Let’s start by stating the facts.
Mobile content consumption is changing everything about the media landscape,
faster than anyone could have ever predicted. In the wake of this massive shift, is publisher CPM’s and their ability to generate revenue from mobile page
views. Just as publishers were starting to come to grips with declines in print
ad spend…mobile has come along and completely upended everything. All one needs
to do is look at this
chart from the Atlantic to see what’s the future holds:
Its not all doom and gloom though…just
take a look at what Facebook is doing in mobile and it’s clear that there is
money to be made in mobile…plenty of it. Facebook went from no mobile ad
revenues in 2012 to mobile now making up 40% of its overall revenue. Quite a
stunning turn of events for a company that admitted in their IPO prospectus
that their mobile growth was accelerating rapidly and they didn’t have a way
(at the time) to monetize those users. Twitter is also growing mobile revenues
at a triple digit pace….A lot can be learned from the success that Social
Networks are now seeing in mobile.
John Ebber in this AdExchanger.com
article Margins
and The First Inning sums it up quite nicely:
“Big
properties with addressable first-party data - logins - seem to hold
the cards for true, by-the-impression, sometimes real-time biddable, audience
buying in mobile.”
And there you have it…the secret to
Facebook’s mobile success…logins. When advertisers buy mobile ads from
Facebook, they know they are targeting the exact audiences they want to reach.
Whereas if they are buying mobile display inventory across multiple exchanges
it's more akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Why? Because mobile lacks a
cross device ID. Right now there is no reliable way to target
specific audiences. Facebook has capitalized on this in a huge way by offering
up their rich profile data for targeting and placing large ad units within the
Newsfeed. The combination of these two factors has made Facebook an overnight
player in the mobile ad space.
So
what does Facebook’s success in mobile have to do with publishers? Well in my
opinion, everything. The real key to Facebook’s mobile success has been the
fact that they have logged in users. While many publishers don’t have
perpetually logged in users like Facebook, they have another weapon. The Email
Address. If you have someone’s email address then they are as good as a logged
in user. You can target to that email address with your 1st
party data, 3rd party data, offline data etc... The Inbox needs to become your focus for finding perpetually logged
in users. And with email being #1
in terms of time spent in mobile, it’s a good chance that’s exactly where
you’ll find your subscribers:
(Source:
http://www.emarketer.com/Article/How-Do-Internet-Users-Divvy-Up-Their-Desktop-Mobile-Web-Time/1009841)
The other reason Social Networks
are so successful is their Newsfeed. Allowing for infinite scrolling means you
have far more opportunities than a standard webpage for the number of ads that can included because the “page” is never ending. I think publishers can take a
page from social here and create a similar experience with their emails. Email
has always been, particularly for publishers, a channel of aggregation. Meaning
emails typically contains links and possibly small summaries for a multitude of
articles from a publisher’s site. But what if we could re-think this dynamic
and begin to create Newsfeed like emails? Could publishers solve the two
biggest challenges in mobile (room for ads & targeting) with email? I
certainly think there’s room for an email newsletter that is much greater in
length to what we typically see today. No longer would subscribers have to go back to a site...the ads would be served right within the email. Two birds, one stone...email newsfeed!
