Social Blade: a 322% overall revenue uplift

Our three placements, which made up less than half the site’s ads, provided significantly more revenue, often delivering double or triple that of the other provider.
To this day, Next Millennium Media remains the main source of ad revenue on Social Blade’s website.

Background

As a premier analytics website, Social Blade is particularly renowned for its expertise in the YouTube space. However, it now also provides analytics for other social media platforms. In recent years, social media analytics websites have become increasingly popular as influencers, businesses, and organizations recognize the value of using data from social media to inform decisions and market fits.

In addition to providing insights into customer preferences and behavior, social media analytics can also be used to track brand sentiment and monitor the competition. Social Blade has been a true leader in this space.

The Challenge

The new outside vendor increased revenues substantially

Since 2008, Social Blade has been providing a free service to social media entrepreneurs through an advertising-supported revenue model. Leading up to 2015, they successfully managed all advertising operations in-house through AdSense. In 2015, as rates began to decline, they outsourced their stack to an outside vendor, as AdSense was not generating enough revenue. Social Blade also found that managing ads in-house was overwhelming due to the time, complexity, and constantly changing nature of the field. Additionally, their resources were limited and they were unable to work on emerging advertising technologies and strategies.

The site was thriving and began increasing its overhead costs to meet the needs of its users. However, later, the thirdparty ad provider was sold and became less focused on ads, and ad rates steadily declined each month. As a result, Social Blade was in need of a new approach to address their declining revenues as they risked not being able to afford the overhead for the site. An introduction to Next Millennium was made by a third party in November 2019.

At Social Blade, we’ve offered our services free to the world since 2008 and have been able to do that thanks to ads. At the start we were handling ads completely on our own through Google which worked, but after time ad rates starte dropping. In 2015 we brought on a third party to manage our ads and revenue went way up! Over time though this ad provider was sold, and sold again and by 2019 ads weren’t so much their priority anymore and though our traffic was increasing substantially, ad rates had fallen so low we were in danger of not being able to pay for the site anymore. That’s when Next Millennium came along.

The Solution

A discovery call was set up between Social Blade and Next Millennium. Prior to the call, Next Millennium's demand team learned about Social Blade's users and the site’s niche. They identified bigger brands that work with Next Millennium directly that would be a good fit for the site's users.

On the call, Social Blade explained its current predicament to Next Millennium in detail. It was agreed that they would start with a pilot project that accounted for all risks, Social Blade's current ad provider, and the site's unique needs. The first steps included running three ad units on the site, alongside Social Blade's pre-existing ad partner.

The very next day, we provided Social Blade with a line of code, and previews of the three placements designed specifically for the site for their approval. Social Blade approved, and the ad units were live.

Results

With the consistent new revenue from the units in place, the ad operations team at Next Millennium knew that the site speed could be improved. Over the following months the team was able to improve LCP speed from 3.6 seconds to 2 seconds, the FID speed from 250ms to well under 100ms and the CLS from 0.10 to 0.08. Google Web Vitals were up across the board and revenue continued to increase dramatically.

Revenue is up 322%

By January 2021, Next Millennium took over the remaining ad units across the Social Blade Site. Today, it is a robust partnership that spans across the entire site. Revenue is up 322% compared to the revenue reports shared with Next Millennium on the initial discovery call.

2 sec

-44%

LCP SPEED

88 MS

-64.8%

FID SPEED

0.07

-74.8%

CLS SPEED