Txt Messaging More Expensive Than Hubble Data Downloading
The 21st century has brought us many great wonders… like new ways for phone companies to charge outrageous prices while locking us into contracts (at least here in the US):
Scientist Says Texting is More Expensive Than Downloading From Hubble | Universe Today: “One space scientist has worked out that sending texts via mobile phones works out to be far more expensive than downloading data from the Hubble Space Telescope. Dr. Nigel Bannister from the University of Leicester looked at the cost of obtaining a megabyte of data from Hubble and compared it with the cost of sending a text. His calculations? ‘The bottom line is texting is at least 4 times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble, and is likely to be substantially more than that.’”
I guess this adds new fodder for the people who claim that Twitter is a huge waste of time and money.
Hopefully, the invisible hand of the free market will one day deliver us from our overcharging mobile overlords.
How Will Mobile Browsing Change Web Marketing?
Marketing on the web is a constantly evolving practice mixed with a touch of art and success based on intuition. In other words, it’s very hard to come up with a solidified tried-and-true formula for marketing on the web that can be easily replicated. There are just too many variables, and time is an incredibly important vector in web marketing.
Add to this mix the realization that mobile web browsing will explode in the coming decade and web marketers should not feel guilty for scratching their heads and trying to figure out the best way to position themselves for the future.
Mobile Browser Market is Transforming and Will Grow to 1.5 Billion Units in 2013 | Press Release | ABI Research: “While a large number of phones today still use browsers with very limited web browsing capabilities, many smartphones are incorporating browsers that support the latest capabilities such as AJAX and RSS, as well as websites optimized for viewing on a mobile device. ABI Research sees this segment of the mobile browser market accounting for the vast majority of growth over the next five years, as the open-Internet browser (OIB) segment for mobile grows from 76 million in 2007 to nearly 700 million browsers delivered in 2013.“
How do we, as web marketers, make sure that we are in a position to play in the exploding mobile field? Display ads as we know them don’t work in a mobile paradigm. So, here are a few thoughts and possibilities for how to succeed in the mobile world:
1) Increased focus on mobile friendly sites that work both on the web and on mobiles and include clear call-to-actions (either affiliate, branding or lead based).
2) Dedicated mobile sites that are light on bandwidth but heavy on immediacy.
3) Heavy reliance on geo and demographic targeting as well as device targeting. Marketing experiences on an iPhone are much different than on a BlackBerry or a Motorola Q (not to mention non “smart phone”). Mass marketing and mobile are not happy bedfellows.
4) Mobile landing sites that encourage the “learn more” approach where the viewer can get more information via email, rss or related channels. AdMob is doing very interesting things with this concept.
5) Diving even more into the long tail and finding communities and hubs where dedicated and highly motivated readers/participants are more likely to use a mobile device in a marketing scenario and follow through with a purchase/conversion/sign up.
Whether or not you’re interested in the mobile space as an affiliate marketer or as a merchant leveraging the affiliate channel, one thing is clear… you need to be interested. Turning a blind eye to mobile and not being prepared for the future will lead to an expensive exercise in playing catch up in the coming years.
Marketing to Millennials with Molander and the Gang
I did the Jeff Molander “Paying for Performance” podcast yesterday since the subject was on marketing to millennials (that age group born between 1980 and 1995). I was born in ‘78 and share many characteristics of this much-stereotyped group, so I thought it might be fun to discuss.
Paying For Performance: “So who are these people and is what we hear in the media really true? To what degree and to what degree is this being over-sensationalized? What ARE the expectations of the people entering our workforce and are they out of line with those who are in need of hiring them?”
Here’s the mp3 for download, or you can head over to the site to listen to the stream.
Year of the Cheap Laptops?
I have to wonder how close we are to a “cheap computer” revolution when linux based laptops start eating into the non-Apple laptop market.
I know personally that the Asus eee is a fantastic little piece of tech. I’ve said more than once that it is my favorite laptop ever (even more than the high end Dell I had for a few years and my new MacBook Pro).
So, the thought of Windows moving into this territory and squishing some of the linux momentum scares me…
Asus and Microsoft working an Eee-targeted version of Windows 7? - Engadget: “Given the Eee’s ‘other requirements,’ Asus and Microsoft ‘couldn’t go the Vista route,’ presumably because the Eee doesn’t really have the horsepower for it. Sure, but what caught our interest was that Microsoft is ‘in close discussions with Asus [regarding] how to take that forward… in regards to the Windows 7 Europe timeframe.’ Windows 7, you’ll recall, has that lean new kernel, which would presumably make building a stripped-down version specifically for Eee-class machines easier — but the last we heard, Windows 7 wasn’t due until at least mid-2009 (and possibly not until 2011), so either Microsoft is planning to continue shipping XP after June or Windows 7 is coming much earlier than we thought. Our money is on XP continuing to soldier on, but here’s hoping.”
What does this have to do with online marketing? A great deal, I believe since the machine that people use to access the web or get things done has a great deal of influence on how they view online products or services. The more people that wise up to linux and open source products, the more people become web and savings savvy.
Nokia’s New Mobile Ad Network Points Towards the Future
Nokia is rolling out a mobile ad network according to CenterNetworks:
Nokia Launches Mobile Ad Network | CenterNetworks: “Nokia (NOK) is announcing the launch of a mobile ad network this morning at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Named the ‘Nokia Media Network’, Nokia notes, ‘The biggest brands in the world trust us with their mobile advertising because they know the Nokia Media Network enables them to reach the largest, highest quality audience on mobile and provides the best ROI.’”
The key difference between Nokia’s potential for success and the existing mobile ad networks is the reach that Nokia has on the hardware side of the mobile phone universe.
With Google revealing its Android platform at this week’s Mobile World Conference in Spain (and it looks spiffy… can’t wait to try out an Android mobile with all of my Google cloud data) and the increasing numbers of people (primarily young people) doing things other than just talking and texting on their mobile phones using increasingly sophisticated phones like the iPhone, a well leveraged mobile ad network could payoff.
The first company to grab a leading market share will help pave the way for this avenue of monetization and be a force to reckon with as more and more of “the web” goes mobile.
A few years from now, we might look back on this launch as a very big deal.
Now, when are the affiliate networks going to start encouraging mobile ads? 
Kyte.tv Gets Funding, Distribution and Celebrities
Video blogging site Kyte.tv has announced a round of funding, added distribution and it looks as if they are adding more celebrities to compliment the popular 50 Cent channel.
Soon-to-announce-a-career-move Robert Scoble is a huge fan of Kyte.tv (and one has to wonder if this will lure him over to the video blog startup or if he’ll go with the rumor and sign FastCompany. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, he’ll be announcing around the 15th of January). He broke the news on his blog:
Kyte just announced a B-round of funding from Telefonica, Nokia, DoCoMo, Swisscom, Holtzbrinck and DFJ of $15 million, adding on to an earlier round of $2.25 million. Whew, the video space is really heating up.
But more significant than the money is the distribution. Telefonica has 230 million users. DoCoMo has 52 million. Nokia has 39% of the cell phone market share. If the Kyte player is embedded on these three it brings a HUGE audience to Kyte.
Also, they showed me a channel that rapper 50 Cent is doing. It has, within a few weeks, passed my Kyte.tv channel to gain the #1 spot on Kyte. More celebrity deals are in the offing, CEO Daniel Graf told me. They also shipped a new iPhone version and demonstrated an even more feature rich version coming in January.
Kyte is interesting in that it functions as a place to live blog, interact with commentors and aggregate content. Perhaps the most compelling feature is the emphasis on mobile blogging via video (which I still think is going to be a breakaway hit in 2008).
So, we’ll see if this news (especially the celebrity additions) add to Kyte.tv’s share in the growing micro-blogging/video/mobile space that is seeing a convergence revolution.
AdMob and the Coming Mobile Marketing Revolution
AdMob is an advertising network aimed at the mobile market. They interact with publishers and advertisers much in the same way as a Commission Junction or Linkshare or ShareASale, but focus on mobile ads, creatives and deliveries.
They have just released their November stats (report available here):
It is our pleasure to send you our third monthly AdMob Mobile Metrics with November data. We have appreciated your feedback and continue to add to the report. This month we have added month-over-month change calculations to make it easier to observe trends in geographic regions, manufacturers and individual handset models.
Some observations from the November data:
- AdMob Network impressions were up 4.5% November over October to 1,722,213,245. The growth was driven by Western Europe and North America.
- Apple iPhone share continued to grow and we saw a strong first full month of iPhone traffic in the UK.
- Nokia N Series devices showed strong growth in November.
The trends here are interesting to observe and digest considering the impact that mobile marketing is poised to make in the general marketing industry in 2008. Companies like AdMob are paving the way and will surely be either competitors or acquisitions of Google, Microsoft or Yahoo.
