We have seen a 775 percent increase of our cloud services in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter in place orders.
We have seen a 775 percent increase in Teams’ calling and meeting monthly users in a one month period in Italy, where social distancing or shelter in place orders have been enforced.
That is a big difference.
They also put out press saying video calling on Teams was +1000% in March – yet without an absolute figure or comparison this isn’t that meaningful.
There is no doubt Teams is growing – now up to 44m daily average users (DAU) from 20m in November 2019.
Interesting article about advertisers blacklisting covid19 keywords.
This means that despite news outlets seeing a surge in visitors (The Guardian for example has seen +47% search traffic according to Google Trends), the industry can’t reap the advertising rewards.
“March was really different each week. From the beginning of March to the end of March, the amount of money that flowed through the company by our consumers went from around $60 billion a week to $mid-40 billion a week and that can bounce around depending on the week runs and where it is in the monthly cycle. But you saw it slow down.” Bank of America CEO
Fascinating that the presumed beneficiary is actually struggling.
“if customer behaviour were to return to normal by August it is likely that the additional cost headwinds incurred in our retail operations would be largely offset by the benefits of food volume increases, twelve months’ business rates relief in the UK and prudent operations management.”
There are clearly huge operational challenges.
Interestingly – the initial spike in volume (pictured) was driven by 30% of customers buying 60% of the volume (slide 23). Certain items flew off the shelves (slide 24) – you can guess which.
General merchandise, clothing, and fuel have been hit hard (FT suggests the latter two by -70%).
Staff has seen a massive spike in absence and they have had to recruit 45,000 people since 20th of March.
Scaling online has proven very difficult.
Additionally Tesco Bank will swing from £193m profit to a loss this fiscal year (due to bad debts and fall in income).
On 11th of March Amazon put a halt to almost all of its spending on Google Ads.
“Amazon seems to have completely removed itself from the competition for essential goods, effectively leaving one million daily visits on the table for other competitors to take.”
Paid search traffic to the site fell 90% almost immediately costing 11.2m visits.
Ebay has capitalised to a certain extent on this by bidding on high volume keywords – you guessed it – “toilet paper”, “n95 mask” and “hand sanitizer”.
