A MobCon morning workout of Content, Ads, Apps and Locations
Here are some reports that have been published over the past week or so that provide us with some insight into the health of the MobCon.
In its first report on the use of “geosocial” or location-based services, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life project finds that 4% of online adults use a service such as Foursquare or Gowalla that allows them to share their location with friends and to find others who are nearby. On any given day, 1% of internet users are using these services.
Basically here is a report that tell us that – despite all the hype over the past year or so – mobile Location Aware Services are still very much a niche market in the US. The only real question we need to be asking ourselves at this time is will Facebook’s move into the “places” market take Location Awareness mainstream or will it remain a niche idea whose time has not yet come.
Moving on and the report that will grab all the headlines today is the one from comScore that suggests that Facebook Now Accounts for Nearly 1 in 4 Online Display Ads in U.S
The headlines focus on the rapid growth in Facebook’s market share in display advertising.
However all this excitement should be tempered by the knowledge that – largely thanks to banner blindness and lack of trust – Display Advertising has proven to be one of the least effective forms of response advertising we have seen across all media (See Is advertising online really your best option?, Search me or Trust me? and Page 19 of Razorfish’s Social Media Marketing Report) and internet advertising has yet to break out of its own ecosystem.
Read the detail and you’ll discover the discover the 10 Ten Display Advertisers are Telcos and online properties. Indeed the list looks remarkably similar to the Top Google Advertisers list published by Ad Age last month (see Google’s long tail).
The great hope for Facebook is it will finally deliver on the internet’s long held promise of delivering better response rates through the wholesale application of targeted advertising techniques fueled by detailed user metrics.
“The ability to buy specific audiences is enabling a greater number of display ads to be delivered on target, display formats are improving at a rapid rate, and the quality of creative is getting better every day. As publishers prove the value of online display ad campaigns, digital should continue to carve out a bigger piece of the advertising pie” – comScore
That theory has yet to be proven but it will not abate the current surge in advertising interest in Social Media. (See AdBook, AdSpace and AdLinked). The golden key that will unlock social media is a combination of Customer Profiling and Quality Creative… alternatively it could simply be a matter of engaging the CrowdSongstress.
For all those budding eAuthors and Bloggers looking for a future beyond putting ads on the menu we have the forecast from Forrester that by the end of the year $966 million in eBooks will be sold and by 2015, the industry will have nearly tripled to almost $3 billion. Interestingly the 7% of online adults who read books read eBooks happen to read the most books and spend the most money on books. (See eBooks ready to climb past 1 Billion).
The news from the New York Times that Amazon has decided to join the 74U34Me club will also please publishers.
Finally, for the Mobile Apps developers there is the PDF Report on The State of the Apps Industry from Millennium Media and last month’s U.S. Teen Mobile Report: Calling Yesterday, Texting Today, Using Apps Tomorrow report from Nielsen.
