The Mobile Paradox | Hacker News Reader

The Mobile Paradox

techcrunch.com

25 pointsiProject13 comments

You guys are missing the point. The problem with mobile is not the ads, it's return on investment. I make mobile apps, and if my profit on a one dollar app is 70 cents, that's a hard limit on my customer acquisition spend. Which is why we don't use admob any more. The clicks are there, they're just not worth much.

The reality is that ads really have to be Re-envisioned for the mobile space. There's not enough real estate on a phone to put up massive banner ads on a phone, and there's good reason to believe we will see something similar to iAd for android and windows phone (which will benefit the handset and OS guys)

What I expect to see is a new wave of mobile utilities that approach advertising differently, integrating into the workflow rather than the real estate model of the web.

I think you're right about having new, different ways to integrate advertising, but don't forget that (compared to the web) it's much easier to charge the user directly.

Also, like pre-Tivo television, it's harder to ignore interstitial ads.

For better or worse, I can picture of future of free smart phones with unignorable interstitials.

This was the concept for the google-phone pre 2007 iPhone launch if memory serves...

That was definitely the rumor, but I think it was mostly speculation along the lines of: Google makes their money from ads, so of course their phone will be wall-to-wall ads.

It seems to me there's a lot of push back from users on the use of interstitial on desktop websites. You think they will be better tolerated on mobile?

Are these pieces paid for? The writer's company link (just.me) takes to a very crude homepage with an un-styled Google Spreadshet form requesting subscriptions.

There's nothing new in this article and a lot of speculation.

> Are these pieces paid for?

Michael Arrington is a just.me investor.

http://just.me/2012/01/seed-and-a-round-funding/

Wow, there are a lot of typos and grammar errors in this piece. I don't want to sound pedantic, but the article was kind of hard to read.

However, I think that the thesis about mobile in some ways replacing older internet ad paradigms is true. Especially in emerging markets, mobiel internet is the dominant platform for most applications.

So apparently, since mobile devices use much smaller screens, it is hard to put an ad and content together on the much smaller screen without annoying the user, and Google has not yet figured out a workaround.

I may agree with you on a basic level but this is far more trouble for Google than it seems.

Mobile apps are incredibly inexpensive compared to their desktop counterparts and a user will always prefer less ads.

Facebook's plan for mobile ads is to embed them in a user's news feed. Google can't do this with search or they will completely poison it along with G+ results.

All relevant info suggests that consumers are using dedicated apps for search and Google can't buy every startup to compete against Amazon, Apple and Facebook.

So, what's the paradox? I just skimmed over the article, but found nothing about one...

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