If you’ve ever looked at your dashboard and thought, “What just happened?” You’re not alone.

eCPMs move seasonally. Sometimes dramatically. And while it can feel random in the moment, those swings usually have very little to do with what you published yesterday and a lot to do with how advertising works over time.

The reality is this: eCPMs follow seasonal patterns. They always have. And once you understand what drives those patterns, you can stop reacting to every dip and start planning around them instead.

Let’s break it down.

eCPMs Don’t Exist in a Vacuum

Advertising is a marketplace. When more advertisers want to reach the same audience — and the amount of ad inventory remains relatively fixed — prices go up. When advertiser demand slows, prices follow.

That basic supply-and-demand equation is influenced by a few recurring forces throughout the year. All of them are predictable.

Holidays Consistently Increase Advertiser Demand

Holidays are one of the most reliable drivers of higher eCPMs. Why? Because consumer behavior changes. Around major holidays, people:

• Spend more money
• Act with more urgency
• Are actively researching and buying
  

Advertisers respond by increasing budgets and bidding more aggressively to reach those audiences at exactly the right moment. More competition for limited inventory typically leads to higher eCPMs.

This isn’t niche-specific, and it isn’t new. The exact holidays may vary by region or vertical, and the strength of the spikes can vary based on the broader economy, but the pattern itself shows up consistently every year.

Quarter-End Budget Behavior Shapes Performance

Advertisers don’t just plan in weeks; they plan in quarters and fiscal years. At the start of a quarter, spending tends to be cautious. Budgets are fresh, strategies are still being tested, and campaigns ramp up slowly.

As the quarter comes to a close, priorities shift. Unused budget becomes a liability. In classic “use it or lose it” fashion, advertisers often spend more aggressively as deadlines approach. That increase in demand puts pressure on available ad inventory, which can result in higher eCPMs toward the end of each quarter.

This is why:

• Q4 typically outperforms Q1
• Late-quarter periods are often stronger than early-quarter ones

Not Every Major Advertising Event Is Predictable

Some of the biggest shifts in ad spend each year aren’t tied to traditional holidays at all. Large-scale retail events (think Amazon Prime Day), platform-led promotions, or sudden increases from major advertisers can inject significant spend into the market with little notice. When one major player increases its budget, it doesn’t just affect its own campaigns — it increases competition for the same audience, pushing up costs across the board. That’s how an otherwise “average” day can turn into a strong one.

These events are harder to predict, but they reinforce an important point: advertiser demand is dynamic. Seasonal trends provide a framework, not a script.

The Disclaimer

Past performance cannot guarantee future results. Economic conditions, global events, regulatory changes, and market uncertainty can all influence advertising behavior in ways no forecast can fully anticipate.That said: The exact dates change. The patterns don’t. Seasonality shows up every year. It just doesn’t always look identical.

How Publishers Can Work With eCPM Seasonality Trends

Understanding seasonality isn’t about chasing perfect timing or trying to outsmart the market. It’s about making better decisions with context.

Here’s how publishers can put these patterns to work:

• Plan high-effort content strategically. Save your most valuable, brand-safe, evergreen content (and biggest promos) for periods of historically stronger demand. When the market bids higher, great content tends to be rewarded.
  
• Set realistic expectations during slower seasons. Lower eCPMs don’t automatically mean something is wrong. Sometimes it just means it’s January. And seasonality isn’t one-size-fits-all: January can be strong for health and fitness, but softer for 0pl;0-p;;l’;l/-lretail.
  
• Avoid overreacting to short-term dips. Seasonal slowdowns are normal. Knowing that helps prevent unnecessary “fixes” that can create more problems than they solve.
  

Use trends as a guide, not a guarantee. Seasonal patterns inform strategy, but they don’t replace good content, sound monetization practices, or long-term planning.

Turning Patterns Into Practical Planning

eCPM seasonality explains why ad rates rise and fall throughout the year—and why those changes are usually predictable, not random. To make these seasonal trends easier to visualize, we publish an annual “Best eCPM Days” calendar that applies historical patterns to a specific year. Think of it as a case study, not a promise.

Each annual calendar shows how advertiser behavior has typically played out across the year, based on long-standing trends. We update it annually, but the underlying framework remains the same.

Because while the calendar changes every year…

Advertiser behavior largely doesn’t.

“Let’s talk about politics.” 

We know. This is a phrase absolutely no one wants to hear uttered around the dinner table or backyard barbecue these days. But hear us out.

As the 2024 election creeps closer, it feels like you can’t escape it. Social media, billboards, bumper stickers, TV — and yes, our desktop and mobile devices.

We’re here to talk about the latter and your options as a Mediavine publisher.

Every election year is unique, but this one has proven especially so. 

According to The Current, a publication owned and operated by The Trade Desk (one of Mediavine’s largest advertising partners), political ad spend is projected to reach $12.3 billion this year, with nearly $4 billion going to digital advertising. 

That’s up 156% compared to the last election.

What’s unusual is that in previous presidential election years, a large chunk of this would have been spent during competitive primaries. Not in 2024.

This year’s major party candidates either emerged victorious early in the process or weren’t seriously challenged at all, meaning the vast majority of potential ad spend is still available, waiting to be deployed by November 4.

The buzz among large political buyers is that it’s estimated that 75-80% of political advertising dollars have yet to be spent, with the vast majority of spending likely to happen between the beginning of September and election day.

Beyond the presidential race, there are U.S. Senate and Congressional elections as well as state, city and local elections and referendums happening all around the US. All of these will have some amount of budget to push their candidate or cause.

Here’s what publishers need to know about earning some of that digital ad revenue, as well as some frequently asked questions about the political advertising world:

“So there’s a ton of money on the table. How can I know what kind of political ads or which political party will show on my site?”

Mediavine offers the ability to opt-in or out of political ads. However, that opt-out only covers political ads in general; there is no way to guarantee that only a specific political party or candidate’s ads will or will not show up on your website. 

Even if the option existed to send a signal to advertisers that you prefer one candidate over another, that signal would more than likely be used by the spender in an attempt to change minds, not respecting your wishes.

“How are political ads targeted?”

The most common form of targeting in the political realm is via a voter file, typically obtained through a political data provider. In simpler words, there are firms that specifically collect and sell publicly available voter data for use in targeted buys.

Another strategy is based on location, or “geotargeting.” Simply knowing where a person lives is a major piece of data for certain campaigns, for obvious reasons.

Buyers also use data segments based on behavioral characteristics or contextual behavior. For example, based on browsing behavior and content you’ve been consuming, a person may have been identified as a mom of young children and/or a video game player. 

If a candidate sees that he or she is polling low with a particular demographic, that user may be hit with a few extra impressions as a result.

“I got a report from a user that ads for Candidate X are showing up on my site. I don’t want my readers to think I support that candidate.”

Here’s the big one. 

Remember — as with all things programmatic advertising — most ads that are shown on page are a reflection of the user, not the publisher. 

The end user, or consumer, is the person targeted with ads for shoes because they were the one searching for that new pair of shoes. 

Political advertising is no different; if a user sees an ad for a specific candidate, it’s likely that candidate’s campaign has identified that user as a good audience for it.

“As a Mediavine publisher, how do I opt in?”

This is the simple part! The opt-in for political advertising lives in your Mediavine Dashboard under Settings > Opt Out. 

These settings can be changed at any time; any changes made give immediate notification to any buyers of your opt-in and opt-out choices.

“How much of an RPM increase can I expect from opting in?”

Unfortunately, there are no historical statistics to help us predict exactly what sort of RPM increases one can expect from opting into political ads. 

Looking back at the 2020 election, we saw average CPM increases of around 8% for those publishers who opted into political advertising.

Past performance does not guarantee future returns, especially these days. But remember how I said earlier in the post that the overall ad dollars are expected to be up 156% over 2020, and that so much of it has yet to be spent?

Odds are good that CPMs will be higher than the previous cycle as well, and any time we see higher CPMs, we see more pressure on the auction. More pressure on the auction makes all buyers bid higher, and higher RPMs follow as a result.

This will vary by site and by audience, like any other ad campaigns. Whatever the increase ends up being, if you’ve opted out, you won’t be in position to take advantage.

“If you’ve opted out, you won’t be in position to take advantage.”

In a time of uncertainty regarding Google Search updates and third party cookie deprecation, it feels like the digital advertising industry is in a state of flux.

These are certainly interesting times, but the deluge of political advertising spend — in its many different forms — is guaranteed to happen this summer and fall. 

Consider opting into this potential revenue boost in your Mediavine Dashboard today.

Did you know that one-third of internet users worldwide have tried using an ad blocker?

As a result, nearly all content creators running ads on their websites are missing out on some amount of revenue thanks to the percentage of visitors using ad blockers.

Fortunately, there’s a new solution available to Mediavine publishers: Ad Block Recovery.

What Are Ad Blockers?

An ad blocker is an application, typically a plugin or browser extension, designed to improve user experience for people looking for an ad-free browsing experience.

By design, this has a negative impact on any publishers (and the open web as a whole) who depend on advertising revenue.

As mentioned above, nearly a third of internet users have at some point tried an ad blocking technology; the good news is we aren’t seeing rates this high on Mediavine sites. 

Third-party data on internal sites shows that for most lifestyle websites, ad block rates are generally quite low — less than 5 percent of users.

This percentage increases in certain verticals like Arts & Entertainment and Technology & Computing, where some properties see 10 to 30 percent of users browsing with an ad blocker.

How Do Ad Blockers Work?

When a user has an ad blocker enabled, the browser extension or plugin scans any page the user visits for specific bits of code and compares these findings to a database of ad-related code. 

If it finds a match, it blocks the ads or limits the ads that can be displayed on the site.

Through these ad blockers, users can choose to completely block all types of ads or opt into only seeing certain types of “Acceptable Ads.”

What Are “Acceptable Ads?”

Some ad block technologies, instead of blocking all ads by default, give the user the option to run “Acceptable Ads.”

Acceptable Ads are a middle ground between the choice to run an ad blocker and the need to support the open web through advertisements. 

There are two general criteria for the types of Acceptable Ads shown to website visitors using ad blockers or filters:

1. They need to be distinguishable as ads and clearly marked with as “advertisement” or equivalent.
2. They need to meet specific size requirements based on where on the page the ad is displayed.

In addition, there are certain ad formats that are not allowed as part of the Acceptable Ads standard. 

For example, ads that contain animation, video elements and/or play sound will most often not be eligible to serve under the Acceptable Ads Standard. 

For the full list of Acceptable Ads, check out the Acceptable Ads Standard.

Enter Mediavine Ad Block Recovery

The good news is that Mediavine publishers can now use Ad Block Recovery to recover some of the ad revenue lost due to ad blockers. 

When enabled, Ad Block Recovery can continue to serve ads to readers if they’re using an ad blocker and have opted into seeing Acceptable Ads. 

Turning on Ad Block Recovery is as simple as flipping a toggle in your Mediavine Dashboard and clicking Save.

Learn how to enable Ad Block Recovery in Mediavine.

What kind of performance can you expect from recovered ads?

Since the types of ads allowed to display through Ad Block Recovery must follow Acceptable Ads Standards, the pool of recoverable inventory is smaller than the inventory available to audiences who haven’t enabled ad blockers at all.

For example, some of the more attention grabbing ads that may contain animation or video elements would not be served to an ad block user. 

Since these types of ads generally command higher CPMs, Acceptable Ads tend to monetize slightly less well on average, though this will vary on a site by site basis.

At Mediavine, we focus not just on monetization solutions but also user experience.

Our mission is to help publishers build sustainable businesses, and Ad Block Recovery is yet another way we are enabling our publishers to do so.

I have a good friend with two adorable children, both of whom are obsessed with peanut butter crackers.

You know the ones I mean. Square, salty, prepackaged in that thin plastic. I bet a lot of us remember these from childhood.

I’m going somewhere with this, I promise. 

The problem for these aforementioned adorable kids is that these snacks have been missing from their favorite retailer for months.

The bigger problem, economically, is that this situation is not unique. 

The pandemic and other unforeseen global events, coupled with the ripple effects thereafter, continue to cause a host of problems we don’t know quite what to make of (including, but not limited to, peanut butter cracker shortages).

Evidence of economic uncertainty is everywhere you look.

If you’ve tried to buy a new car lately, you’ve probably seen that getting the exact model you want has become challenging at best or impossible at worst.

When that new car does arrive, it’s hard not to cringe each time you’re at the pump, with prices $2.00/gallon higher than just 18 months ago.

Energy doesn’t exist in a vacuum, either. The same factors driving up gas prices are also fueling runaway costs of nearly every household good and service. 

Nor is this limited to the basic essentials we think about each day. According to Consumer Reports, microchip shortages and myriad manufacturing delays are likely to persist into 2023.

Even the largest global tech companies aren’t immune to the current environment.

According to Bloomberg, seemingly untouchable Internet giants like Amazon, Alphabet (Google) and Apple are already planning on cutbacks to staff.

Meta (Facebook) actually posted losses in the previous quarter, forcing it to recalibrate expectations in Q3 with its near-term projections awash in uncertainty. 

This marks a huge change for titans who are typically unstoppable revenue machines, proving that volatility is the dominant economic theme of 2022.

It’s no wonder that this tumult has roiled the digital advertising market.

There’s little point, after all, in promoting a car that likely won’t be available until 2023 — or that fewer people might be able to buy when it does hit the showroom.

Budgets are stretched thinner these days due to the rising costs of goods and services. At the very least, brands are more cautious and rethinking their approach. 

Campaigns that are tightly targeted and timed rule the day as advertisers enter a phase of uncertainty along with the broader economy.

So what happens next?

Predicting what the landscape will look like in the coming months is very difficult.

Advertisers have very specific key performance indicators (KPI) to hit, and will look for very specific ways to deploy their budgets and campaigns accordingly.

There certainly are still opportunities to capitalize. Advertisers seem to be focusing more than ever on events in which consumers are likely to spend, even in this climate. 

We saw evidence of this during Amazon’s Prime Days, July 12-13. Major deals on millions of items, all in a limited window, led to a big increase in advertising spend.

Mediavine alone saw around a 15 percent increase in eCPMs, and more than a 10 percent increase in average RPM for publishers, during that span.

Whether this trend continues — brands being more conservative with their budgets and/or waiting for a very specific event — is hard to predict. 

How can you put yourself in the best position? 

The simplest answer is to stay the course. 

If you’re partnered with Mediavine, you’re already on the right track. No matter the circumstances, our sales team is constantly knocking on the doors of top advertisers, touting the portfolio of more than 9,000 quality websites that Mediavine brings to the table. 

Rather than retrenching or scaling back in the current environment, Mediavine is expanding efforts on behalf of our publishers on every front, bringing on new sales, engineering, marketing, product and support team members every month.

Also, have you heard of Grow? 

You probably have, but I’ll pitch it for the 93rd time:

With Grow, Mediavine has created a terrific suite of tools that not only helps build a closer relationship with your audience, but improves monetization of your traffic right here and now.

Yes, it’s great news that Google pushed back the date for the deprecation of cookies until 2024, but publishers who have adopted Grow are seeing increases in RPMs on devices and browsers where cookies are already a thing of the past.

Beyond that, continuing to create and promote great content — and pushing that content to a hungry audience — is an approach that never fails.

Does the usual advertising cycle matter?

We know that budgets usually increase around the same times each year. I expect that to continue, even with the lack of clarity caused by all the factors I just listed.

It’s hard to imagine that industry wide, things won’t pick up in Q4, even as the above caveats make it challenging to pinpoint exactly when, and by how much.

Perhaps the cyclical trends will even be further amplified with what we expect will be more tightly, tactically used budgets through the rest of 2022. We will have to wait and see.

As publishers, all we can control is what we can control. 

Fortunately, we have a lot of things going for us that we’re confident will help us weather any storm and flourish in the years ahead.

An Internet publisher since 2004, Mediavine has adapted and grown through countless changes in our industry. Look no further than two years ago, at the onset of the global pandemic.

We’ve stayed the course through two-plus years so unprecedented that we’re pretty sure there are no precedents left, focusing on building the best business for our content creators and positioning our company and its publishers for where the web is going.

This is our mentality and time and again, we’ve become stronger for it.

For now, we’ll see what next week and next month have in store (hopefully, the timely return of peanut butter crackers) as we monitor this very unpredictable market.

From the simplest “set it and forget it” options, such as Google AdSense, to a company like Mediavine, which offers full end-to-end solutions for content creators, there’s no shortage of options when it comes to ad management.

In any marketplace with a wide variety of choices, a business is inevitably asked the following question: How do you perform compared to others in the industry?

We’ll attempt to answer that as it pertains to online advertising in this latest edition of Behind the Numbers with Brad. (Is #BTNWB trending yet? No? Maybe next edition.)

Looking back on industry trends from 2020 and early 2021, and comparing it to the average performance of Mediavine websites to see how we stack up, is an interesting exercise.

A recent article published in Mediapost documented the monthly change in digital advertising spending in the U.S. over these unprecedented last 12 months.

The trends are not overly surprising and tell a story of an economy that has been through the uncertainty of a pandemic, a recession and a recovery mode in a year’s time.

For comparison, let’s look at Mediavine publishers’ average RPM — a metric that compares revenue earned over a period of time to the user sessions during that same period.

An essential tool to gauge a website’s performance, RPM will fluctuate over time based on many factors — one of the biggest being how overall industry spend is trending.

A great example of this is seasonality. In Q4, when advertisers are looking for users during the busiest shopping days of the year, we see competition in the ad marketplace increase.

This means advertisers driving up the CPMs for each ad unit which in turn increases the earning potential of all sites running ads on the internet.

When that season is over and we enter the first few weeks of a new year, we see the reverse, with advertising budgets largely diminished, finance teams working to reset those for the new fiscal year and limited demand for that same ad inventory.

So how did Mediavine compare to the advertising industry as a whole through the ups and downs of seasonality and Covid alike?

Let’s examine the data!

Below, you will see a graph in which we illustrate both the year-over-year RPMs of Mediavine publishers and overall ad industry spend.

Mediavine publishers’ year-over-year change in RPM is represented by the teal bars, while the industry-wide change is represented by the red bars.

In Q1, Mediavine started out strong. Our sites saw RPMs 32% higher than the previous January, and 24% higher in February despite industry growth rising up 9%.

Then, well, you know what happened last March.

The advertising industry took an abrupt and significant step back in a wave of uncertainty that saw large-scale economic shutdowns and stay-at-home orders.

March, a month that normally finishes much stronger than February, instead saw declines in spend and our publisher RPMs closely followed the trends of the industry.

Then there were the days we’d all like to forget from Q2.

April and May were tough for the industry. Survival mode was a term used all too frequently. Companies focused on ensuring they could survive several lean months, if not more, while pivoting advertising strategies to reflect these new challenges.

As a result, April and May saw advertising spend down 35% and 31% respectively and our publisher RPMs again closely followed these trends.

For Mediavine publishers, things started to turn the corner in June and we began to outpace the industry, largely due to the hard work of our publishers who dug in and met the challenges of the pandemic head on.

We reminded our content creators that there were still ad dollars out there to be had and that when greater demand for inventory returned, they would be in a strong position if they vowed not to give up and worked instead toward recession-proofing their sites.

Meanwhile, incredible work by our Engineering and Ad Ops teams helped us to bring new, high paying outstream ads to publishers on a larger scale, allowing Mediavine sites to capture lucrative video CPMs without so much as lifting a finger.

The video momentum continued throughout the back half of 2020 and into early 2021.

New features such as video playlists were introduced to our publishers, allowing for a more customizable video experience for users, while keeping SEO top of mind.

Our Marketing and Support teams further challenged our publishers as we reached Q4 with proactive advice and techniques to finish a turbulent year on the highest note.

Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the exciting rollout and continued development of Grow, a user engagement suite developed by Mediavine for publishers to enhance their websites, improve experiences for users and collect first-party data.

All in all, the hard work and amazing content of our publishers stood out among the rest.

Mediavine publishers were able to capture a significant share of the market spend that remained during the downswing and put themselves in position to succeed so that RPMs eventually not only outpaced spend but blew it out of the water.

We couldn’t be more proud of our team and our 7,800+ publishers who allowed us not only to survive in a time of great uncertainty but emerge from it even stronger.

By now, you don’t need us to remind you what a challenge the last 12 months have been, or why. Personally and professionally, the most difficult part of 2020 was the uncertainty.

From a business standpoint, all of us at Mediavine were on pins and needles wondering how lockdowns, health concerns and changing consumer habits would affect industry spend.

Would we see advertisers scale back, or even close their doors? What does a “new normal” even look like when so many variables are constantly in flux?

More importantly, how would all of this turbulence impact the more than 7,600 publishers that Mediavine works with — and who depend on us –every day?

Now that 2020 is over, the data has been gathered and neatly organized by our Director of Business Intelligence, Cynthia Butler, and I’m happy to bring you some of the most useful insights in the latest installment of BTNWB. (That acronym has taken hold by now, right? Anyone? Sigh, fine. It stands for By the Numbers With Brad).

Below, we’ll review RPM trends from 2020. As usual, we look at RPM from a session level at Mediavine. Here’s what we found by aggregating all Mediavine sites:

It’s not hard to see when major lockdowns began, and in turn, when advertisers decided to reevaluate their budgets and hold off spending until the dust settled.

We are still living with Covid-19, of course, and with that brings some uncertainty, but RPMs started to recover from the March-April decline in the middle of 2020.

As you can see above, by late July, RPMs were outpacing 2019 and ended up doing so by wide margins as they continued increasing steadily through December.

Some of this increase was likely due to advertisers regaining some lost confidence, not to mention previously-withheld budgets being reinjected into the market.

But don’t discount the collective work behind the scenes by Mediavine’s hard working teams who found incredible ways to increase publishers’ earnings per session.

Our engineering and operations experts worked tirelessly on technology initiatives such as outstream video, faster server-to-server connections and much more in 2020.

Marketing churned out amazing and engaging content, and our sales force (virtually) knocked on more doors than ever before, garnering new and exciting deals.

As always, our award-winning support teams were everyone’s rock, lending unparalleled and unwavering guidance to a bigger, more diverse group of publishers than ever.

On that note, we would be remiss if we didn’t applaud our publishers themselves. Countless times we saw people take the challenges of recent months and turn them into opportunities — optimizing their sites and pages with remarkable results.

Arts and Entertainment

With indoor gatherings prohibited, restricted or simply less desirable due to the pandemic, advertisers quickly backed away from the entertainment industry.

Audience interest in arts and entertainment content also slowed in some cases, given the onslaught of news in a year that was oftentimes chaotic.

As summer came to a close though, Mediavine started to see a slow but steady increase in overall RPM for entertainment sites which continued.

By the end of the year, the category was more or less back to “normal” — at least to the point where there’s reason for optimism in 2021.

Food & Drink

You’ll begin to see a pattern emerging with each of these graphs, regardless of category. A downward trend in overall RPM through the summer months, followed by an upward trend through the rest of the year, also summarizes the food and drink space.

The spring declines in RPM were mitigated somewhat by record traffic in 2020 for our food & drink sites as people sought recipes and meal ideas from the internet like never before.

Advertisers were still wary about putting money into the market during the summer months, but demand ramped up before the holidays and finished the year incredibly strong.

Travel

A frequent topic of the BTNWB posts has been travel sites.

No group of publishers was more affected in traffic and RPM in the past year. Given what a global event this was, and all the uncertainty surrounding it, that’s not a surprise.

The bad news has been obvious and covered at length. The good news is that travel was no exception to the pattern of RPMs steadily climbing in the second half of 2020.

A sign of a resurgence in the industry and more confident travelers? We sure hope so, for everyone’s sake. Working at home is only fun when you can occasionally leave.

All kidding aside, check out the interactive chart below to browse through the rest of the site categories that call Mediavine home and see how they performed.

The trends for each of them point to a positive end to the year and hopefully to the beginning of a new year with a less volatility and more continued growth!

Well folks, we made it.

After 10 months in which we’ve heard the word “unprecedented” infinite times, and a political season to match 2020’s craziness, November is here.

We’re smack in the middle of Q4, when a quick glance at our publisher Dashboards each morning can cause one to break into a holiday song:

“It’s the most wonderful time of the yearrrrrrr!” Just take a look at this actual archival footage of a Mediavine publisher after checking their Q4 RPM.

Yes, Q4 is a magical time filled with spirit, verve and ever-increasing CPMs. But what can we expect specifically, from now until 2021?

I’m glad you asked!

In this edition of Behind the Numbers with Brad, I’ve once again teamed up with Cynthia Butler, our talented Director of Business Intelligence, to shed some light on this topic.

In previous editions of BTNWB (we love our acronyms in this industry, however ridiculous), we’ve explored how Covid has impacted publisher traffic and RPMs in 2020.

While it’s clear that Covid is far from over, the good news is that the advertising industry has adjusted and seems to have found some stability, even in uncertain times.

Budgets that were paused earlier this year during peak panic have been reinjected into the marketplace, leading to a strong performance as we close out the year.

Moreover, many businesses have adapted new and exciting ad campaigns, thanks to fresh strategies such as online delivery and curbside pickup.

Will this mean that November and December 2020 follow the same patterns we saw in 2019? We sure hope so, but there’s no guarantee (see upcoming disclaimer).

Let’s get to the numbers. We took a look back at 2019, by site category, to analyze RPMs week over week from the beginning through the end of the fourth quarter.

We uncovered some interesting Q4 trends. I want to highlight a few that stood out the most, along with my most logical explanation for each.

Food & Drink

Steady growth starting around the middle of October, and booming right before Thanksgiving, is the trend line for sites in the Food & Drink category.

These revenue trends also come at a great time of traffic growth. People are looking for new recipes for the holidays, and advertisers want to be a part of it.

Even after the tryptophan hangover wears off, RPMs stay high before taking a slight dip at the beginning of December due to the start of a new month.

RPMs then remain on the high side right through the end of the year, before taking a sharp downturn in the last week of December after Christmas.

At that point, even though it’s technically still Q4, advertising budgets are exhausted and consumers are less likely to be shopping.

Health & Fitness

Something that I found interesting: our Health & Fitness sites follow roughly the same trend lines as Food & Drink sites but with a sharper drop off after the first week of December.

This tells me that companies and brands are eager to get in front of health-conscious eaters ahead of Thanksgiving, before taking a pause and looking forward to January 1 and the ambitious resolutions that a new year brings.

Personal Finance

The RPM trend from our Personal Finance category of sites also tells a great story.

We see much more steady growth throughout Q4 than most of our other categories, with only slight dips near the beginning of each month.

Advertisers on these websites are likely targeting the budget-conscious population. They have deals galore starting in October and continuing all the way through Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday (or as those of us who work from home call it, Monday) and Christmas.

Take a look at the fun interactive table below to see for yourself how RPM changes vary week over week for various site categories.

Now for the disclaimer, because what would 2020 be without some unpredictability?

With Covid making a strong resurgence in some areas, and uncertainty surrounding the elections, we may see some changes in these numbers compared to last year.

Generally, the ad industry follows the overall climate of the economy. When the economy widely shut down in March, advertising ground to a halt.

Since then, it’s recovered somewhat and if the economy keeps running smoothly with the majority of businesses open, we should continue to see strong ad spend.

If conditions worsen and we experience shutdowns similar to Q1 of this year, which we can’t predict one way or the other, it could be a different story.

To put it more simply, these numbers are subject to change from year to year because 2019 and 2020 have been wildly different years but hopefully they won’t!

Either way, Mediavine is always well positioned to earn the most possible for its publishers and we look forward to a future post where we can recap and compare the two.

Unless you’ve been living in the cave, or in a bunker off the grid (wouldn’t blame you if so … 2020 amirite?), you may have noticed some fairly major events happening in our nation.

The events of 2020 have affected the economy in unprecedented ways, and digital advertising is certainly no exception.

Global shutdowns due to COVID-19 earlier this year massively affected how the general population consumed information, with advertising budgets drastically slashed as marketers waited for more stable times.

As if that weren’t enough, we’re now in the midst of another major event that impacts digital advertising and publishers’ earnings.

That’s right, it’s a presidential election year, and ABC News is reporting that $6.7 billion will be spent on political advertising in 2020, with 54% of that coming between late August and Election Day.

The Democratic nominee for President alone plans to spend a record $280 million across the major battleground states, with more than 20% of those funds designated for online advertising.

So how can Mediavine publishers take advantage of this ad spend, and if they do, what effect will it have on their overall earnings?

Political advertising in a digital world

First, let’s get into the weeds a bit and discuss how this advertising spend actually works in the digital marketplace.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) categorizes all ads into special categories and subcategories. The categories are set up at a high level with subcategories that relate to the main category.

For example, there is a category for Food & Drink (IAB-8) with a variety of subcategories ranging from Cajun/Creole (IAB8-3) to coffee/tea (IAB8-6) to vegan (IAB8-16).

Politics falls under the category of Law, Government and Politics (IAB11), in the subcategory of IAB11-4.

This means that when any political campaign, Political Action Committee (PAC) or Advocacy Group advertises a political issue, the Demand Side Platform (DSP) will likely categorize that advertiser as political and assign the IAB code of IAB11-4.

Mediavine publishers have the ability to opt-out of certain categories that correspond with these IAB designations.

When a user loads your webpage and begins to scroll through your content, Mediavine sends out what the industry calls “bid requests” to all of our advertising partners.

That bid request contains data around the ad unit for each specific site. This includes what sizes are allowed to serve — as well as the device the user is using, the geo-location, the general category of the website on which the ad will display and any opt-outs that the publisher has requested. 

For example, if you opt out of political ads, the bid request contains a “blocked category” or “bcat” message instructing each ad partner to exclude any advertiser in that category from bidding for that particular ad unit.

Can I choose to only advertise for the party of my choice?

Unfortunately not. There are no subcategories for politics corresponding with party affiliation. It is an “all or nothing” categorization.

But I opted out of political ads, and I’m still seeing them.

Unfortunately, the system is not perfect. Some DSPs choose not to listen to these signals we send them, or mis-categorize the advertiser so that our signals, while correct on our end, are not matching on theirs.

Will I get an earnings boost from political ads?

Let’s get down to brass tacks: Enabling political ads on your site will undoubtedly increase your overall earnings.

Working with our Director of Business Intelligence, Cynthia Butler, we were able to look at the average CPM differences between those publishers who run political advertisements versus those who opt out.

Our data shows us that the average Mediavine publisher will see around an 8% increase in average display CPMs as a result of showing political ads on their websites. 

Anytime you’re able to increase average CPMs, you put more pressure on the auction. This means ALL advertisers have to work harder and pay higher prices to win an impression on your page.

More auction pressure means higher RPMs, every time.

The better news? It looks like political spending is once again starting to ramp up.

We’ve pulled political spend data from our top partners from the beginning of 2020 until now, and included that data in the graph below.

The first quarter of 2020 showed strong political spend, particularly because of the primaries that occurred then. This spike, during what is typically the worst quarter of the year, and with a pandemic and shutdowns in the mix, shows the potential political money that could be flooded into digital advertising as we get closer to Election Day in November.

While this spend dropped off sharply with the conclusion of the primaries, we have seen a staggering 350% increase in spending from April to August as election season starts to heat up again.

We fully expect this to substantially increase over the next 10 weeks.

In Conclusion

The purpose of this post is not to pressure anyone to enable ads for the sole purpose of earning a few extra dollars. If political ads aren’t for you and you don’t want them on your site, that’s exactly what the opt out in your Dashboard is there for.

Mediavine’s job as an ad manager is to give you the ability to earn (or not earn) from this massive spending pattern, and give information to our publishers about how these choices will affect their overall income.

We strive to assist publishers in making informed decisions — your decisions — as part of our mission to help content creators create sustainable businesses during these ever-changing times.

We completely understand that this type of advertising is not for everyone, especially given the current political climate, but hopefully with this blog post you can feel confident in making an informed decision before you opt in, or out, of political advertising.