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After two years of lost revenue, travel-focused publishers are looking to maximize post-pandemic recovery.
America’s travel brands have allocated an expected $4 billion to digital marketing this year, creating huge ad dollars for publishers to capture.
BoardingArea, a publisher network of more than 60 travel blogs, isn’t just banking on the return to normal, according to founder Randy Peterson. After weathering the pandemic, BoardingArea is betting on revenue diversification and an improved programmatic technology stack for its future growth.
Today, the boarding area network attracts 80 to 100 million monthly impressions. But during the Covid-19 pandemic, it shut down travel around the world, creating a readership and revenue for the boarding area.
“In early 2020, we saw an increase in readership and doubled down on investing our time and money into fountains and the latest technology,” Peterson said. “Then things went downhill from March 2020. Between April and June, I lost 90% of my monthly ad revenue and display ads.”
BoardingArea decided to facilitate an open web programmatic technology stack and diversify beyond Google.
“We pushed ourselves into a header bid,” Peterson said. “Xandr became a great partner. We graduated from Amazon’s integrated advertising marketplace, and Amazon turned out incredibly well. Before that, we live in Google’s world, and it’s not a bad world, but you have to trust Google. Increasing competition for his ad units was the best way to ensure he was getting the best value for his ad units.
For guidance on programmatic best practices, Peterson took cues from major publishers such as USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. “We wanted to run with those guys, so we looked at every little pixel they were using on their website and audited it almost every day,” he said. “We’ve redefined our ad stack and pushed it harder, even in the dark hours.”
Before the pandemic, BoardingArea relied on direct sales for 30% of its advertising revenue. Right now, direct sales only account for 15% to 20% of ad revenue from the onboarding area, with the rest mostly coming from programmatic. That reduced reliance on direct sales positions the onboarding environment well for a relaunch of programmatic travel advertising in early 2022.
“Every month from January to June this year was the best revenue month in the company’s history,” Peterson said. We’ve got great new partners like OneTag and TripleLift. And Sharethrough gave us a 38% increase in typical ad revenue through Amazon’s transparent ad marketplace.
Economic recession and income inequality
However, after a good start to 2022, BoardingArea is starting to see a return on its fall-related ad spend.
From July and through August and September, ad revenue “fell off the rails,” with a 38 percent drop in monthly revenue, Peterson said. Fearing failure, he said, some brands are pulling back on display advertising despite “top-performing” claims, or are focusing on affiliate deals instead.
But BoardingArea has a few cards to answer for this latest setback.
It is currently developing a private server-to-server integration with Xandr’s Prebid Server Premium to increase the efficiency with which buyers can purchase display impressions. Added Admiral’s platform to recover 17% to 23% of revenue from site visitors using ad blockers. Boarding Area Penske Media Corporation and SHE Media plan to create a PMP that will be sold directly to travel advertisers. And it’s exploring new revenue streams like video.
For example, The Boarding Environment recently integrated the EX.CO video platform into its blog network.
The move comes after years of false starts with video autoplay ruining the site’s experience and a lack of trust in video metrics, Peterson said.
An initial test of the EX.CO platform at one of the networking sites saw a 38% increase in regular revenue after one month of integration, driving widespread testing and adoption.
BoardingArea now plans to roll out the video player across its entire network by the end of September. On average, adding integrations increases a site’s revenue by 27%.
BoardingArea EX.CO likes that it sits outside of Google’s tech stack, which means it doesn’t disrupt existing configurations, Peterson said. “It will not take up an ad slot as it will appear as content outside of the display ad package.”
EX.CO’s platform includes a content recommendation module, which maximizes session times and drives clicks on onboarding sites, he said. And because the video content resides outside of the ad blocker’s network, the onboarding environment serves as an extension of the ad blocker’s recovery efforts.
BoardingArea is testing alternative IDs like Index Exchange’s OpenID to boost ad revenue from Safari traffic — or, as Peterson puts it, “to get some money from Tim Cook.”
BoardingArea knows it can monetize its first-party data, but Peterson admits it’s “behind the curve on that, because that’s a big boy thing.” “You have to have the right tools, the right partners, and you have to know what to do with the data. Until we understand this, chasing first-party information is unnecessary.
And, when it comes to finding first-party data partners, many vendors don’t answer calls about the onboarding environment because “they’ve got more business than they need,” Peterson said.
“You can read about what great people do,” he said. But I’m not sure yet if there are solutions 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 for solutions that focus on us.
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