On 9 March, the Gigaom.com website, a leading site for high-tech news, ceased publication. Despite its proven quality and 6.5 million monthly unique browsers, this website, which depended 100% on advertising revenues, was unable to withstand the tsunami unleashed by the ‘move to mobile’.
Paradoxically, the current flood of smart phones and tablets is not good news for digital media funded by ads. The same advertisement brings in five times less revenue when it is viewed on a mobile device than on a desktop computer, simply because it is much less visible – and consequently profitable – on a small screen.
According to ‘Digital Disruption’ , a study published by Deloitte in 2014, the use of broadband from a mobile device (tablet or smart phone) has overtaken use from a desktop computer. And that is only the start of things. The All Things Digital website even went so far as to declare: ‘It’s official: the era of the personal computer is over’. In her book, ‘Le journalisme numérique’ (Digital Journalism), Alice Antheaume tells us that more pages of the Lemonde.fr website are now viewed using its app than its website.
For the time being, there is no getting away from it: mobile technology is not good news for the ad-funded digital media. However, the industry has already been giving thought to new models capable of monetising audiences on these terminals. One of the ideas to have emerged is that of ‘interstitial mobile ads’ – full-screen ads displayed at transition points between two contents in the same application. Another possibility is the native in-stream ad, which closely resembles the general appearance of the application, and is seamlessly integrated into a user’s feed.
There is basically no reason for this explosion in mobiles, which has increased both media consumption and reader engagement, to be bad news. With time and the right innovations, these terminals will renew their alliance with the ad-funded media.