Jon Steinberg, President, BuzzFeed, recently said: ”Mobile-first is not enough. Mobile should be all you care about!”
Really
As I’m getting up to speed here at the Ayzenberg Group (we’re a full service ad agency), I’m pulling all the latest data from our [a]list in-house publishing platform (website, email newsletter and social channels).
Today between 20 and 30 percent of our readers are using mobile or tablet devices to access the [a]list newsletter and website on any given day and 70-80 percent are still accessing our website and newsletter using desktop computers.
So that means that our readership is still heavily desktop-based and that’s where we should spend our technical and design resources
Not really.
First of all, our [a]list mobile traffic is growing the fastest (up 55 percent as compared to 42 percent for overall traffic). Secondly, I have a feeling that it would be growing even faster if we did a better job of publishing specifically with a mobile-first strategy. Last, I think we are missing a lot of traffic from people who would like to consume our media content when they have the time, rather than just when they happen to be in front of a computer screen.
But what if we add a lot more heavy video content over the coming months? Turns out, in spite of mobile data caps on many cellular plans, the average American is also streaming more and more video to their mobile phones and tablets every day.
Video platform Ooyala’s data shows {link no longer active} consumers are adopting mobile online video even faster than previous forecasts, driven, in part, by live events like the Winter Olympics in Sochi and March Madness, which both showed huge gains in mobile share. Add to that the upcoming Soccer World Cup in Brazil this summer and it’s pretty clear that 2014 is poised to be a record year for streaming.
Ooyala believes the time viewers spend watching video on mobile devices will double by the end of 2015 to 37% 2016. Another recent forecast from ABI Research show that mobile video viewing will increase more than 65 percent by 2019, with consumers watching online video 21 hours a month, up from 12.7 hours per month in 2013.
So, while people might say that “mobile-first” is just the catchphrase du jour in the publishing industry, the data doesn’t lie. As Wayne Gretzky famously said: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
Now, here comes the real problem with any mobile-first publishing strategy: What will happen to ad revenue It’s the old analog dollars versus digital pennies debate all over again.
The fact of the matter is that either publishers nor advertisers have kept up with the growth in mobile. Pre-rolls, pop-ups and tiny little banners at the bottom or top of the screen, is this the best we can do as an industry No, Facebook and Twitter have shown us that we have an alternative that is really working and it’s called native.
But we have to scale this up and make it the center of our universe. Publishers and advertisers need to realize that they are in the same boat and we need to work together or the user will pay the price in terms of bad mobile experiences and turn to other platforms that get this right.
Barry Lowenthal, President, The Media Kitchen, put it well in a recent column:
“I love this business, and I believe that some of the smartest and most innovative people work in this business. But I’m a little worried that we’re not moving fast enough to create meaningful mobile advertising experiences and we’re not trying to solve the attribution and measurement challenges fast enough.”
Image Source: Sports Illustrated
