Coronavirus climbs up keyword block lists, squeezing news publishers’ programmatic revenues.

Digiday—March 9, 2020

As interest in Coronavirus has surged globally, publishers have launched a fleet of popup products focused on the disease, including popup newsletters, podcasts, live blogs, and even a text messaging service.

But a publisher’s ability to monetize those products is limited. There is basically zero interest in direct sponsorship of the coverage…

That leaves programmatic advertising, which typically yields lower CPMs than direct-sold advertising for news, a dynamic that worsens for publications’ coverage of things like natural disasters, said Tom Swierczewski, the programmatic media director at the media agency Cramer-Krasselt. Swierczewski noted that advertiser demand for impressions on those stories can be so low that it often lowers the CPMs news publishers get, when the impressions are sold at all. The drops in CPM vary, Swierczewski said, though they often start around 5%, and deepen the longer a story stays in the news.

Read the full article on Digiday.