Will lower web traffic actually hurt publishers?
It depends on whether they've diversified their revenue.
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Let’s jump right into it…
Will lower web traffic actually hurt publishers?
Many web publishers experienced massive gains in web traffic during the Trump presidency, mostly because his tenure was an around-the-clock garbage fire that had news consumers glued to their phones as the foundations of our democracy eroded. In 2020, news outlets saw even greater gains, in part because it was an election year, but also because the pandemic created more at-home leisure time that resulted in increased internet usage.
But once Biden took office, many within the media industry wondered whether the end of the “Trump bump” would negatively impact web traffic as DC resumed its normalcy and newly-vaccinated people ventured back out into the world.
Digiday just published new traffic figures from Parsely indicating that such worrying was warranted:
While publishers’ traffic across the board has declined from their 2020 peaks — through the first half of 2021, traffic across a 1,400-site sample in Parsely’s network is down 10% compared to the same period last year — the drops for many small publishers have been so steep that they are now behind where they were in 2019 in terms of pageviews.
Through the first half of this year, traffic to sites that gather between 30,000 and 1 million pageviews per month in Parsely’s network is down 40% from the same period in 2019. For even smaller sites, traffic is down 27% over those same periods.
Should publishers be concerned about this traffic decline and its longterm effects on their businesses? It depends on how diversified they are.
If your site is primarily monetized through programmatic advertising, then yes, you could potentially see a decline in revenue. I say “potentially” because the post-pandemic economic recovery has led to a surge in advertising demand that’s upped the CPM rates at most ad exchanges. If you’re generating more revenue per visit, then that could offset any losses due to a decrease in traffic.
But there are several other reasons that publishers might be just fine despite a shrinking audience.
The first is that many publishers significantly invested in expanding their ecommerce/affiliate operations during the pandemic. The combination of the digital ad market cratering AND consumers purchasing more products from home created incentives for outlets to start pumping out more ecommerce content. Because publishers are paid at the point of sale, raw traffic to article web pages matter a lot less. Instead, outlets focus on improving paid conversions.
The second is that publishers have doubled down on growing their subscription revenue, which may explain why they’re seeing a decrease in traffic. In fact, the Digiday article acknowledges as much:
Broadened paywall implementation is another possible reason. While most publishers committed to keeping news about the pandemic freely accessible last year, many also tightened their paywalls on everything else, meaning that as interest in COVID coverage declined, the effects of constricted paywalls remain: For sites generating up to 10 million monthly pageviews, internal referrals are down 42%.
“We objectively have tighter paywalls than we did in 2019,” Petty added.
The third is that publishers have focused heavily on migrating distribution to their owned and operated channels, primarily newsletters. While a newsletter might have fewer subscribers than a publisher’s Facebook page, it’s better at driving repeat visits and also allows publishers to collect first party data — both of which make it easier for the publisher to sell more lucrative direct advertising.
On the whole, publishers in 2021 are a lot more diversified than they were in 2019, and so I doubt many executives are losing sleep over these traffic dips.
Quick hits
How YouTube is disrupting television. [YouTube]
Substack co-founder Chris Best: "People say, 'oh, newsletters are just blogs again,' and I'm like, 'fucking great. Yeah, that's awesome.' The only problem with blogs is there's no way to make money and mobile killed them." [Garbage Day]
A new company wants to be the “TikTok for podcasts.” [The Hustle] It's repeated ad nauseum that podcasting has a "discovery problem," but I've become less and less convinced that such a problem even exists.
There are YouTube channels with millions of subscribers that are focused on pranking overseas scammers. [Dirt]
Peloton instructors are becoming online celebrities. [BuzzFeed]
HBO Max is launching a Batman podcast within its app. [The Verge] Netflix is making similar moves with its app. Podcasts are cheaper to produce and you can use them to reach your subscribers when they're not on their couch.
Someone who uses Spotify primarily for music listening complains that the app is constantly trying to shove podcasts down his throat. [How to Geek] This is what you always risk when you diversify your app so it does more things: you start annoying the people who use the app for a single purpose.
"Of the top 10 most viewed [YouTube] channels in the last 30 days ... four of them ... have more than 15,000 videos uploaded. 23 channels in the top 100 have uploaded more than 10,000 videos, and 43 channels have uploaded more than 1,000 videos." [Tube Filter]
Acast has paid out $110 million total to podcasters in its network. I wonder how much of that was within the last year? [Medium]