Happy holidays! Another year is almost here, and while 2021 was more stable in terms of ad revenue, the ongoing pandemic still managed to make things difficult at different times during the year. All that being said, we still managed to see some amazing outcomes with a good number of our sites as we expanded into things like ad block recovery, much more video implementations, and our sponsor product (we’re happy to answer questions about any of them!). 

One of the more exciting things we’re focusing on in 2022 is our direct sales efforts, both in supporting our publishers that are selling their own inventory and our own sales team. To start, we have always had a direct sales crew here at NitroPay (despite what our competitors might say or believe), and we’re actively scheduling a number of visits to ad agencies and marketing conferences to make sure we’re putting your sites at the forefront of our messaging to marketers. 

We’ve been going to shows like GDC, E3, Digiday, and others for years, but this year brings more emphasis to our efforts. We expect to be able to include all of you in a few big buys this year; as always these won’t necessarily be called out in your dashboard as we take the exact same revenue split from direct sales buys as we do from standard programmatic inventory.

On the other hand, we also have made huge improvements to our ad server and campaign functionality as well, and we are still directly assisting anyone that is selling their ad inventory directly. We’ve been doing this for years, so if you have a request from an advertiser, we are always happy to help. 

Finally, the vast majority of your revenue – even if we end up selling inventory directly – will still come from our programmatic placements, so we will continue to focus our technical efforts on making sure that we’re earning as much revenue as possible with our primary earnings driver. 

As we head into the new year, the Q1 seasonality will kick in hard like it always does. During this month, publishers can expect to see a decrease in revenue as the holiday season ends. A few factors cause this, including decreased website traffic, causing a lower impression rate; decreased fill rates, caused by that lower website traffic and lower advertising budgets; decreased CPMs, caused by less advertiser bidding; and a whole host of other things that can cause volatility within the ad market. 

Along with the normal seasonal slump that we see in Q1, you’ll likely start seeing an increase in emails and messages from other ad networks making promises and declarations about things including fill rates, CPMs, direct sales, video, etc. Feel free to ask us if you have any questions about their emails or if you see something you’d like us to try on our side. The Q1 slump is always a rough time – however, it also gives you an opportunity to experiment and try out new things. We’d love to help and if you have any ideas, please let us know!