Mobile Fix: Big numbers
Over 50% of the population now has a smartphone. Digital ad revenue is over £5.5 billion and more than £500 million of that is on mobile. Facebook has 15 million mobile users every day, and 50% of all internet sessions on mobile are on Facebook or from Facebook links. These are big numbers. So what’s everyone waiting for?, asks Addictive! founder Simon Andrews. It’s time to experiment and start learning.
The new Motorola phone won’t be a phablet
We’re starting to get rumours about the first Motorola phones under Google ownership. Their head of design says:
“From a software and UI perspective, our strategy is to embrace Android and to make it the best expression of Android and Google in the market. It will be the unadulterated version of Android, and I feel really good about our embracing Android and being the best Android experience.”
But they won’t be following the trend towards bigger and bigger screens. Rather than bigger is better, they think better is better.
Facebook Home
We chaired the panel at the Facebook mobile event in London last week and felt the visceral focus on mobile that everyone at Facebook now has. With Home, they are innovating at the top end of the market but they also have Facebook working on very basic phones and feature phones.
Home is now available and is getting mixed reviews – although we suspect a lot of the one star ratings are from people trying to get it to work on unsupported phones.
Inevitably there are rumours about Facebook looking to get Home on to Apple and Microsoft phones and we continue to believe that we’ll see deeper integration on the next version of iOS, but it won’t be anything as extensive as Home on Android.
There have also been some suggestions that Google are unhappy with Home, which Eric Schmidt has been quick to deny, whilst stressing good relations with Samsung.
With Home not officially available for the Nexus 4, it will be interesting to see whether the new Motorola phones support Home.
Facebook ads
Sheryl Sandberg has been in town and talking up the power of Facebook advertising.
“The size of the audience makes this – the phone – a mass medium. It’s as important to a marketer as TV,” she told journalists at Facebook’s headquarters in London on Monday.
“This is as important – if not more important – than television.”
We have already termed Facebook the ITV of social and their huge reach does mean that they are the first digital opportunity that can truly be compared with TV. And Engagement at Scale will become easier to achieve as they role out video ads in the Newsfeed.
Launching in the US in June, these ads will expand to take up much of the users PC screen – just exactly how they work (especially on mobile) is still being worked on, but they are being sold now with an asking price of $1 million.
The ads will be capped at 15 seconds and frequency capped to ensure that no user sees more than three per day.
Now three video ads a day sounds like quite a lot. At the London event a number of people raised the issue of too many ads – with Facebook restating that their data shows no negative effect and that they will be careful not to spoil the user experience.
With new research from Nielsen showing that 33% of US users agree that ads on social network sites are more annoying than other online ads, Facebook will have to be careful with these video ads.
But for brands this looks like a great opportunity, even though the sophisticated targeting that epitomises Facebook won’t be available at first.
Latest research on Social
The new report on Social from Nielsen shows a drop in the number of people using Facebook – down 4% on the previous year – whilst some Experian research also shows a fall in the time spent on social sites; in the UK, 22% of time spent online in 2012 was spent on social networks and forums – down from 25% in 2011
And the Nielsen data goes into some interesting detail on what people are doing when they are second screening, showing some significant differences between smartphone and tablet behaviour.
It’s well worth spending time reading these reports as the granular detail is probably more interesting than the headline figures.
Another new study shows that 71% of Twitter users now use mobile – with tablet usage doubling to 18%. The UK is the top market for Twitter with 21% of respondents admitting that they are frequent users.
One surprising stat this week showed that messaging service WhatsApp is now bigger than Twitter. It does seem that teenagers are finding these chat apps more relevant than Facebook. This Daily Mail article is a surprisingly good look at the chat apps market and well worth reading.
And the stories about a Billion dollar sale of WhatsApp to Google are denied – just why someone with 250 million users and a robust business model would sell for the same as Instagram was never clear…
Google Fiber
We talked about Google providing a city wide fibre connectivity a while back. This super fast broadband service (between 75 and 100 times faster than typical broadband) was tested in Kansas and it has obviously been a success as they are now launching in Austin, Texas.
Those who have used the service in Kansas are very positive.