After two years of lost revenues, travel-focused publishers are eager to maximize a post-pandemic recovery.
US travel brands earmarked an expected $4 billion for digital marketing this year, creating a huge pool of advertising dollars for publishers to capture.
BoardingArea, a publisher network that includes more than 60 travel blogs, isn’t just banking on a return to normal, said its founder Randy Petersen. After weathering the pandemic, BoardingArea is betting on revenue diversification and a revamped programmatic tech stack for its future growth.
Today, BoardingArea’s network attracts 80 to 100 million monthly impressions. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, which shut down travel around the globe, BoardingArea’s readership and revenue cratered.
“At the start of 2020, we saw an increase in readership, and we had doubled down on putting our time and money into waterfalls and the latest technology,” Peterson said. “Then things fell off the cliff starting in March 2020. Between April and June, I lost 90% of my monthly ad revenue and my display advertising.”
BoardingArea decided to optimize its open-web programmatic tech stack and diversify beyond Google.
“We pushed ourselves into the nuances of header bidding,” Petersen said. “Xandr turned out to be a great partner. We graduated from Amazon’s Unified Ad Marketplace, and Amazon unbelievably turned out to be great. Prior to that, we lived in Google’s world, and it’s not a bad world, but you’ve got to keep Google honest.” Adding competition for its ad slots was the best way to ensure it was getting the best prices for its ad units.
For guidance on programmatic best practices, Petersen took cues from major publishers like USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. “We want to run with those guys, so we looked at every little pixel they use on their websites and audited them almost daily,” he said. “We redefined our ad stack and got stronger, even in the darkest hours.”
Pre-pandemic, BoardingArea relied on direct sales for about 30% of its ad revenue. Now, direct sales account for only 15% to 20% of BoardingArea’s ad revenue, with the rest largely coming from programmatic. That reduced dependency on direct sales left BoardingArea well positioned for a reemergence of programmatic travel advertising at the start of 2022.
“January through June of this year, each month was the best revenue month in the history of the company,” Petersen said. “We found great new partners like OneTag and TripleLift. And Sharethrough gave us a 38% bump in normalized ad revenue through Amazon’s Transparent Ad Marketplace.”
Recession woes and revenue diversification
But, after a great start to 2022, BoardingArea has started to see a recession-related pullback in ad spend.
Starting in July, and carrying through August and September, ad revenue “fell off the rails” to the tune of a 38% decrease in monthly revenue, Petersen said. Fearing a recession, some brands are pulling back on display ads despite what they say is “overperformance,” or they’re focusing instead on affiliate deals, he said.
But BoardingArea has a few cards to play in response to this latest downturn.
It is currently working on setting up a private server-to-server integration with Xandr’s Prebid Server Premium to increase the efficiency with which buyers can purchase display impressions. It added Admiral’s platform to recover revenue from the 17% to 23% of its site visitors who use ad blockers. Boarding Area plans to create a PMP that Penske Media Corporation and SHE Media can sell directly to travel advertisers. And it is exploring new revenue streams like video.
For example, Boarding Area recently integrated EX.CO’s video platform into its blog network.
The move came after years of false starts with video that were plagued by autoplay ruining the site experience and a lack of trust in video metrics, Petersen said.
An initial test of EX.CO’s platform on one of the network sites saw a 38% increase in normalized revenue after one month of integration, prompting wider testing and adoption.
BoardingArea now plans to roll the video player across its entire network by the end of September. On average, adding the integration has increased per-site revenue by 27%.
BoardingArea liked that EX.CO was placed outside its Google tech stack, which meant it didn’t disrupt its existing setup, Petersen said. “Since it’s viewed as content outside the wrapper of display advertising, it’s not taking away an ad slot.”
The EX.CO platform includes a content recommendation module, which drove increased session time and clickthroughs on BoardingArea’s sites, he said. And because the video content lives outside the ad blocker network, it serves as an extension of BoardingArea’s ad blocker recovery efforts.
BoardingArea is also testing alternative IDs like OpenID as a way to boost ad revenue from Safari traffic – or, as Petersen put it, “to get some money back from Tim Cook.”
BoardingArea knows it could monetize its first-party data, but Petersen admits he’s “behind the curve on that, because that’s big boy stuff,” he said. “You have to have the right tools, the right partners, and you have to know what you’re going to do with the data. Until we figure that out, chasing first-party data isn’t important.”
And when it comes to finding first-party data partners, many vendors won’t answer BoardingArea’s calls because “they’ve got way more business than they need,” Petersen said.
“You can read about what the big guys are doing,” he said. “But I’m not sure yet that there are solutions out there for guys like us. Most companies are fighting for the big networks, and they serve as pathfinders for the rest of us. But we have to wait till there are solutions that focus on us.”
Correction: A previous version of this article referenced “Index Exchange’s OpenID.” OpenID is actually an open-source authentication protocol promoted by the OpenID Foundation.
