News Spend Up Over 1000% Thanks To Coronavirus And COVID-19

Gaming is up 25%. E-commerce is up 34%. Social media is also up almost a third, and news is up more than 11X. Apparently, when we’re stuck in quarantine, we play a lot of games, buy a lot of stuff digitally, check up on each other via social media, and read a lot of news.

Coronavirus and COVID-19 have changed a lot in our lives.

They’ve also changed a lot in terms of what marketers are spending their ad dollars promoting.

In $2.5 billion of 2020 ad spend that I analyzed for Singular, a marketing analytics company, it’s clear where the market is moving. We’re consuming much more news, and the corporations that produce the news that we consume are reacting by spending heavily to increase their audience size. (Full disclosure: I do some consulting work for Singular.)

“It’s easy to see what’s down thanks to all the changes Coronavirus is causing,” says Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv. “But we see multiple industries that are growing too.”

Gaming is a no-brainer.

With kids out of school and adults out of work — or skipping the commute — something has to fill the time gap. One executive I interviewed in Beijing told me that all the gaming companies were hitting revenue highs due to the pandemic, and the same is likely to be happening here.

E-commerce and on-demand services are a more complicated picture. Retail marketing spend spiked during the week of Super Bowl, only to drop right back down to a normal level. In the second week of March, however, as stay-at-home and lockdown orders started happening in earnest, retail jumped 34%. People are ordering online and ordering for delivery.

One example: Costco, Walmart, and Instacart, a grocery-ordering-and-delivery app, all hit app install highs over the last few weeks.

But the overall on-demand sector has seen a bit more bumpy growth.

People seem to be more inclined to order groceries and cook at home than to order Uber Eats or Skip the Dishes, according to Apptopia data. And the marketplaces sector, which includes buying and selling exchanges like eBay, is also a bit troubled: who wants to meet strangers in person to exchange goods during the Coronavirus pandemic?

What’s unquestioningly growing is news.

People naturally consume more news during a crisis — especially one that impacts their lives, their jobs, and the degree to which they can continue their normal daily routines. As they’re increasing their consumption of news, the news aggregators, distributors, and makers are increasing their advertising spend to get more readers to their sites and in their apps.

In fact, news organizations ad spend more than doubled from the first week of March to the second, and exploded more than 11X from early in the year to March.

“Consumer demand is surging in both predictable and unpredictable ways,” Eliashiv says. “Companies that are looking to keep the lights on in these challenging times are finding they need to keep experimenting with different ways of both delivering their products or services, and communicating with potential customers.”

One area that as down as the stock markets?

Fintech.

Most of our investments and retirement accounts have tanked, and our only option is to hold on until the markets rebound when (if?) things get back to normal. That’s when interest in financial firms and their services is also likely to rebound.



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