
The scariest chart in Mary Meeker’s slide deck for newspapers - Brajeshwar
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-scariest-chart-in-mary-meekers-slide-deck-for-newspapers-has-gotten-a-little-scarier/
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jleyank
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.

~~~
spitfire
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.

~~~
k-mcgrady
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.

~~~
edgyswingset
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.

~~~
k-mcgrady
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.

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lazyjones
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 ...

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smoe
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.

~~~
product50
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.

~~~
SixSigma
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.

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spitfire
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.

~~~
cperciva
_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.

~~~
hkmurakami
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

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manicdee
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?

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hayksaakian
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.

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briggers
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?

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brownbat
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...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/kpcbweb/files/85/Internet_Trends_2014_vFINAL_-_05_28_14-_PDF.pdf?1401286773)

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aceperry
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.

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njharman
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.

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

