Mobile Fix: Innovation at risk?
Current mobile trends are no real indicator of where we might end up, says Simon Andrews, founder of Addictive! – and the size of the mobile opportunity means that everyone needs to get involved.
I am currently rereading Burn Rate, Michael Wolf’s excellent book on his adventures running a content business in the early days of the web. Starting in 1996, his stories of VCs and start-ups still sound quite contemporary. The figures are amazingly small though – he talks of Excite having a $40 million war chest.
But the thing that resonates most is the description of the shift taking place from AOL, Genie, Delphi and Prodigy towards the web – and the huge excitement as people moved from a controlled environment to the free web, where anyone could do what they want.
I’m old enough to remember that era – we had just started Poppe Tyson in London – and many prospective clients were still investing marketing budget in AOL and Compuserve.
As we discussed last week, the web seems to be taking a back seat on mobile and the rise of apps is arguably taking us back to that controlled era. Chris Dixon of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz points out:
Apps have a rich-get-richer dynamic that favours the status quo over new innovations.
VC Fred Wilson agrees that the dominance of apps is stifling innovation and looking at the top 200 apps sees very few that are recent venture-backed businesses.
GAFA are crucial in the discovery and distribution of apps and we all know that without a substantial budget for Facebook app install ads it’s nearly impossible to get an app to scale. And the app store tax of 30% is a major factor too. Are the vertical stacks the new walled gardens?
The net neutrality arguments are designed to give similar status to the mobile networks – which, as we know, stifled innovation in mobile prior to the GAFA era. This is a good summary of the various points of view on apps and the threat to innovation.
Yet the combination of the mobile web and mobile search are still low cost options – and therefore great opportunities for innovation. And in our research we find that people think of apps as the icons on their home screen; click on them and something happens. Few know or care about them being native apps or bookmarks for mobile websites. If it solves a problem, it will probably earn its place.
So in our projects we usually advise that a blend of mobile web and native apps is the right way to go – together with smart thinking on how to use search and social to drive discovery and get that icon on the home screen.
As Ben Evans points out, the mobile opportunity is still wide open and current trends are no real indicator of where we might end up. The size of the mobile opportunity means that everyone needs to get involved and invest smartly in learning what works and what doesn’t for your business.
Reading Burn Rate you remember that those early days were just the start of the digital switch that has changed how millions of people live their lives and transformed every business sector.
We are now just at the start of the mobile switch where billions of people are going to have their lives changed. And every business sector is going to get transformed again.
It’s time to experiment.
Social evolution
A very experienced smart marketer slightly stumped us this week when he posed the question, why should I spend any effort on Facebook? He totally saw it was a valid media channel for ad buys, but with a modest number of followers he wonders why he should invest in time and content to grow his likes, when there is now little benefit in free reach.
Of course as part of a social strategy of ubiquity, the effort in Facebook improves results on Twitter, Google+, etc, as some content can be reused. And knowing what content resonates with fans does help improve ad performance.
But as the Facebook feed evolves we see both users and brands frustrated with the experience. This TechCrunch piece gets into the details on how the Feed is now constructed and looks at the various complaints, but we don’t see a solution yet. John Batelle argues – quite convincingly – that Facebook should let the user take control.
It is essentially the same challenge that Twitter potentially has. Twitter is a hugely valuable service but you always have the nagging doubt that you may have missed some good stuff if you haven’t checked for a while. But I prefer that to a feed that Twitter has decided is the right one for me. Again we think lists are an underused asset for Twitter; setting up some specific lists allows for an occasional browse of a certain set of Twitterers, without needing to have those feeds in your timeline.
With a whole swathe of new ad formats on the way, Twitter is ramping up its advertising push and by redesigning profile pages, potentially makes them much more usable. Some think that these profile pages could evolve to be someone’s main profile on the web; you may have a blog and a LinkedIn page but an improved Twitter profile would probably be a better representation of you.
Just as Facebook and Twitter share similar problems – and similar ad formats – the new profile pages make Twitter look a lot like Facebook.
Social revolution
It’s clear that messaging is going to change social and Facebook is keen to stay ahead of the curve. It demonstrated this when it bought WhatsApp, but many questioned the role for its own messenger service. Facebook is now stripping out the messenger functionality from the Facebook app, so users have to download the separate app – continuing the single purpose app strategy it showed with Paper.
This is a good take on Facebook messaging and the new Asian competitors; Line, WeChat and Kakao.
Ex-Facebook exec Christian Hernandez has a good look at these new apps in this piece on the pros and cons of relying on someone else’s platform. Well worth reading.
This is an edited and abridged version of Mobile Fix – click here to read the full article on Addictive!’s website