Between Black Friday and the New Year, brands battle one another for consumers’ hard-earned cash. As a result, advertising demand for premium inventory climbs, and advertising rates increase significantly during the month of December.

And then in January, a drought follows. All the presents have been bought. Consumers cut their spending, and advertisers follow suit. There’s less competition for Consumers’ attention and ad prices go down. Typically 50-80% from the end of year Holiday season peaks.

As a DSP for native advertising, Zemanta works with partners who cover 95% of the native advertising universe. Fortunately for our clients, we can report native advertising prices for content have fallen just as you might expect.  And we’re seeing the same pattern across all our partner networks, platforms and exchanges. Ad prices are lower on Outbrain, Yahoo, Gravity, and Adiant to mention just a few of our partners.

As a result, we have seen visits almost double versus a month ago for many campaigns without any change in the budget. Through the Zemanta platform real time price optimization techniques, we have managed to get four times as many visits for some of those campaigns as well.

Looking through our list of clients, we’ve identified various types of advertisers that are taking advantage of this always on campaign strategy:

•    Brands with a longer sales cycle (think construction, insurance, investing, taxes, etc.)

•    Consumer Brands focused on long-term customer engagement

•    B2B companies

•    Products that help fulfill New Year’s resolutions

It seems counterintuitive to advertise during the business off-season, but it really shows the value of taking advantage of seasonal variations in market pricing.  Especially given many content-based native advertising campaigns focus on cost per unique visitor and/or cost per engaged user.