Success Story:
Novel Updates
Find out how we helped Novel Updates with their monetization strategy, supercharge their ad revenue, increase their inventory in a user-friendly manner and overcome ad quality issues.
About Novel Updates
Novel Updates is a clean and fast platform for users who enjoy reading web novels, where you can find a collection of all the latest chapter updates across the web, all in one place! You don’t have to visit tons of websites anymore to find out if a new chapter of your favorite novels has been uploaded, the updates released by Wuxiaworld, TapRead, Smoggy Translates, Light Novels Translations, Foxaholic, Gravity Tales, VolareNovels and many more are all organized and tidy in a single free and light-weight novel tracker. You will find all types of web novels, such as science fiction, wuxia, xianxia, xuanhuan, romance, fantasy, CEO, and more.
The partnership
Started back in early 2016th, as a conversation about digital advertising and publishing. After an eventful journey, our partnership with Novel Updates has become a relationship built on trust and shared business goals, while still growing every day.
PubGalaxy advises on various aspects of the programmatic industry and works torwards constant optimization of Novel Updates’ monetization strategy. This includes not only revenue driving tactics, but also support in terms of improving user experience, ad quality and compliance with GDPR and Google regulations. We face challenges as a team, which allows us to keep producing great results.
The Struggle
Running a websitе such as this one requires great dedication, as volume and speed are critical when it comes to this particular type of content. Novel Updates already had that nailed down, which allowed them to become one of the leading platforms in their niche, but there was also a problem. While the website was seeing great success over time in expanding their audience and driving engagement, the financial return was rather disproportionate. There goes the main challenge and in the same time opportunity for growth – how to maximize profits from each session without jeopardizing the user experience and destroying engagement. Additionally, the website was only using a small fraction of what programmatic had to offer and was selling inventory at suboptimal prices as a consequence.
The Strategy
We devise a bespoke plan for each of our clients and Novel Updates was no exception. The goal was clear from the beginning – to increase impression value and get the site’s inventory to scale up with increasing engagement. The proposed strategy was built around one of the website’s best characteristics, which is high average session duration and decent pages-per-session ratio. It was obvious that latency had to take priority over individual bid value, so we focused on load times and efficiency instead. After a thorough page-level analysis, this lead to the conclusion that a lightweight setup, backed by dynamic trigger technologies was the best option. With this as a base, we could then proceed to increase inventory competition by introducing the right mix of additional demand.
Solutions Implemented
Maximizing ad revenue
In 2016, we started working with Novel Updates to help streamline the monetization of the website. At the beginning, the site was using mainly Google AdSense and was looking for an upgrade. Novel Updates already had a good amount of traffic and fantastic audience engagement, so it was simply a matter of implementing the right solutions and a little guidance for the earnings to start growing. The first thing we had to do, was to increase competition by plugging in more demand, utilizing our relationships with all major buyer platforms. We also set Novel Updates up with our header bidding solution to maximize bid value on the high end. In the following weeks, we were monitoring the setup carefully, making adjustments to the demand pool and tweaking the wrapper timeout constantly. As a result, we were able to find the perfect split between header auction and waterfalling, as well as the right mix of demand partners for the site.
The Result: 25% Page RPM Increase
44.37% Revenue Uplift
Monetizing engagement
Novel Updates had a great monthly traffic and was seeing increasing engagement, however, longer sessions weren’t monetized effectively. The obvious solution would be to implement auto-refresh but that would come at the expense of added latency, which was not an option with a site so heavily dependent on responsiveness. That’s why we decided our smart ad refresh technology would be a perfect fit, as it combines engagement, viewability and time-based triggers to reload placements, with next to no added latency. We hand-picked specific ad spots based on data analysis and launched Smart React right away. The result was no harm to user experience and yet a fantastic revenue source for the publisher. Performance matched expectations and now Smart React is a vital part of our partner’s monetization strategy.
The Result: 22.06% Revenue uplift
Introducing new inventory
We’re constantly in the process of developing new solutions to monetization problems, one of which is underutilized vertical space. Smart View is a technology detecting blank spaces on a web property and placing ads in them dynamically when in view. After running a few tests and analyzing the results, we added Smart View on our partner’s site. The solution is now utilized with 1 ad spot and despite the high revenue estimates, we took the safer, more user experience approach and utilized only 1/3 of the solution’s potential. After this considerate implementation the technology is achieving great revenue results. Now, Smart View is part of Novel Updates’ monetization strategy and the numbers speak for themselves.
The Result: 6.09% Desktop Revenue Uplift
Let’s start working together and achieve your goals
Our achievements
#2 – Fastest growing Tech companies in Central Europe
#150 – Fastest growing Tech companies in EMEA
