Pets are big business. There are around 77mn dogs in the US and 58mn cats. The US pet industry was, according to the American Pet Products Association, worth $136.8bn in 2022, with almost $60bn spent on food and treats alone.
The UK market is smaller, but still significant, with more than £3bn spent on pet food and another £1bn on accessories across the 12mn households which own pets, where there are around 13mn dogs and 11mn cats.
Those numbers were juiced during the pandemic, when interest in animal companions soared from humans unable to see each other. Google searches for dogs and cats reached all time highs in April 2020, as lockdowns were imposed around the world. Ordering supplies online was unsurprisingly pretty important for pet owners old and new so, along with streaming sites and other stay-at-home activities (including tech), the pet industry bucked the rest of the economy, and particularly advertising’s downward trend.
All this in theory makes pets an appealing subject for media, especially when there are plenty of people trying to look after and interpret the behaviour of mostly furry friends. It’s a challenge that creates a knowledge gap.
And yet a look through the highest ranked sites in Similarweb’s Pets category finds a mish-mash of pet buying or adoption listings, web stores selling pet food, toys and veterinary services and sites focused on amusing or cute pet stories. What is harder to find are comprehensive resources telling owners how to look after pets, combined with a place to get them what they need.
It’s that combination of pandemic-fuelled economic forces and a gap in the market that prompted UK-US publisher Future to launch PetsRadar on both sides of the Atlantic in 2020, at the height of a pandemic that was simultaneously decimating the advertising business and turbocharging technology eCommerce.
Future says that, as it sought to deal with the challenges of the pandemic’s impact on the economy, it “identified the pet market as a key growth area, and found that – although existing online content could be split into reference sites, for example those offering advice on pet care, and retail sites selling pet accessories and food – no sites appeared to combine the two. PetsRadar was launched in 2020 specifically to bridge this gap by combining trusted information on animal care alongside reviews of the latest pet products and pricing comparisons – to ensure consumers got the best in quality and value when making pet-related purchases.”
With the tagline “expert advice for happier pets” the outlet focuses on useable information for pet owners, with categories for Dogs, Cats and Rabbits (of which there are 6m kept as pets in the US and 1m in the UK).
It employs a roster of writers including vets and others with qualifications on aspects of animal welfare that are prominently displayed on the site. Not only does this give readers a sense that they are hearing from people who know what they are talking about, but it also helps to improve Google rankings that neatly take expertise and authority into account.
The bulk of readers (60%) come to the site via organic search and – while it has a healthy social footprint with 6mn followers across various platforms – that is seen as an “additive engagement tool”. That stands in contrast to social media-focused media business in the same area, such as PETZBE, which claims to be the the world’s largest pet focused social media platform with 800k community members.
It’s not surprising PetsRadar is heavily focused on search, when its aim is to be a go-to source of information for pet owners looking for advice, and, importantly, recommendations for what their pets need. In turn, it’s no surprise that ecommerce is core to the site’s strategy. Creating content which sells stuff has been a central focus for Future across its brands under CEO Zillah Bing-Thorne, who stepped down this year after almost a decade. Applying that expertise, including the in-house eCommerce platform Hawk, to a resilient and growing market was a no-brainer for PetsRadar. Over its first 15 months, it managed to bring in more than £800k in eCommerce sales and is now assumed to be generating some £1.5mn annually from its 1mn monthly unique viewers.
Among the encouraging signs for PetsRadar may be the fact that the newish UK high street and online retailer Pets at Home increased its revenue by 30% and profit by 50% during the two years of pandemic.
Often the question for media outlets that occupy a comfortable but highly-targeted gap in the market is whether they can keep growing. Future says it is expanding PetRadar’s team and is looking to “increase interest from major UK and US retailers to advertise”. Whether it can build enough scale to make that a big business with so many other forms of pet content available (albeit less expert), is an open question.
Yet – as a story of identifying a market need and a business model and then executing a strategy around it – PetsRadar represents a pleasingly sensible approach to digital media. Enough to make you purr – and look harder still for fresh, all-digital opportunities.
