Group items tagged

TBG Digital’s CEO Simon Mansell tells me “this is huge news that show mobile is potentially going to be the big revenue driver that Facebook needs, especially because the usage in there.”

According to a new study by TBG Digital on 278,389,453 Sponsored Story ad impressions across 17 clients, mobile news feed Sponsored Stories (the only ads Facebook shows on mobile) have a stunning click-through rate of 1.14% at a $0.86 CPC. That means Facebook earns $9.86 per 1000 impressions (eCPM), and that could actually rise as more advertisers realize the power of mobile Sponsored Stories and compete for impressions there.

Compare those numbers to the desktop news feed Sponsored Stories that get a 0.588% CTR at $0.63 CPC and earn Facebook an eCPM of $3.72, and Facebook is getting 1.93x the CTR and earning 2.65x as much on mobile sponsored stories compared to what it makes on the web.

audience for mobile apps has hit 58 million in primetime — 8 p.m.

The IAB estimates that the U.S. mobile ad market brought in $3.4 billion in 2012. The IAB didn't break out revenues for apps vs. the mobile web, but Flurry has estimated that 80% of mobile activity occurs on apps

Kantar Media calculated that TV advertising accounted for $74 billion in ad revenues in 2012. Even if apps generated 100% of mobile ad revenues, the market would still be just 4.5% that of TV.

In 2014, the mobile Web will die. That’s right, that bastardized version of the normal Web will crawl into a shallow grave and leave us all in peace. No more websites crippled with horrible “mobile.yourawfulwebsite.com” URLs. No more reading janky websites that display way too much fine print or omit crucial features when viewed on your smartphone or tablet. 

The mobile Web will die because the companies that make the engines it ran upon are killing their mobile browsers and replacing them with fully functional versions that run on any device. In 2014, these browsers will be updated to put the final nail in its coffin. In turn, developers will continue to build websites that can work across any screen size. Responsive design (what we do at ReadWrite to make the site look pretty everywhere) will continue to grow in 2014 as people realize that their old websites are losing them a lot of traffic from mobile devices.

Location-based consumer apps didn't let me down; as predicted, they remained stagnant this year. Foursquare and its kindred just are not hot anymore, even if Foursquare did just raise a funding round this week.

Overall desktop ad spending set to decline in 2014 while mobile grows 83.0% Desktop search in the US is poised for a significant decline this year as paid clicks on Google shift toward mobile devices, according to new figures from eMarketer. US mobile search ad spending grew 120.8% in 2013, contributing to an overall gain of 122.0% for all mobile ads. Meanwhile, overall desktop ad spending increased just 2.3% last year, according to eMarketer.

desktop search ad spending will drop $1.4 billion this year, a decrease of 9.4% from 2013, while mobile search will increase 82.3% year over year. Mobile search will total $9.02 billion, compared with $13.57 billion for desktop search. Overall, US spending on advertising served to desktops and laptops will decline 2.4% in 2014 to $32.39 billion, down from $33.18 billion in 2013. Google will have a notable influence on the overall shift from desktop to mobile search spending. In 2013, 76.4% of the company’s search ad revenues came from desktop. However, that share will fall to 66.3% in 2014 due to a $770 million decrease in desktop search ad revenues year over year, eMarketer estimates. At the same time, the company’s mobile search revenues will increase $1.76 billion, totaling approximately one-third of Google’s total search revenues.

Up from 19.4% in 2013, mobile search will comprise an estimated 26.7% of the company’s total ad revenues this year. Desktop search declined to 63.0% of Google’s ad revenues in 2013, having already fallen from 72.7% in 2012.

A recent study (PDF) found that more than 80% of people are disappointed with the experience of browsing Web on mobile devices and would use their smartphones more if the browsing experience improved.

A recent study (PDF) found that more than 80% of people are disappointed with the experience of browsing Web on mobile devices and would use their smartphones more if the browsing experience improved.

64% of smartphone users expect websites to load in 4 seconds or less, while the average website takes more than twice that amount, at 9 seconds.

“If you’re designing a website and not thinking about the user experience on mobile and tablets, you’re going to disappoint a lot of users,” he warns. Designer Tom Muller thinks big brands getting on board will lead to agencies “increasingly using responsive design as a major selling point, persuading clients to future-proof digital marketing communications”. When doing so, Clearleft founder Andy Budd believes we’ll see an end to retrofitting RWD into existing products: “Instead, RWD will be a key element for a company’s mobile strategy, baked in from the start.” Because of this, Budd predicts standalone mobile-optimised sites and native apps will go into decline: “This will reduce the number of mobile apps that are website clones, and force companies to design unique mobile experiences targeted towards specific customers and behaviours.”

During 2012, the average site size crept over a megabyte, which designer/developer Mat Marquis describes as “pretty gross”, but he reckons there’s a trend towards “leaner, faster, more efficient websites” – and hopes it sticks. He adds: “Loosing a gigantic website onto the web isn’t much different from building a site that requires browser ‘X’: it’s putting the onus on users, for our own sakes.”

Designer and writer Stephanie Rieger reckons that although people now know “web design isn’t print,” they’ve “forgotten it’s actually software, and performance is therefore a critical UX factor”.

In Norway, the leading country in the region, 63.5% of the population will use a mobile phone to access the internet at least once per month in 2014. With Denmark and Sweden a few points behind, and Italy lagging other countries with an expected 42.7% of the population using the mobile internet via phone, Western Europe will average 48.2% mobile phone internet penetration this year.

Western Europe’s mobile phone internet user base is expected to undergo steady growth, primarily driven by smartphone adoption. Between 2013 and 2017, the penetration rate of mobile phone internet users among mobile phone users will rise from 49.0% to 77.8%.

According to the ITU's "facts and figures" publication, mobile penetration rates (pdf) are now about equal to the global population - including an 89% penetration rate in "developing countries," which currently have the highest mobile growth rates.

nearly everyone on the planet has a mobile phone - or will have one soon enough.

"mobile broadband" subscriptions have grown from 278 million in 2007 - when the iPhone was first introduced - to 2.1 billion in 2013 - an annual growth rate of 40%. 

social media use on mobile devices rose 63% between native apps and the mobile Web in the United States in 2012.

Between PCs and mobile devices, Americans spent 121 billion minutes on social media in July 2012, an increase of 37% (88 billion minutes). 

In the United States, 152 million people accessed Facebook from their PCs against 152.7 million through either native apps or the mobile Web.

Twitter has confirmed our scoop with the announcement of Tailored Audiences - its name for retargeted ads. Available globally to all advertisers via a slew of adtech startup partners, advertisers will be able to target recent visitors to their websites with retargeted Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts.

Twitter’s users are on mobile. Seventy percent of its ad revenue already comes from the small screens, and it likely follows that a majority of engagement is on mobile, too.

retargeting happens like this. You visit a website, say a travel booking site, and look at a page for buying a flight to Hawaii. You chicken out at the last minute, don’t buy, and navigate away, but the site has dropped a cookie for that Hawaii flight page on your browser. Then, when you visit other sites or social networks that run retargeted ads, they detect that cookie, and the travel site can show you an ad saying “It’s cold in SF. Wouldn’t a vacation to Hawaii be nice?” to try to get you to pull the trigger and buy the flight it knows you were already interested in. But without cookies on mobile, you can’t retarget there… …unless you can tie the identity of a mobile user to what they do on the computer. And Twitter can. It’s one of the few hugely popular services that individuals access from multiple types of devices.

Google’s Matt Cutts said that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if mobile search exceeded desktop queries this year. A similar comment was made by a Google speaker informally during a roundtable discussion at the International Franchising Association conference in New Orleans earlier this year

The comments above refer to global query volumes not in the US or North America where PC-based search still far outstrips mobile queries. However in many developing countries, such as India, mobile internet traffic has eclipsed the desktop.

Globally mobile traffic is about 30 percent of all internet activity. That’s also the case in North America.

To guarantee the ads you pay for actually appear and look great on all screens, you should insist to your ad agencies that your advertising creative be developed in a mobile-compatible format.  And the one open, industry-standard, universal format for building mobile-ready creative is HTML5.

Your opportunity has never been greater. Nearly half of the US population has a mobile phone with internet access*, and one out of five pageviews on the web happen on a mobile device - a number that is growing every month.**

According to IDC, mobile web browsing will soon eclipse desktop browsing in the U.S. and worldwide. This consumption of mobile content isn’t just happening on the go; 93% of people are now using their mobile devices to browse the Web from their homes, according to a study from Google.

The main development methodology behind responsive design is the use of media query functionality in CSS3. Media queries target not only certain device types (e.g., Android vs. iPhone), but actually inspect the physical characteristics of the device that renders the page. For example, the code below “asks” the device if its max horizontal resolution is equal to 480px: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css", media="screen and (max-device-width: 480px)", href="http://uxmag.com/iphone.css" /> If it is 480px, the device will load iphone.css. If not, the link is ignored. You can also include media queries in CSS as part of an @media rule:

a responsive design approach does not involve putting all of your content in front of the reader. Responsive design is about putting the right content in users’ hands according to the context of their interaction.

The social network has now passed 1.23 billion monthly active users. Of those, daily active users passed 757 million on average during December 2013, and the number of monthly active mobile users hit 945 million

Daily active users (DAUs) were 757 million on average for December 2013, an increase of 22% year-over-year. Mobile DAUs were 556 million on average for December 2013, an increase of 49% year-over-year. Monthly active users (MAUs) were 1.23 billion as of December 31, 2013, an increase of 16% year-over-year. Mobile MAUs were 945 million as of December 31, 2013, an increase of 39% year-over-year.

76.83 percent of Facebook’s total monthly user base now accesses the service from a mobile device.

Facebook reported $1.8 billion in advertising revenue, with mobile ads accounting for 49% of that sum—and roughly 44% of all revenue. At this time last year, the company generated only 14% of its advertising revenue from mobile.

Facebook now boasts 874 million mobile monthly active users, an increase of 45% year-over-year. And it remains the world's largest social network, with over 1.19 billion people using the service each month.

comScore reported earlier this year that there are more than 100 million smartphone users in the United States alone and mobiThinking reports there are now more than 1.2 billion mobile web users worldwide, accounting for more than eight percent of total web traffic.

Gartner predicts mobile will be the number one Internet access device as early as next year.

Adobe analyzed more than 1 billion visits for more than 1,000 websites and found that 8% of traffic came from tablets. That ranks ahead of the 7% of visits that came from smartphones. Of course, that leaves 85% or so percent of Web traffic still coming from desktop PCs and laptops. 

no matter how much we harp on the notion that the mobile Web is not just the future, but also the present, the vast majority of Web traffic still comes from the legacy that is the PC. 

Firefox OS is of the Web, for the Web. There is no such thing as a “native” app to Firefox OS. If an object exists as a web page, it can easily be turned into an app for Firefox OS by essentially turning it into a shortcut for the browser-based operating system to access. Instead of having to develop specifically for mobile platforms like iOS, Android or Windows Phone, the Web is the platform for Firefox OS. 

If you are a developer, you can build an app for Firefox OS by making some small changes to your website. You can then test the app by downloading the Aurora Marketplace onto your Android or using the browser-based Firefox OS Simulator. 

in 2010, Google did something very different. Google announced website speed would begin having an impact on search ranking. Now, the speed at which someone could view the content from a search result would be a factor.

Google's Matt Cutts announced that slow-performing mobile sites would soon be penalized in search rankings as well.

While Google has been intentionally unclear in which particular aspect of page speed impacts search ranking, they have been quite clear in stating that content relevancy remains king.

The average top 1,000 web page is 1575 KB.

Page growth is a major reason why we keep finding, quarter after quarter, that pages are getting slower. And faster networks are not a cure-all for the challenges of page bloat.

According to Akamai’s most recent quarterly State of the Internet report, the global average connection speed among the top 50 internet-using countries is 3.3 Mbps — a 5.2% increase over the previous quarter. But when we’re seeing year-over-year page growth ranging from 45-50%, it’s easy to see that the gap is widening.