Upwardly mobile mobile - Village Magazine

August/September VILLAGE

, Emarketer estimates that adults will

spend just under three hours each day on

their mobile devices, with laptop and desk-

top usage dropping to close to two hours.

Accordingly, mobile ad spending is set to

increase % from  to , passing

out radio, newspaper and magazine spend-

ing, and settling into third place behind

television and desktop spending. Currently,

advertisers spend twice as much on desktop

advertising as on mobile, but that’s also set to

change, with mobile revenue set to outpace

desktop by .

So, who ends up pocketing all of this adver-

tising revenue? The ﬁve most-visited Irish

websites are google.ie, google.com, facebook.

com, Google-owned youtube.com, and wiki-

pedia. In the US, Google takes around % of

online ad revenue, followed by Facebook at

%, and much of Google’s advertising reve-

nue distribution goes to Facebook. This year,

Google will take more than one-third of its

revenue from mobile advertising, and that

could increase to % within two years.

It’s not just that we’re spending more time

on mobile devices. To their delight, adver-

tisers are discovering that mobile devices,

in the words of tech website pando.com, are

turning us into “advertising hungry, nonstop

retail monsters”. A report by advertising

agency Criteo found that users are far more

likely to click on mobile ads than on desk-

top ads. On iPhones and iPads, we’re %

more likely to click on an ad, while Android

(by Google) users are % more likely

to click through, and % of the world’s

smartphones running on Google’s Android

operating system. There’s a mind-bog-

gling cycle of information at work here. Our

mobile devices are feeding great amounts

of data back to Google about our habits and

movements, enabling the company to deliver

targeted and location-based advertising;

with Apple devices, it’s possible to mini-

mise the data fed back about location, but

Android doesn’t oﬀer such opt-outs. Yes, it

seems that nothing makes us happier than

shopping online with our mobiles.

We’ve wised up to banner ads, whose click-

through rates were once more than %, but

which have plummeted now to less than .%,

forcing advertisers to look for other ways to

attract our attention. Enter ‘native adver-

tising’, the online equivalent of newspaper

pages discreetly marked out as ‘commer-

cial features’. The New York Times executive

Meredith Levien notes

that its readers now

spend as much time

on branded content

as on news stories.

Time CEO Joe Ripp

is elevating ‘native

advertising’ to a new

level, announcing in

July that his editors

would now report to

the advertising exec-

utives. There has

traditionally been a

wall between edito-

rial and advertising

for ethical reasons, to prevent advertisers

from directly inﬂuencing editorial matters.

Brands are increasingly hiring journalists

to create content for their native advertis-

ing divisions.

In recent years, we’ve seen the conse-

quences of this blurring of the lines between

editorial and advertising, and it hasn’t gen-

erally served us well. The division between

editorial and advertising in newspapers

is most slight in the property and motors

sections of newspapers, where all cars are

good, and all properties are interesting

when they’re not exclusive. Vast revenues

accrued to newspapers from property adver-

tising during the mid-s, and although

newspaper insiders knew that the property

advertising bubble indicated a market at its

peak, they largely failed to ﬂag the crash.

When Sunday Business Post property writer

Carol Tallon suggested in July that buyers

would be wise to wait a few years for an

increase in the housing supply, it felt like a

very edgy and radical thing for a property

writer to say, though in fairness, the paper

did need someone to counterbalance the

recent if temporary elevation to go-to opin-

ion writer Jim ‘soft-landing’ Power. •

NE of the best in-jokes among editors

this year is that “desktop is the new

print”. Four years ago, news websites

had zero visitors arriving via mobile devices.

This year, the Financial Times noted that

almost two out of three visitors to its website

came via mobile devices, and news websites

expect mobile users to account for four in ﬁve

online readers in two years time.

What’s driving all of this change? Step for-

ward, the Circle. Sorry, Google.

Although not a news platform, Google is

driving a staggering rate of change in the

news business as the company captures more

and more of the advertising revenue from

print and online news media. This change

is being driven by the widespread adoption

of smartphones and the increasing amounts

of time we spend on our mobile phones and

tablets.

A survey by US website emarketer shows

that in , adults spent an average of

two hours and twelve minutes on mobile

devices (such as smartphones and tab-

lets) and desktops or laptops. By the end of

Mobile reaps proﬁts

and information,

while Time’s editors

will now report to its

advertising executives.

By Rónán Lynch

Upwardly

mobile

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