The scariest chart in Mary Meeker’s slide deck for newspapers | Hacker News Reader

The scariest chart in Mary Meeker’s slide deck for newspapers

niemanlab.org

67 pointsBrajeshwar28 comments

If my behavior is anything typical, advertisers are going to be a world of hurt. When I read a newspaper, I tend to be open for advertising. I usually am looking for movie reviews, concert information and the like. Ads for concert series, festivals, ... are welcome in this environment. To me, these ads can often make me willing to deal with the advertiser.

However, when I am using a mobile I tend to be doing something with that mobile. Looking at mail, getting map information, watching a video or browsing my cycle of blogs and RSS feeds. While I am doing this I tend to find advertisements rather annoying. They suck down bandwidth I'm sometimes paying for. They get strangled when there's not enough bandwidth to go around. Contrary to print ads, these tend to make me unwilling to deal with the advertiser. Particularly if they're intrusive, animated or noisy.

As many others have said, if you show me pertinent(!) ads when I'm interested in ads I'm happy. If you ram stuff in my face, spend my time and money and keep me from doing what I want to do I'm unhappy. Here's a clue: unhappy people don't make good customers.

Also, if you're of a certain age you remember things like computer shopper magazine. Which, while it had articles, I don't think I ever found one. It was basically a one and half inch thick catalogue.

People paid money to buy a thick catalogue, to see what was shiny and new.

What was it about ads in magazines that made us actually want to see them. I used to buy guitar magazines and even though I never bought any of it I liked seeing new gear that was coming out. Online I would never bother to check things like that and actually get annoyed by those ads on guitar websites.

I think it's just because of the pushy nature of so many ads on the web or mobile apps.

An example of it done well would probably be The Verge's mobile app for Android when their primary benefactor was Starbucks - when you'd launch it after a while, you'd get a quick ~2 second splash screen that showed the Starbucks logo while the news data was being loaded.

True. I wonder how advertisers could get the kind of engagement online that they got in magazines where people would voluntarily read your entire ad, maybe spending as much as a few minutes on it.

There are better ways to learn about new products on the web, so ads suck more.

I remember Computer Shopper. I used to have a subscription at work. I would keep the issues in a bookcase. Back in the mid nineties, each perfect-bound issue was the size of a major city telephone book and consisted of perhaps a 100 pages of editorial content on decent paper spread out in a sea of advertising on cheaper paper (the kind that gets ink on your fingers). Then, as the internet ramped up, the magazine got slimmer and slimmer. Looking at my bookcase, it was easy to see the trend. I see from their Wikipedia entry† that they finally ceased print in 2009. The started in 1979. I lost track of them in about 2002.

†http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Shopper_%28US_magazine...

Television advertisements would like to have a word with you. These are the most annoying, strategically placed to interrupt in tense moments, yet they make up the bulk of ad spending?

I find that I've gotten to a point too where my mind subconsciously blocks out ads, even the ones at the top of Google searches. I also don't believe I've ever clicked on a banner or display ad (purposely) since I've been on the internet. They just always feel scammy or not targeted well enough in my opinion. But that's also just the nature of the internet...

Advertisers figured out how to use the newspaper, the radio, the televison, and we've watched them figure out how to use the internet. It isn't like mobile is tainted somehow, they'll figure it out as well. From the 2012 to the 2013 charts, in no case did the spending allocation trend against the consumption allocation.

An RSS reader paid for by local announcements actually kind of makes sense, but I don't see anyone with the market share to make it work.

EDIT: and if someone doesn't think spending tracks allocation I'm open to other theories of why the bars line up.

I actually do keep score on advertisers whose uninvited popups or navigational hijack tricks waste my time. Their brands accrue negative associations.

I can't fathom why so many advertisers are so eager to demolish their brand equity by annoying the shit out of users.

Mobile ads suffer from 90%+ accidental, "fat finger" and "creative use of page loading effects" ad clicks (yes, the reported 40% or so numbers are wrong). The resulting conversion is terrible and both Apple and Google are knowingly keeping it that way because fixing the problem would mean greatly reduced clicks and ad revenue. Just try to promote a free mobile app download for a well-known website (no click-baity advertising at all, viewers know exactly what they'll get and have no reason to click on the ad unless they want to download) using Google's mobile app promotion ads, you'll get something like 1-3% actual conversion and many users telling you they hit the deceptively loading and positioned ads by accident, which shows clearly how big the problem is.

Sooner or later advertisers are going to realize how they're being hit by this problem and that advertising in print media or desktop browsers is still the better way to go. The mobile ad industry is in for a world of hurt ...

My main problem with mobile ads is that they often completely break the user experience.

Why not make ads analogous to print: just (arguably) beautiful photography with some text on it and place them within the article where it makes sense. I never felt bugged while reading a multi page article in a magazine, when it says "continue on page 43" and got interrupted by a full page ad.

But no, mobile ads have to be huge in size, animated – or even better videos (because everybody has a unlimited data plans now, yeah), block scrolling and or slap you in the face after you already started reading.

Just nobody seems to care about quality of advertising on the web and mobile. A lot of big companies still focus on their traditional channels and pay a few bucks extra for the web/mobile part of the campaign. The Advertising Agency assigns the implementation task to the intern who knows a thing or two in jquery. And in the end the IT department of the newspapers just copy & pastes the code in without testing.*

A company would most likely never send a smelly alcoholic to sell their product on the streets. But they to that on the web.

*This paragraph may sound harsh, but this is how i often felt, when I was working for a big online newspaper responsible for custom campaign implementations and development.

That is why native ads are becoming popular in mobile. Think about Facebook ads in your news feed or Promoted Tweets. They don't break the experience.

This is early days yet but more and more app developers are catching on the trend. Tango and other text apps are other examples.

Ads in my Fb feed.on mobile very much do break the experience because it takes me a moment to work out where it came from. I have intelligent interesting friends and I take time to engage with the things they post. Finding out that something I took time on is a sponsored post is invariably a negative experience and I go out of my way to post childish rude comments on every one I receive in order to devalue it for the advertiser.

For what it's worth, the early internet was like this too. The early Google made a killing when they realized they could provide a useful service with contextually relevant and well placed, but not annoying ads. I don't know what they do nowadays, but back then they were extremely strict about google ad placement on other websites and required that shitty ads were not placed alongside theirs.

I have a feeling the companies that figure out how to do this will be successful. There's a difference this time though, Google acted as a portal while apps are destinations. I think this might be important, but I'm not sure.

Yes it already improved a lot. I don't really have insides in the financial aspects of advertising and don't know what would be possible with mobile ads alone. Unlike other startups, the big disadvantage news companies have is, that they need a comparably huge staff and spend a lot on licensing just to get a basic product.

But, what makes me angry is that newspapers are probably the industry with the longest experience in how to mix content and advertising into a single product people want. Yet, they ignored the internet for a decade until the money flow from print started to run dry and mobile users started – completely unexpected – to read the products, the news companies considered worthless themselves.

Of course it's not all their own fault. But they could have been better prepared.

Early Google didn't sell search result placement, they focused on superior organic results. It was later that they copied the idea from Overture, a company with much smaller search volume, but which had figured out a successful monetization model for search. Google's organic search results weren't mauled by SEO in the early days. Likewise, in the early days conspicuously avoided ads ("Ads aren't cool" - "The Social Network").

Does anyone want ads on their phone? Or having their smartphone data stream continuously mined by advertising spyware networks? $100/mo, tiny data transfer caps, tiny screen, expensive hw, and an industry salivating at the opportunity to take a bigger chunk of the mobile users' experience. Joy.

I kinda thought that phones were a personal communication device, and that for almost a grand for the phone (unsubsidized, thanks Verizon, Steve Jobs RIP), and $100 a month, my phone would serve myself, rather than act as a personal data conduit to data brokers.

It isn't necessarily scary. The charts show "time spent" vs money spent. But what you really want to know is "money spent" vs "results taken". IE: Which channels drive revenue.

on the flip side, you can measure these things on web/mobile platforms, it gets much more difficult with print ads.

FWIW I'm more likely to respond to an ad I see on the Economist or Monocle than one I see on my mobile phone. At the moment just the fact that it's on my mobile phone tells me it has less value.

Which channels drive revenue.

You don't even need to go that far: Which channels have useful audiences?

My guess is that the average Economist reader has far more disposable income than the average Candy Crush player.

Exactly the reason why professional golfers have very lucrative endorsement contracts, and why the tour has sponsors and advertisers ranging from luxury goods to enterprise software vendors.

(Phil Mickelson's endorsement income was reportedly $45MM in 2013, which is

Since 1993, the only ad I've ever intentionally clicked on was for Belroy wallets. I still haven't bought one, though the idea is pretty cool.

I have accidentally clicked on many ads due to site that load the ads first and then put the content in the middle, so the page is continually shuffling around for the thirty seconds to a minute it takes to load on my "high speed" ADSL in Australia.

So take those click-through statistics with a grain of salt: how many of them are forced due to pages shuffling elements around?

It's all about demographics.

I might advertise in magazine/newspaper X because I want to reach people who actually read magazine/newspaper X.

If you're reaching out to the high end / older demographic, that might just be the best form of ad spend.

Nowadays, advertising in Print is just another form of niche advertising. The ad spends don't justify it as a form of mass market advertising.

I think the future of mobile advertising will be more like today's product placement and less like banner ads or interstitials. It's such a size-constrained platform that anything insufficiently subtle will give you haters rather than customers.

I created a public transit app which shows a route on screen. Is there a way for me to easily display a list of businesses or special offers within a km of the user's destination? If not, there should be.

Or with something like Instagram - okay, the user has taken a picture near a beach on a sunny day, why not ask them if they want an ice-cream?

Lots of interesting stuff in the full deck.

On cybersecurity (18):

"Vulnerable Systems Placed on Internet Compromised in <15 Minutes"

Improvements in genome sequencing previously tracked with Moore's law, now jumping far ahead of it. (89)

142 and 143 provide some food for thought.

PDF of slides: http://s3.amazonaws.com/kpcbweb/files/85/Internet_Trends_201...

I like how she presents important info in easy to digest graphs. One thing that I find interesting and provocative is slide 11, where she lumps mobile devices (phones,tablets,mp3 devices,cameras,appliances) into a new category of "computing cycle." Characterized by increasing integration and consisting of much larger number of devices. Useful analysis to think about.

Newspapers have significant and ever increasing mobile and online busines. They haven't been print only since last century.

The best news is decline of TV. I seriously hope it dies.

Why is time spent so important? Results are what matter. And where is outdoor? A billboard has minutes of time spent.

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