If the Future Is Mobile, Where Is the Revenue?
Thursday’s news of the world’s largest tech companies struggling to make a profit in Q3 of 2012 created a secondary wave of discomfort. Mobile technology may very well be the future, but without a current guarantee of mobile advertising revenue, where exactly will the money come from?
It shouldn’t come as much of a shock that companies like Intel, Microsoft, and AMD are hurting as PC sales plummet. Their CEOs have seen it coming, and they’ve claimed that they’re making the business model changes necessary to right the ship during this rapid shift to a mobile technology world.
The reemergence of the success of these companies isn’t hard to imagine, not because they’re “too big to fail,” but because they don’t rely heavily on online advertising dollars. On the other hand, Google and Facebook clearly stand out as companies that must figure out how to generate advertising revenue in the mobile world.
Twitter and Facebook both are doing everything in their power to make life easier for advertisers, when what advertisers want more than anything is clicks. That is, purposeful clicks.
Trademob, a German mobile app marketing company, conducted a study that found that a staggering forty percent of mobile ad clicks are purely accidental. From the combination of small screens and large fingers, to cases where “shady publishers intentionally place big banner ads next to small buttons to induce accidental clicks” this is troubling news.
Alexander Franke, Trademob’s CEO, told GigaOM that he believes that “accidental clicks are going down, in part due to larger screen devices which lower the potential for mis-navigation.”
Advertisers won’t likely continue to pay for banner ads that provide such a low return on their investment, and companies like Facebook and Zynga are taking more creative measures to increase their advertisers’ returns.
Time will tell what the most effective mobile advertising campaigns of the future will be, as Facebook and Zynga are both currently attempting ads that are less obvious than giant, floating banners.
A recent Pew Research Center poll asked people where they most liked seeing ads, whether it be on a desktop/laptop, tablet, smartphone, or print publication.
Forty six percent replied they didn’t like seeing ads on any of them.
