On the Proliferation of Mobile Web Publishing Platforms
Recently, there have been a lot of stories in the news concerning the state of advertising as it relates to publishers on the mobile web. Bluntly, it sucks. Load times are slow and download sizes are huge, even though top-of-the-line phones these days are more powerful than many old laptops and mobile readership increases by leaps and bounds. Most of the trouble is attributable to bloated ad software that is a necessity for just about every publisher with a large percentage of those ads coming from Google.
In class, we discussed how search companies monetize ads with methods like pay-per-click but what if the users never see the ads in the first place? With the release of iOS 9, Apple controversially added capability for ad-blocking applications — a feature which has existed on the desktop for years. This announcement coincided with the release of Apple News, a native platform for publishers which hosts and distributes the content itself. This way, publishers can use Apple’s iAd service to get revenue and users can have a faster, cleaner experience. Facebook is attempting a similar idea with it’s own Instant Articles.
For publishers, these competing platforms add complication and restrict freedom of expression by limiting the available tools for customizing content while increasing the number of versions of each article that need to be published. Most publishers rely on companies like Google or Facebook to supply ads since they are too small to attract advertisers themselves meaning they are forced to accommodate these platforms. For users, the experience is ostensibly better but limitations on publishers eventually trickle down to users. For advertisers however, ads in these native platforms which cannot be blocked are a huge boon. Furthermore, a company like Facebook can offer exceptionally tailored ads given their knowledge of the user which boosts the return on investments in these ads. Therefore, the financial incentives push us toward a set of disparate platforms instead of an open Internet. The structure of how ads are sold on the Internet (like we learned in class) has caused this dilemma as it incentivises advertisers and ad-exchanges to act against the best interests of the users, especially in the mobile world.
Source: http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/20/9002721/the-mobile-web-sucks