For those who don’t know:
Daily Mirror publisher Reach to cut 550 jobs
Print revenue tumbled by 29.5pc during the second quarter, while digital turnover also fell by 14.8pc
Online traffic soared during lockdown. There were therefore many more ad spots in inventory. Ad purchasing rather dropped – why advertise during lockdown? At least, why advertise some things during it.
The combination meant that ad rates plummeted. This is as true of the majors like those above as it is of entirely trivial operations like Worstall Megaindustries Blogs Inc. Not wholly and entirely but the digits have remained the same, the units not so. Shift the decimal point one place the wrong way perhaps.
I did hear of one little amusement. A place I used to be at paid on a performance basis. They didn’t change their per unit (ie, per reader visit) payout to writers as volume soared and corporate revenue slumped. They thus had handfuls of writers (tens and twenties of them) on $20,000 a month and up using the old payment standards while revenues had sadly – most sadly – slumped well below that for that traffic. Entirely middle of the road writers were seeing their personal traffic go from 400k a month to 4 million sorta thing.
Pity I wasn’t still there of course as I’d have made an absolute killing in such circumstances for I always was right up in the top small handful of their payout tables. Buy a house amounts over the several months they made the mistake. But it is still nice that they made such a mistake, the bastards.