Advertising Isn't A Mobile Strategy
from the content-comes-first dept
ReadWriteWeb has an article claiming that the way to beat Google is by having a better ad platform (via Matt Asay). It says that "the company that can corner the mobile web ad market is going to be able to go toe-to-toe with Google." This is getting things completely backwards. Google doesn't dominate the search engine market because it has the best advertising platform. It dominates the advertising market because it has the best search platform. Other companies, such as AOL, that have seen themselves as an advertising company first and a content/applications company second have gone nowhere. This is especially true because the best advertising platforms are tightly integrated with their associated applications. One of the reasons Google's search advertising is so lucrative is that Google figured out how to make its ads highly relevant to users' search terms. This had two benefits. It increased click-through rates, obviously, but more importantly, it made the ads more useful -- and therefore less annoying -- to users. The same principle applies to the mobile space. Mobile advertising will only work if companies figure out how to make the overall user experience positive so that the ads don't scare users away. The way to do that is not to focus on building the best possible mobile ad platform, but rather to build the best possible mobile services, and worry about monetizing them after they've built up a significant user base.
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Filed Under: advertising, business models, platforms, strategy
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RWW is slipping!
I'm still a fan, but...
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Mobile Advertising
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Good writing
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Googles Search Engine
If one wants a better search engine then one simply needs to take a look at Yahoo. Yahoo's context sensitive search engine by far produces superior results to Google.
That is unless you like being "spammed" by page after page of ads while futilely searching for something that has at least some relation to what you are searching for.
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However, Google had the chance to grow in a quiet homogeneous environment (OS, browsers). "Make the overall user experience positive" is quite a case in such a complex/atomised environment as mobile one.
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