The Mobile Maelstrom

Digiday reporting: Many publishers are ignoring the mobile storm that threatens to upend their businesses.
The basics are straightforward. The screen is tiny; fewer ads are placed on a mobile page than on desktop; mobile ad units are barely readable, if not usable. Most importantly, publishers are trying to fit the model of rectangles of desktop ads onto a phone — old print formats carried over from the desktop Web. The math bears this out: A mobile user for nearly all publishers is worth a fraction what a desktop user is.
Present this case to many publishers, and you’ll hear stalling tactics. It’s still early, they’ll say. Mobile users are “additive,” they’ll claim. Mobile banners are sure to improve and close the yawning gap with desktop, you’ll be assured. But what if that’s not the case? What if mobile starts to eat up a big chunk of their traffic — say 40 percent — under the current economics? That’s trouble. Just ask Facebook, which has seen a huge chunk of its audience shift to mobile and is now struggling to come up with an ad product that works there.
“I suspect a lot of us traditional publishers don’t have a completely comprehensive plan in place yet,” said Jay Lauf, publisher of The Atlantic, which gets about 10 percent of its traffic via mobile.
There’s a huge revenue gap on mobile even though smartphone penetration is above 50 percent in the U.S. Yet publishers are still, as one noted, approaching mobile like gum on a shoe: a minor inconvenience that can just be scraped off. Publishers are still trying to place traditional concepts of advertising onto new media are finding their problems exacerbated by the dearth of inventory.
http://www.digiday.com/publishers/the-mobile-maelstrom/?utm_source=Daily+Buzz+from+eMedia+Vitals&utm_campaign=ad9c024925-nl_DB_08_30_2012&utm_medium=email