Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
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Friday, March 09, 2007
Mobile communities, feasible or not?
What we're learning from Web apps, part two: Community = shared obsession goes through reasons why Internet-based communities are popular, but I don't fully agree with the conclusions/hypotheses regarding mobile communities, that I think are overly pessimistic, so here's my take on mobile communities, only partly based on verifiable facts.
Mobile communities is probably the most popular mobile service category around, if counting also chat, media sharing etc in this category. There are lots of communities that are only accessed via phones (and from media/analyst point-of-view might be virtually invisible), and there are of course also originally PC-optimized communities that are now accessible from mobile phones (e.g. MySpace, Flickr).
The note says a community like dogster can't be converted to the mobile form factor. As a comparison: PC-optimized news sites often show tons of information on one page, in several columns and with pictures all over the place etc etc. Still, reading feeds of the same news works excellently from a mobile phone. Stripping down a service to the core functionality reveals that funtionality like chatting, user profiles, blogs, feeds, media sharing etc can be ported to a mobile format (not necessarily easily or cost/performance-efficiently, but all the same). Also, it's not necessary to make all service functionality accessible via mobiles, and there are also things you can achieve much simpler via a mobile phone, like photo and video blogging/sharing, adding value to the service.
I extracted some interesting official stats from the AdMob Daily Inventory page. The first figure indicates ad click proportion for that service category, and the second figure provides daily average ad clicks for one service in that category:
This is clearly not a scientific analysis, and doesn't really counter Michael's conclusions per se, but indicates there's clearly life in mobile communities, and for some reason users of mobile communities are eager (relatively speaking) to click on ads. It would be interesting with a comment from AdMob for why this is so. The reason might be obvious.
Seemingly you shouldn't go for pure entertainment (whatever that means), news and search sites if you want to get mobile ad click revenue. That would completely contradict the ongoing hype around mobile search, so what's wrong in the logic? There's only one search service listed on the stats page, so the margin of error is huge in this case, but still, why only one? Because other search services handle their own advertizing? Possibly. Google and other heavy-weights obviously do, or intend to.
Mobile communities is probably the most popular mobile service category around, if counting also chat, media sharing etc in this category. There are lots of communities that are only accessed via phones (and from media/analyst point-of-view might be virtually invisible), and there are of course also originally PC-optimized communities that are now accessible from mobile phones (e.g. MySpace, Flickr).
The note says a community like dogster can't be converted to the mobile form factor. As a comparison: PC-optimized news sites often show tons of information on one page, in several columns and with pictures all over the place etc etc. Still, reading feeds of the same news works excellently from a mobile phone. Stripping down a service to the core functionality reveals that funtionality like chatting, user profiles, blogs, feeds, media sharing etc can be ported to a mobile format (not necessarily easily or cost/performance-efficiently, but all the same). Also, it's not necessary to make all service functionality accessible via mobiles, and there are also things you can achieve much simpler via a mobile phone, like photo and video blogging/sharing, adding value to the service.
I extracted some interesting official stats from the AdMob Daily Inventory page. The first figure indicates ad click proportion for that service category, and the second figure provides daily average ad clicks for one service in that category:
- Communities: 55.0%, 38065
- Contextual search: 0.0%, 1031
- Downloads: 26.4%, 19191
- Entertainment: 1.4%, 1102
- News and information: 0.0%, 701
- Portals: 16%, 19778
This is clearly not a scientific analysis, and doesn't really counter Michael's conclusions per se, but indicates there's clearly life in mobile communities, and for some reason users of mobile communities are eager (relatively speaking) to click on ads. It would be interesting with a comment from AdMob for why this is so. The reason might be obvious.
Seemingly you shouldn't go for pure entertainment (whatever that means), news and search sites if you want to get mobile ad click revenue. That would completely contradict the ongoing hype around mobile search, so what's wrong in the logic? There's only one search service listed on the stats page, so the margin of error is huge in this case, but still, why only one? Because other search services handle their own advertizing? Possibly. Google and other heavy-weights obviously do, or intend to.
