Following up our Covid-19 special – you can read the first article here – and after our live event on the 17th of March on Facebook “Corona: Win or Loss for your app business” we gathered further information and fresh data from some of our industry friends on Corona’s impact on their very own business. As you can imagine, for some of them it is dramatic, in both directions.
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About the educational sector
In Spain on the 12th of March Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced that all educational centers would close for two weeks and effectively they are from the 16th of March. While in the US as well from the 16th of March public and private schools are closed currently across 26 states.
DSP ad request data
More data that we received from Tim Koschalla, the founder of Kayzen, a fast-growing DSP based in Berlin, specifically shows some changes for ad auctions on Mopub and Google Adx. The pattern of ad auctions shows a clear trend now. Particularly over the last few days, we can recognize a dramatic spike in ad auctions. Google Adx looks more stable but it’s just because the intra-day data points make it look volatile, which is essentially just normal day/night fluctuation.
Games are the biggest winners
Another interesting and probably the most impressive example which we received from Kayzen is from the famous Plague Inc. Game which shows daily ad requests (a proxy for daily in-app ad impressions) from January 2020 till the 15th of March on their Android app, globally. The data shows high fluctuation during the last week (7-15th of March) but what’s most important is the ten-fold growth from 10 Million daily ad requests to 100M daily ad requests. These guys must be printing money right now.
Thanks to our friends from Dynamo Partners we were also able to obtain some further data, eg. about the public transportation sector. The metrics show weekly sessions for one major city. Two updates lead to an increase in usage, which dropped back to the normal average in the week of the 24th of February. Then in the week starting from 2nd of March, sessions start to drop, and in the week starting from 16th March, since when people are urged to work from home, usage drops even further due to less work and school-related commuting. The expected impact is that the user will be around 20% of the normal average during the crisis.
Corona’s impact on classifieds platform category
Another interesting example from Italy, from the classifieds platform category. The data we see is in line with the real-life situation, during the week starting 1st of March, some regions declared themselves as „red zones“ in Italy, schools and universities closed, and ultimately as of 9th of March, the whole country went on lockdown. The expected impact: usage will drop even further if lockdown continues.
And last but not least data from Austria, as well from the classifieds platform category. In Austria, they introduced nationwide lockdown was on the 16th of March. The expected impact is that the usage will drop even further if lockdown continues.
