We’re tracking native content teasers on over 20 of the bigger Swedish websites. These are our key stats from April 2020.
April: native market sees Corona impact – but not native as a format
Before and throughout april, the impact of the Coronavirus and Covid-19 situation has grown in the Swedish society as a whole and therefore also the digital advertising market.
During the past month, we tracked a total of around 280 articles from over 120 advertisers. This is both below the activity level of march (ca. -13%) and last year (-23%), in terms of articles and advertisers. This reduction is however smaller than reports we’ve seen for many other formats and channels in industry press.
While campaign activity has reduced, we however don’t see any signs that user engagement on native articles has followed the same path. In our last blog article (Swedish), we analyzed reader engagement on native articles and saw that users spend at least the same amount of time on sponsored content as before Corona. People don’t seem to be overwhelmed by Corona news as they spend more time online – they are still interested in reading good native content from brands!
Similar to march, around 1 in 12 native articles were directly or indirectly related to the Coronavirus pandemic. Most common in this context were personal finance related topics (how savings and the stock market are affected). But also stories around working from the home office or training at home were run by advertisers.
Most active and new brands running true native advertising
Spotify continued and seemed to increase their activity we started seeing in March – and now topped our list of most active native advertisers:
One interesting brand in the top 10 is the Swedish startup Scrive, who’ve pushed for their e-signing solutions during recent weeks – certainly not a bad market timing currently.
Another brand that quickly rose into the top 10 is WellO2, who just recently started running native articles and already made it into the list.
At the same time, during april only around 60 advertisers (re)started working with sponsored articles on the bigger sites we track. In March, we still saw close to 100 (re)starters, which also contributes to the lower overall activity in the market.
Selected campaign highlights
E.On opening the season for solar cell installations – in what might become an interesting year for many topics around Home & Garden in general as many Swedes are likely to go on a ”staycation”
One of Swedish startup Scrive’s articles around e-signing – surely also an interesting timing given increase remote work these days
Accounting tech startup Wint, among other B2B and B2C brands, with one of several articles regarding the declaration and financial reporting season during Q2
