Mobile Fix – SoLoMoPho
Simon Andrews, founder of the full service mobile agency addictive!, on social, local, mobile and photos…
SoLoMoPho*
While you could make a strong argument for Apple, Google, Twitter or Facebook buying Instagram we think the one who needed it most was Facebook.
As the FT put it: “Buying Instagram is an admission that, while its own mobile app is used by hundreds of millions of people, Facebook was not built with mobile in mind.”
The math makes some sense. If Facebook do get the $100+ billion valuation when they IPO, each of their 850 million users is valued at $118. The price they paid for Instagram valued each of their 30 million users at just $33. And yes some were already FB users and some will close their accounts. But Facebook have just blended the best way to share photos with the most popular way of sharing them.
We should never forget that the real opportunity for mobile is to take early adopter behaviours like Instagram mainstream and this is going to be an interesting case study.
Of course the challenge for Facebook remains to be monetising their user base. In the IPO papers Facebook say they currently make just $4.39 per user each year. Brands do use Instagram, but they don’t pay to do so – yet.
The pivot to mobile at Facebook is happening in other ways too. The support for HTML5 through the Ringmark initiative is becoming clearer with a new blog post explaining what they expect to support in each of the Rings. Interestingly they see the ability to access the camera through HTML5 as being very close.
So we should expect to see a project that started at HTML5 (the first iteration of Instagram was called BurBn and built in HTML5) return to HTML5 at some time soon(ish).
*Social, Local, Mobile, Photo
eBooks
With the US Government cracking down on Apple and five of the leading book publishers for price fixing, the way is open to Amazon to go back to price cutting. A key reason for the publishers to agree with the pricing was that they could regain control of what prices books are sold at – with the retailer taking a 30% commission. Whilst Apple (and the publishers) liked this , Amazon didn’’t – so they have jumped at the chance to go back to deep discounting.
The danger for anyone with ambitions in the book business is that Amazon – and their closed Kindle reading software and hardware system – become the dominant way people buy and read books. The only credible response would seem to be to drop DRM (Digital Rights Management), which fights piracy but also means that (simplistically) publishers can’t get their books onto Kindle unless they are bought from Amazon. Our friend Matteo Berlucchi from Anobii has been arguing against DRM, opening up the possibility of real competition as anyone can add any book to their Kindle.
As GAFA seek to develop their vertical stacks, they’ll do what they can to prevent anyone else getting an advantage. But the Kindle is a huge asset for Amazon.
Of the e readers sold in the UK 92% were kindles – and the Kindle Fire is getting close to a UK launch. The Kindle app is huge on iOS – listed as a top 10 ipad app in terms of downloads. And Amazon are building the ecosystem for developers with the extension of one click purchasing to mobile.
Mobile Search
Mobile search continues to grow, with a new study from Adobe showing that mobile search in the UK has grown 250% over the last year – now accounting for 11% of UK total search. In the US mobile is 8% of total search, but the overall search market is growing much faster there – up 16% versus growth in the UK of just 3% – so virtually all UK growth came from mobile. Adobe forecast that mobile will grow to 15-20% of the total over 2012 as conversion rates are comparable to desktop while cost per click are up to 30% lower.
Of course for this to work advertisers need mobile landing pages, and we know that 80% of brands are ill-equipped for this. Last September we looked at how some of the biggest search advertisers were paying to drive people to non-optimised sites and we were disappointed to see that little has changed when we looked again this week.
First mobile advertiser when you search for Mortgages? MoneySupermarket driving traffic to a non-optimised site. Loan? CreditSavingExpert with a non-optimised site. Insurance? GoCompare – who have a mobile optimised landing page – but when you click on any of the links you go to a non-optimised page.
These are three of the most expensive search terms, so these brands are wasting a lot of money. We could build mobile optimised landing pages that would unlock the value of this search and deliver ROI within weeks. What are people waiting for?
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