
Carriers Are Making More from Mobile Ads Than Publishers Are - gregmac
https://medium.com/@robleathern/carriers-are-making-more-from-mobile-ads-than-publishers-are-d5d3c0827b39
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JustSomeNobody
Things are going to come to a head sooner rather than later. People are more
and more talking about how bloated and slow web pages have become. Now we have
ad blocking thrown into the mix.

Consumers are tired of big, slow web sites with intrusive ads (non-intrusive,
people seem to be more ok with).

Web pages need to go on a diet. Lighten the size of the frameworks. Don't use
so many hi-res images (and heck, what ever happened to text only pages!? They
can be gorgeous too!). Use more sensible advertising. Just generally optimize
the size and speed of the web page.

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ori_b
> Things are going to come to a head sooner rather than later. People are more
> and more talking about how bloated and slow web pages have become. Now we
> have ad blocking thrown into the mix.

I remember people talking about this since the late 1990s.

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IBM
In the 1990s Apple didn't have leverage over the web like they do now and not
being an internet company that makes money from ads, their incentives are
aligned with combating this more than ever.

~~~
kps

      > their incentives are aligned
    

They sure are. Apple sells native ads which, naturally, they do _not_ allow
users to block. [http://advertising.apple.com/](http://advertising.apple.com/)

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rimantas
And how does that apply to the web?

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ori_b
Well, if advertisers can't reach customers via web ads, where do they turn?

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manigandham
This is a weird comparison though since they're separate issues.

When you go to a theater, the cost of driving/gas can be more than the movie
ticket. It's up to the user to weigh the costs.

I think this really highlights the mobile data ripoff that currently exists
more than ads/cruft but both are real problems, just orthogonal. Then again
the majority of mobile data is over wifi anyway so it's not as bad as it
seems.

Zero-rating / sponsored data does seem to have some potential applications
here though. Not many scenarios yet but might become more common.

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gizmo686
I think this is slightly different, in that mobile ads demonstrate an explicit
market inefficiency (it is in the interest of both the user and the publisher
for the user to pay directly for content, instead of being served ads).

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ajb
Wow. So, if we work out a way for carriers to fund content (in return for
increased marginal data consumptiom) then we can ditch the ad-funding model?

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idunno246
Isn't this exactly what net neutrality is fighting?

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awhitty
I thought it was fighting the reverse: content creators/publishers pay to have
priority access to consumers. Or is it fighting both directions?

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rizwank
Big miss in the methodology here. (CTO of a MVNO, watching data usage and
pricing trends is a huge part of my day)

Those plans and costs ignore that at least a third of the US is on far lower
cost plans from MVNOs, CSEs (Carrier-Sponsored Entities), various prepaid
plans, as well as T-Mobile and Sprint.

They also absolutely ignore the fact that there is an additional talk and text
price embedded in those. It's very techie to assume that the cost per MB for a
plan is just total cost/Mb; the reality is that you easily have to figure
$20-30 for the actual phone part of the plan.

Personally, I'd prefer to give subscribers far more value from their plan;
advertising isn't the only problem. Many video apps default to greedy mode;
pulling as high quality video as possible; without consulting or making it
easy for users to requests lower bandwidth streams. Add that to FB video auto
stream which just eats up bandwidth by scrolling through your news feed (and
has had at least two separate places to turn it off- making harder to educate
users) - and you have a trend of content and app designers assuming wireless
connectivity is a commodity and unlimited for all.

Many, many people have smartphone plans with less than a gig of data because
that's what they can afford - and the ecosystem devalues the actual experience
of that gig more and more.

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ised
What I find amusing about this is that in addition to taking the money on the
table by serving mobile ads, the carriers are also charging their customers
for "data".

All the mobile ad and other cruft just increases the amount of data used by
the customer.

Imagine if customers were only charged for the actual content. Is CSS, fonts
and Javascript "content"? I guess it depends who you ask.

As a user, I rarely turn on Javascript, yet I still download heaps of it (then
filter it out client-side). For me, this is totally unnecessary data usage.

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thehal84
it is no different then cable TV. You pay to watch all those commercials. In
Canada the largest Carriers also happen to be Cable providers.

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mattzito
It's a little different - in effect, the amount of TV I watch has no impact on
the cost to me from my cable provider.

In this case, the more ads you consume, potentially the more you pay from your
wireless carrier.

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fieryeagle
A way to look at cable TV is like a buffet. Everything is paid for in
advanced. In a buffet, you can eat until you bust and the restaurant would
still break even with the food cost at worst. Most cases, profit. The rest of
users always make up for the revenue 'losses' caused by a small set of
anomalies. This double income from ads and data only happened because your
carriers were allowed to get away with placing data caps on wireless. In some
distance past, we used to get limits on broadbands too, remember?

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greatthanks
> That’s an average of $22.92/Gb or $0.0224 per megabyte

That is surprisingly expensive:

I live in Germany and pay monthly 10 Euro per 1.5GB - that's 6.7 Euro per GB
or about 7.5 USD per GB ...

And that's not even a contract but prepaid on monthly basis.

Actually I could get 5 GB for 15 Euro thats 3 Euro or 3.4 USD per GB.

Is mobile traffic really about 5 to 6 times more expensive in the US?

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Eridrus
Depends how you count it. The pricing structure of cell phones is pretty
unfriendly in the US.

You can get a 1GB plan from T-Mobile for $50; or a $3GB plan for $60 or 5GB
for $70 or unlimited for $80. [1]

So, the average cost is close to that $22/GB number, but the marginal cost is
closer to $5.

You can find some prepaid voice+data plans, but their prices are not
particularly competitive in the 2GB range.

I did find some cheaper data-only plans from T-Mobile at $10/GB[2], but that's
not really what people are buying.

[1] [http://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-
plans/individual.html](http://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-
plans/individual.html)

[2] [https://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/prepaid-internet](https://prepaid-
phones.t-mobile.com/prepaid-internet)

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maxerickson
The so called Walmart plan is cheaper:

[https://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/other-prepaid-plans](https://prepaid-
phones.t-mobile.com/other-prepaid-plans)

(And fairly popular as prepaid goes)

