Mobile Ads on Google’s Horizon
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | November 13, 2006 | Share This
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Eric Schmidt wins the Quote of the Day contest, with “Your mobile phone should be free”. In an interview with Reuters on Saturday, Schmidt dropped that gem in tandem with the announcement that Google is experimenting with different formats of mobile advertising (shocker). Schmidt predicts that ad-supported subsidies will soon enable free, or at least very low cost, mobile service.
There’s no question that this would stimulate user adoption rates of wireless mobile, especially in lagging markets like the U.S. - just look at the massive popularity of Skype. Skype’s next-to-nothing VoiP service has over 136 million subscribers, and accounts for roughly 7% of global international long distance minutes. In fact, if Skype were a carrier, it would have the third most subscribers in the world - behind only China Mobile and Vodaphone. What’s more, Skype has begun toying with the ad-supported business model, introducing a click-to-call browser button and offering free service in the U.S. and Canada until the end of this year. Despite having relatively high technology requirements, Skype has managed to grow over 20% Q/Q, primarily because of it’s unbeatable service cost.
The question then, as presented by GigaOm, is, “how long would it take for the mobile advertising market to grow large enough to support such an environment?” Everyone is talking about mobile, but few are spending money on testing ads. A fascinating report from the London School of Economics (PDF) claims that mobile advertising will likely succeed as highly-targeted, interactive, “snackable” ads - aka, ads that are unobtrusive, and can be picked up or disregarded at will. Video ads have a 7 second limit on attention span, image-based ads can take up only a fraction of screen space, and text ads require full browsing capabilities.
Mobile advertising, then, will need to be a radical departure from traditional media (and even current online media) to merely not be annoying - which is to say nothing about their ability to convert. This sphere has a long way to go, and for that matter, needs more than Google to be testing the water.
Topics: Technology |