Robert Andrews writes: "Publishers are seeing mobile audiences growing fast – but revenue is yet to catch up, and it’s the ad industry taking the blame. ... Many publishers are becoming worried about migrating their audience from web to mobile in lieu of the latter offering an equivalent business model."

  • fuzzyfuzzyfungus

    Who would have thought that customer tolerance for advertisers would drop through the floor when their demands for real-estate are coming out of a 4 inch monitor, not a 20 inch one, and their obnoxious blinkenpictures are being pulled out of your bandwidth allotment at a price that keeps the wireless telcos happy?

    It is something of a problem, of course, since advertising has been a major aspect of periodical and web publishing; but the trouble on mobile is really just a reminder of how much people really don’t like advertisers very much.

  • autark

     sliver lining?: If industry can be convinced that unlimited bandwidth is a solution to enable more advertising revenue, maybe we all benefit… we just need good adblock plugins for our phones

  • atimoshenko

    The problem is not with mobile per se, it is with the plummeting ROI of advertising. For advertising to be effective, information has to be expensive to produce and expensive to distribute. Under such conditions, a brilliant product can indefinitely languish in obscurity despite its brilliance, simply because there is no way of getting word out about it. On the other hand, when it becomes trivial for pretty much anyone to produce and broadcast any sort of information, the notoriety of a product becomes much more a function of the brilliance of the product and much less a function of the size of the centralised marketing push.

    Content producers better start figuring out a non-advertising related way of supporting themselves, regardless of whether they have a mobile presence or not.

  • jimmoffet

    Well you’re not going to fight the tide here. Your content will primarily be accessed on mobile devices whether you like it or not, and if you aren’t available on mobile, you won’t be sacrificing some revenue, you’ll be sacrificing your business.

    So I guess if advertising is less-effective on a mobile platform, that means people will have to start charging for products again. To which I say, “Hooray!”. Down with advertising and up with paying a small amount of money for things we like. Maybe this way the news media will start producing articles that people are willing to pay for instead of articles with headlines they’ll click on for free for a few seconds of titillation.