Happy Friday! First off, we want to remind everyone that both video and sponsor/subscription options are available to use, along with our new anchor, rail, and sticky-stack placements. Please send us a message if you’re interested in these.

Second, we wanted to provide a quick newsletter this morning to discuss global markets and how the Coronavirus outbreak is impacting advertising and CPMs. Many of our publishers have already reached out with questions or concerns, so I hope this provides some useful information to you.

When the NitroPay team has observed and worked through recessions or market-wide events in the past, the first thing impacted is any scheduled direct campaigns, and that’s what we’ve seen in this situation as well. We have had a few campaigns cancel pre-execution, but nothing that was a detriment to our overall profitability. Often direct campaigns are noticeably more expensive to the companies involved – both in time and cost – than a broad-reaching programmatic marketing effort, so companies dial back the “extra” spend that they’d use on direct spends to simply save money and time. Layoffs in marketing departments force companies to look for efficiencies, and those certainly exist within the programmatic space that NitroPay operates in. Programmatic campaigns will continue to perform and won’t be as severly impacted as direct sales efforts.

However, we should expect programmatic CPMs to dip. It’s hard to predict the level they might hit, but it is likely that we will see CPMs impacted, especially in the first few weeks of April as we come off Q1 spends that are already in the system. We assume that things will begin to revert to normal going into the holiday 2020 season, but we’ll likely see a few months of depressed CPM rates through the spring and summer.

Luckily, the entire web, entertainment, and gaming landscape is likely going to see a noticeable bump in the amount of activity we see on our websites and playing our games. With people quarantining and staying at home, they will need to find entertainment sources and ways to cut through the boredom, and we are well positioned to provide that to our customers.

The NitroPay team is fully remote, so don’t expect us to suddenly disappear or be impacted by the Coronavirus beyond normal sickness issues (if it happens). We are here for you.

Thanks again for partnering with us, and let us know if you have any questions.

Cody Bye – Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer