Impact of the Global Pandemic on News Publishers

Publisher update from George Tarnopolsky, VP, Programmatic: News publishers are finding the COVID-19 crisis challenging to navigate. While news consumption has grown dramatically, the impact to news publishers has been a negative one from a revenue perspective; most ad buyers have been blocking Coronavirus content. News publishers have had to balance increasing viewership and infrastructure costs with a declining ability to monetize content. In response, Google has announced that it would waive Google Ad Manager (publisher ad server) costs to news publishers, for a period of five months. In a recent blog post, Google said that they hope to “help news organizations reduce some of the cost of managing their businesses and funding important journalism during this time.”

(Source: CMI/Compas "The Scoop" eNewsletter)