Digital news consumption spiking during the pandemic
Its more than 7 days into the lockdown in India, digital content consumption surges to a record high. From news to entertainment to work, digital applications are seeing a sudden growth in consumers.
Google trends and comscore shows a significant growth in content consumption, especially digital news.
According to Quintype Analytics, we are seeing a huge spike in traffic across our publishers over the last few weeks. Here is the traffic of five of our publishers. Some of our publishers have recorded their highest growth in pageviews in the last few weeks.
Unfortunately, Publishers are not able to capitalize this opportunity and are expected to lose out on advertising revenue due to keyword blocking.
Newsworks, the body representing UK newspaper publishers, is estimating a £50m in lost advertising revenue in the next three months for the keyword "coronavirus", when it's reporting is inevitable at this time.
With this whole advertising drop its more important to bring back paywalls into your revenue models. While you offer content on health and safety for free, you can put other content behind a paywall.
With a lower paywall, we’re missing opportunities to convert drive-by readers into subscribers.
McClatchy’s vice president of news, Kristin Roberts
What are your thoughts on moving to subscriptions at this time?