Effects of the pandemic on the App Economy

The last two months have been signed by the pandemic, sadly taking out too many lives and also affecting economies all around the world.
At Mapendo we obviously are monitoring advertising prices and we decided to take this chance to release some data on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the app advertising economy.

As you might have guessed starting between end of February/early March advertising prices have been on a rollercoaster. We’ve taken into account eCPI values from January to May 10, 2020 for the US market. The data we show is taken from our platform.

Some of our takings on the chart we’re showing below:

• During the last years after weak months in January and February, prices used to rise up in March & April. This year the opposite happened.
• At the end of April average prices were 35% lower than January’s prices. This is unprecedented in the outmarket.
• We see the same trend in every vertical & category we’re operating in. Obviously there are some categories where activities were completely stopped, for example Travel & ride-sharing.
• Around the 4th week of April we see the first signs of recovery, with a steady rise in eCPI prices in early May.
• This recovery is partial, many verticals are still (almost) stopped. While most successful advertisers changed (or adapted) their strategy in order to thrive during the current situation (among our clients we’ve seen many examples of this in sports related companies and fintech/finance services)
• The decline of eCPI reflects both the fall of CPM prices on the supply side and the suddenly decrease of ROI that almost every advertiser witnessed during this period.

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We plan to release updated charts & data in the next weeks. If you want to receive these updates, please subscribe here.

Mobile Marketer Price Index (Monthly % variation, eCPI prices US market, Jan — May 2020)

Disclaimer: data used for this analysis come from our activities. Some apps, marketers and partners might see different numbers on their data.