6 ms·

Mobile is Where the Growth Is

121 points by MediaSquirrel 14y ago

k-mcgrady 14y ago
Great post. I think one of the most interesting aspects of this is payments. Throughout the history of the web most services and content has been free to consumers and support with ad revenue. But on mobile consumers are much more willing to pay and it is almost completely frictionless. I wonder if in the next few years we will start to see more and more apps using the subscription model. If Facebook was started today as a mobile first business would they charge for the app outright, charge $1 per month, or use in-app purchase to charge for extra features? NB: I first posted this comment on the blog
- technoslut 14y ago
  It's fun to think about but it wouldn't change Facebook's model at all. The power of Facebook is based upon the number of users it has.
JanneVee 14y ago
Well you can't argue with that. But what says you can't build a successful business around the web? Why can't you build a successful business with a desktop application?
- Spearchucker 14y ago
  You can (build a successful business with a desktop application). I think the degree or pace of success will be different for a mobile, desktop or web app. I also think that an app that's on all three will be more likely to succeed than one that's only on one or two of these. A couple or so years ago Microsoft had this vision of being on every screen or something. I'd never heard anything that made more sense as a vision statement from a tech giant. Then cloud came along, and they dropped that vision for the Azure/Office 365 push. That was a mistake. [Edit] To be clear, Azure/Office 365 weren't mistakes - they were/are good. Dropping that vision statement was the mistake.
  - JanneVee 14y ago
    Yeah, but I find the original post as a little backwards. Not everything makes sense on mobile. Not everything makes sense on the web. So why try to shoehorn it in there?
    - Spearchucker 14y ago
      You're absolutely right. Kindof like of your hammer is Java, then everything looks like a thumb. In that sense I guess his post is talking to what's hot right now.
    - extension 14y ago
      As with the web, it's not the shoehorned apps that are leading the charge on mobile. It's the totally new kinds of apps that didn't make sense until this platform came along.
lifeisstillgood 14y ago
Mobile is not a single view / Market / technology The post sort of implies smartphone == mobile, but with African mobiles being used to transfer scrip, Indian phones already having good SMS based payment models, there are multiple models, markets and a lot of cultural sensitivities The one preditiom I can make is there will be no more global phenomenon - one website taking off everywhere. Even just tacking on a new tld will not fix the local differences that mobile adoption is bringing Basically people adopted themselves to the web cos it was so useful and new. But mobile phones get adapted to people.
- tomjen3 14y ago
  I have to strongly disagree with that claim. India and Africa doesn't matter. Nobody wants to sell to people who can only pay a tiny fraction of what the product could be sold for in the first world.
  - phpnode 14y ago
    This is super short sighted. There are billions of people in India/Africa combined, it doesn't matter that they can't pay that much individually because combined they represent a huge and growing market. So what you say might be true today, but it's not a good long term strategy. These are exactly the kind of markets that people should be targeting, uncrowded and huge huge potential
    - wslh 14y ago
      I don't agree. It is also about cultures: people buying pirated software even if the time spend on that is more than the price of the product. For example, in Argentina people can buy pirated software in the streets and nobody care about original software, even if they have the money to do so.
      - phpnode 14y ago
        so give your software away and monetize around services
amirmc 14y ago
"The ads are the default content object (the tweet) and are delivered right in the primary user experience (the feed/timline)." True, but this is also why it's annoying.
- mikejarema 14y ago
  Agreed. But you could argue that once Twitter (and FB) tweak sponsored content to the point where it's no longer annoying or is actually share-worthy, that they've nailed this rev model.
  - tomjen3 14y ago
    At that point, they will become obsolete. Why? Because then the advertising agencies will have a way to make content people want to read and share and therefore they can rely on people sharing it, at no cost to them.
    - mikejarema 14y ago
      True, that's a solid point, thanks for the reply. However, ad agencies typically get paid more for spending more, so I don't think a "no cost" campaign works well for covering their costs. Of course there's probably agencies out there that do/will pitch this type of campaign, and charge for the ideation + production. But virality is usually an empty promise. Alternatively, increasing the k-factor on an already successful campaign is something agencies will want, so I believe they will fork out for these sponsored placements regardless. All told, I really do think some secret sauce for targeting (aided by Twitter's/FB's data insights) plus some cool content produced by the brands/agencies will win out as the monetization strategy for social networks.
mtkd 14y ago
One factor assisting 'mobile' right now is that SEO is less pervasive - mobile apps are focussed on UX which desktop webapps long ago ditched to get rankings (ramming as much content on page as possible, overusing keywords, reviews, ratings, UGC etc.). I'm finding many mobile apps simple/clean to use - although the 'responsive design' movement is diluting that.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  Responsive design doesn't mean mobile apps should be any less simple or clean. Only if it's done badly.
- franze 14y ago
  app stores are market-places. search engine are market-places. app stores are search engines. the optimizations for (native) apps just moved from the app-level to the market-place level.
  - AznHisoka 14y ago
    Very very true. However, if the optimization for apps is based on usage, reviews, downloads, etc, then having a good experience is consistent with having good rankings. Not so much with SEO where things like engagement and usage data don't factor much into rankings since it's not reliable
    - franze 14y ago
      >where things like engagement and usage data that's a story the link-counting-tool providers (i.e. seomoz) and linknetworks / linkbuilidng companies have been telling for years. and it is bullshit to keep the (crapy) status quo in SEO (because their business is deeply rooted into the status quo). ux metrics (serp clickthrough, long clicks) are an a factor for ages, see i.e. the discussion about "long-clicks" in the exgoogler book "i'm feeling lucky". plus: on big sites it is very easy (and i and other have done it multiple time) to test this UX factor. just make the UX of google referred visits significant poorer (i.e. via cloaking or performance delays) and see what happens to your overall SERP impressions and click throughs. the same goes for reviews, there is even an publicly available googler paper about it.
dirkdk 14y ago
Love this post. Monetization on mobile, as shown by Facebook's struggle to do well, is the next code to crack. I agree that as users are on mobile in a very focused state of mind, they are not open to advertisements, in particular not those that are in the way of achieving a goal. Subscription, in-app purchase might be better, also when users become more aware of the fact that if they are using a free service, they themselves are part of the offering being sold to the companies paying the bill.
gbog 14y ago
I wrote a reaction to this article: http://www.douban.com/note/223029237/ http://www.douban.com/note/223029237/ The gist of it is that APIs will become more important, and that they shouldn't stay as poorly designed as they are today. I try to think about how an API design could look like git's architecture.
ThomPete 14y ago
This post is great but it speaks primarily to B2C. B2B market will still be desktop/web based exactly because of the mobile apps being more features than actual applications.
rbn 14y ago
"There is a significant shift going on this year, much more significant than we saw last year, from web to mobile" what? so these mobile apps do not use the web?
aswanson 14y ago
That is why Facebook should (and it looks like will) break its big monolithic web app into a bunch of small mobile apps. Messenger, Instagram (not yet owned by Facebook), and Camera are the model for Facebook on mobile. I don't understand the complaint about Facebook not being mobile-ready. When I was on it, the mobile fb app worked almost as well as the regular website. That's how I'm guessing most users want the damn thing to work, the same across every platform and not fragmented because, well, it's on a phone. I'm trying to figure out why everyone thinks they're a non-entity on mobile.
joe-mccann 14y ago
I will continue to beat this drum: Mobile is not just the web. If you are thinking mobile first, you should be building network applications, not web applications. Fred Wilson is just an example of someone who get this.
niico 14y ago
SEO is dead. Mobile IS THE FUTURE. I used to create simple websites, do some SEO and get thousands of visit daily and now its impossible. Regular link building its dead nowadays. So, building freemium apps IS the future.

121 points by MediaSquirrel 14y ago

Great post. I think one of the most interesting aspects of this is payments. Throughout the history of the web most services and content has been free to consumers and support with ad revenue. But on mobile consumers are much more willing to pay and it is almost completely frictionless. I wonder if in the next few years we will start to see more and more apps using the subscription model. If Facebook was started today as a mobile first business would they charge for the app outright, charge $1 per month, or use in-app purchase to charge for extra features? NB: I first posted this comment on the blog

technoslut 14y ago
It's fun to think about but it wouldn't change Facebook's model at all. The power of Facebook is based upon the number of users it has.

JanneVee 14y ago

Well you can't argue with that. But what says you can't build a successful business around the web? Why can't you build a successful business with a desktop application?

Spearchucker 14y ago
You can (build a successful business with a desktop application). I think the degree or pace of success will be different for a mobile, desktop or web app. I also think that an app that's on all three will be more likely to succeed than one that's only on one or two of these. A couple or so years ago Microsoft had this vision of being on every screen or something. I'd never heard anything that made more sense as a vision statement from a tech giant. Then cloud came along, and they dropped that vision for the Azure/Office 365 push. That was a mistake. [Edit] To be clear, Azure/Office 365 weren't mistakes - they were/are good. Dropping that vision statement was the mistake.
- JanneVee 14y ago
  Yeah, but I find the original post as a little backwards. Not everything makes sense on mobile. Not everything makes sense on the web. So why try to shoehorn it in there?
  - Spearchucker 14y ago
    You're absolutely right. Kindof like of your hammer is Java, then everything looks like a thumb. In that sense I guess his post is talking to what's hot right now.
  - extension 14y ago
    As with the web, it's not the shoehorned apps that are leading the charge on mobile. It's the totally new kinds of apps that didn't make sense until this platform came along.

lifeisstillgood 14y ago

Mobile is not a single view / Market / technology The post sort of implies smartphone == mobile, but with African mobiles being used to transfer scrip, Indian phones already having good SMS based payment models, there are multiple models, markets and a lot of cultural sensitivities The one preditiom I can make is there will be no more global phenomenon - one website taking off everywhere. Even just tacking on a new tld will not fix the local differences that mobile adoption is bringing Basically people adopted themselves to the web cos it was so useful and new. But mobile phones get adapted to people.

tomjen3 14y ago
I have to strongly disagree with that claim. India and Africa doesn't matter. Nobody wants to sell to people who can only pay a tiny fraction of what the product could be sold for in the first world.
- phpnode 14y ago
  This is super short sighted. There are billions of people in India/Africa combined, it doesn't matter that they can't pay that much individually because combined they represent a huge and growing market. So what you say might be true today, but it's not a good long term strategy. These are exactly the kind of markets that people should be targeting, uncrowded and huge huge potential
  - wslh 14y ago
    I don't agree. It is also about cultures: people buying pirated software even if the time spend on that is more than the price of the product. For example, in Argentina people can buy pirated software in the streets and nobody care about original software, even if they have the money to do so.
    - phpnode 14y ago
      so give your software away and monetize around services

amirmc 14y ago

"The ads are the default content object (the tweet) and are delivered right in the primary user experience (the feed/timline)." True, but this is also why it's annoying.

mikejarema 14y ago
Agreed. But you could argue that once Twitter (and FB) tweak sponsored content to the point where it's no longer annoying or is actually share-worthy, that they've nailed this rev model.
- tomjen3 14y ago
  At that point, they will become obsolete. Why? Because then the advertising agencies will have a way to make content people want to read and share and therefore they can rely on people sharing it, at no cost to them.
  - mikejarema 14y ago
    True, that's a solid point, thanks for the reply. However, ad agencies typically get paid more for spending more, so I don't think a "no cost" campaign works well for covering their costs. Of course there's probably agencies out there that do/will pitch this type of campaign, and charge for the ideation + production. But virality is usually an empty promise. Alternatively, increasing the k-factor on an already successful campaign is something agencies will want, so I believe they will fork out for these sponsored placements regardless. All told, I really do think some secret sauce for targeting (aided by Twitter's/FB's data insights) plus some cool content produced by the brands/agencies will win out as the monetization strategy for social networks.

mtkd 14y ago

One factor assisting 'mobile' right now is that SEO is less pervasive - mobile apps are focussed on UX which desktop webapps long ago ditched to get rankings (ramming as much content on page as possible, overusing keywords, reviews, ratings, UGC etc.). I'm finding many mobile apps simple/clean to use - although the 'responsive design' movement is diluting that.

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
Responsive design doesn't mean mobile apps should be any less simple or clean. Only if it's done badly.
franze 14y ago
app stores are market-places. search engine are market-places. app stores are search engines. the optimizations for (native) apps just moved from the app-level to the market-place level.
- AznHisoka 14y ago
  Very very true. However, if the optimization for apps is based on usage, reviews, downloads, etc, then having a good experience is consistent with having good rankings. Not so much with SEO where things like engagement and usage data don't factor much into rankings since it's not reliable
  - franze 14y ago
    >where things like engagement and usage data that's a story the link-counting-tool providers (i.e. seomoz) and linknetworks / linkbuilidng companies have been telling for years. and it is bullshit to keep the (crapy) status quo in SEO (because their business is deeply rooted into the status quo). ux metrics (serp clickthrough, long clicks) are an a factor for ages, see i.e. the discussion about "long-clicks" in the exgoogler book "i'm feeling lucky". plus: on big sites it is very easy (and i and other have done it multiple time) to test this UX factor. just make the UX of google referred visits significant poorer (i.e. via cloaking or performance delays) and see what happens to your overall SERP impressions and click throughs. the same goes for reviews, there is even an publicly available googler paper about it.

dirkdk 14y ago

Love this post. Monetization on mobile, as shown by Facebook's struggle to do well, is the next code to crack. I agree that as users are on mobile in a very focused state of mind, they are not open to advertisements, in particular not those that are in the way of achieving a goal. Subscription, in-app purchase might be better, also when users become more aware of the fact that if they are using a free service, they themselves are part of the offering being sold to the companies paying the bill.

gbog 14y ago

I wrote a reaction to this article: http://www.douban.com/note/223029237/ http://www.douban.com/note/223029237/ The gist of it is that APIs will become more important, and that they shouldn't stay as poorly designed as they are today. I try to think about how an API design could look like git's architecture.

ThomPete 14y ago

This post is great but it speaks primarily to B2C. B2B market will still be desktop/web based exactly because of the mobile apps being more features than actual applications.

rbn 14y ago

"There is a significant shift going on this year, much more significant than we saw last year, from web to mobile" what? so these mobile apps do not use the web?

aswanson 14y ago

That is why Facebook should (and it looks like will) break its big monolithic web app into a bunch of small mobile apps. Messenger, Instagram (not yet owned by Facebook), and Camera are the model for Facebook on mobile. I don't understand the complaint about Facebook not being mobile-ready. When I was on it, the mobile fb app worked almost as well as the regular website. That's how I'm guessing most users want the damn thing to work, the same across every platform and not fragmented because, well, it's on a phone. I'm trying to figure out why everyone thinks they're a non-entity on mobile.

joe-mccann 14y ago

I will continue to beat this drum: Mobile is not just the web. If you are thinking mobile first, you should be building network applications, not web applications. Fred Wilson is just an example of someone who get this.

niico 14y ago

SEO is dead. Mobile IS THE FUTURE. I used to create simple websites, do some SEO and get thousands of visit daily and now its impossible. Regular link building its dead nowadays. So, building freemium apps IS the future.