Touché, Mike.
Link: This is Mobility � Blog Archive � Yet Still More Mobile Advertising.
But is advertising supported content on mobiles a natural and correct evolution on the whole? In my opinion, yes. It just might have to look significantly different enough from online advertising that we’ll have to stretch our definitions after the fact in order to include it.
Sigh. And I always wanted one.
Now I need Rodeny Brooks’ folks to come out with one. I just don’t feel like building it myself. Hey, this is the 21st century – we buy robots, not build them.
Link: Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | Why did Sony kill off its Aibo robot dog?.
Because Aibo isn’t a band or a film, and it can’t play or record music or films. Essentially, Sir Howard Stringer, the new boss at the Japanese multinational, is trying to focus the company on areas that will generate cash and, more importantly, profits, and the robotics unit that created Aibo, launched in 1999, was put to sleep in the process.
It’s about communication. You want to build a community? Build it around something to share (a focus) and conversation will emerge from that.
Link: Joho the Blog: Interests, not demographics.
In a Report in the 6 Jan 2006 Science Kossinets and Watts offered an empirical analysis of social network evolution in a large university community.
…
The results show that at least in this particular environment, people were more likely to form ties with others when they had a shared "focus" such as a class that brought them together or a mutual acquaintance, but were less likely to interact solely on the basis of shared characteristics such as age or gender.
Gotta get that article.
Friday night
Originally uploaded by schickr.
Me and the kids, no less. 🙂
Being a FOG (Follower of Guy) for many years now, I now get daily doses of his wisdom on a regular basis. A recent post on his website stats has a few great gems in it, but one comment on click-thru advertising was enough for me to launch on another Blindspot rant.
Advertising is not the panacea for free services that everyone makes it out to be.
First of all, people act like Google invented the tools for advertising supported websites. Uh, anyone remember ad banners, pop-ups, and other regular advertising channels on websites?
Second (see Guy’s quote below), click-thru metrics only pay significantly if you have enough traffic, say Google’s or Yahoo’s. Sure, some sites are making some chump change with AdSense, no problems there, but don’t try to build a company on it (or a company of more than one person). I’ve been saying that for some time now, and folks have been looking at me as if I was spouting heresy.
Here’s what Guy says, spot on with what I’ve been saying:
I spend about two hours per day on the blog, so I’m making about $5/hour. 🙂 Also, if any company comes to Garage and says that their business model is to generate a lot of page views and monetize it with Google AdSense, I’m going to be figuring that each page impression is worth $.001. For example, 10 million page impressions would yield $10,000/month. It’s not that hard to get 10 million page views in a month, right? 🙂 “We’ll generate a lot of traffic and monetize it with Google AdSense” is hereby labeled the 11th lie of entrepreneurs.
Third, if you want to run an advertising-supported service, study how the pros do it. No, don’t go looking on the Internet. Go to your nearest news kiosk. Print publications have been heavily advertising-supported
for a very long time (heck, there is no front page news on the main Helsinki rag, it’s always an ad). Practically all subscription magazines and
newspapers are advertising-based. And they have whole departments working to get advertising that brings in money, that is relevant is relevant to the publication, that is relevant to the reader. Not only is AdSense an automated system that is second best to targeted ads, but you have little control as to what it shows.
Fourth, who makes the money? Google AdSense users aggregate a huge number clicks that bring most of the money to Google, not to the users. Look at Guy’s stats again.
Mobile?
It wasn’t just Guy’s comment on AdSense that got me going, but MoMo Mike pointing out a comment on mobile advertising from the W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices:
Developers of commercial web sites should note that different
commercial models are often at work when the Web is accessed from
Mobile devices as compared with desktop devices.
You betcha. When you open up a Web page on your PC, you have enough space not to care about those pesky links somewhere else on your screen. Also, your browsing experience really doesn’t take a hit, nor do you have to really pay for that advertising to be served to you.
Not so on the mobile, where space is precious, the environment is personal, time is critical, and cost is a sensitive subject.
Enough of the rant. Here are some positive suggestions.
Don’t think of advertising-supported services, as that will make you think of traditional advertising. Think ‘marketing-supported’ services and then you will start to think of other ways to have someone pay for your users’ free service. I think if you make clear the ‘cost’ to the user for using a free service is you channeling brands and such to them.
For example, a company could sponsor a Java game that would have the sponsor’s branding displayed in an integrated and unintrusive fashion.
Or, if you have a really cool local map client (uh, maybe Google Local Mobile). When you get the info on the venue in that nifty pop-up, there could be an ad or two. Maybe even a local ad.
Or, think of how your service could be a door to other better paying business, such as consulting or upgrades to paid service. Using a free service or content to drive sales at a store is quite common, that I won’t even list the sites that do this.*
So there
As you can tell, this is not just a blindspot I don’t understand, but something that I think really others have a blindspot to. I am like guy and shudder whenever anyone says they want to start a business based on AdSense. Heck, that’s NonSense.
*Well, this one, Treonauts, I think is nifty. It’s a blog that grew into much more. That’s how you give free stuff away to bring in folks long enough to have they leave some money behind. 🙂
17096_image (093)
Originally uploaded by schickr.
Jippo and I trekked straight into the forest just across the street from home. It was so beautiful. We had so much fun walking down new trails for us. Who would have known? This place is so full of wilderness.
I guess I’m not the only one who thinks .mobi is a bad idea.
Link [Googirama]: .MOBI domains available – Berners Lee opposes
As reported on MEX, .MOBI has been around for almost six months as the new suffix for mobile/WAP sites. The Register reported then that the new domain names would start selling in early to mid 2006. We’re curious to see how fast this will take off given the fact that Tim Berners Lee ( so called creater of the world wide web) published a paper last year against the addition of the .mobi TLD rasing issues of fairness, device independance and loss of web functionality.
There have been some recent rumblings in the fixed broadband space (see link to article below). For example, cable companies are no longer held to the same laws as DSL providers. Also, there has been at least one case, that was overruled, of a DSL provider blocking Skype calls.
Two things (of many) have got the broadband service providers worried: VoIP and bandwdth hogs. With VoIP, many service providers are thinking like our dear wireless carriers – it’s a service in my pipes and I should be able to charge for it. With the bandwidth hogs, it’s not much different, except it can hamstring companies like Google and Yahoo whose users and services make up a huge chunk of Web traffic. And it will only get worse with video and music consumption being more mainstream (and billable!).
Why is this of any import to our ‘little’ mobile world? Well, the rulings that might go against broadband providers might spill over to the data services of operators. For example, the US House Commerce Committee is thinking of passing a ruling on Net Neutrality, where, as I understand it, everyone has equal access to broadband connections, no preferential treatment, no negative restrictions, no blocking of ports or IP addresses only because of a market protectionism.
Well, a voice call is still a circuit-switched call and is regulated as that. But, mobile data services are part of the Net, so might those also fall under the Net Neutrality? Might that mean that if oprators allow access outside their systems and onto the open Net, they need to allow full access instead of the current, surreptitious (or threatened) port and IP blocking?
On the flip side, if the service providers get their way and can charge and extra fee for bandwidth hogs like Google, how will that impact further growth for mobile services?
Read the article and letme know what you think. It’s pretty good.
Link: At Stake: The Net as We Know It.
Google et al fear broadband carriers will tie up traffic with new tolls and controls. Ultimately, it could mean a world of Internet haves and have-nots
