The Billions In Mobile Ad Money Nobody Can Grab 203
jfruh writes "Here's a pressing mystery: despite users spending an increasing amount on their mobile phones, mobiile advertising only produces 20% of the revenues per page that web advertising does. This seems like a big opportunity for somebody, but a whole complex of reasons might mean that it isn't just a matter of someone being smart enough to do mobile ads right. The whole advertising industry, which in many ways still resembles the Mad Men-era old boy's network, simply may not be equipped to cope."
Re:CPM=thousand not million? (Score:3, Informative)
Latin mille, meaning one thousand.
Re:CPM=thousand not million? (Score:4, Informative)
Not really a mystery. M = 1000 in Latin
Re:Mobile ads are a waste of time, space, and mone (Score:5, Informative)
Android has a task bar type thing. When you hold the "Home" button for 3 seconds it brings up you most recent applications. Tapping on an application pulls it's most recent state from the stack and restores it exactly as you left it.
--Sparksis
Re:My theory (Score:4, Informative)
And then sometimes it gets things just completely, absolutely wrong. I swear that at one point, my Droid was *convinced* that I was a gay black man with AIDS. Wrong on all counts save that yes, I am male. I don't even know how it came up with that - there is literally nothing I've done that would support that idea.
You were hacked by the GNAA.
Re:Mobile ads are a waste of time, space, and mone (Score:4, Informative)
No, but it's worth trying first. Store brands are almost always of sufficient quality that it doesn't make economic sense to pay more for a marginal increase in quality. And a lot of the quality that people assign to name brands only exists in their heads. You tend to like what you're used to. If you get in the habit of trying generics often, you don't get used to more expensive brands that aren't actually any better.
Its not all about Don Drapper (Score:3, Informative)
which in many ways still resembles the Mad Men-era old boy's network, simply may not be equipped to cope."
Citation please. Everyone I know working in advertising or even anywhere near it is obsessed with quantifying, measuring, targeting, and tailoring. Most of that is at least as high tech as developing any other kind of web application. I think they are "up to the challenge," and trust me I really wish they weren't.
There are probably a good number of Don Drapper like dinosaurs still roaming the halls of ad agencies; possibly especially in "creative" but most of the industry is pretty scientific now and has been for quite some time.
Re:related question: (Score:4, Informative)
Lots of phones DO have FM. Try connecting headphones and launching the 'music' app. You might be surprised. I had my Photon for almost 5 months before I stumbled over that feature by accident. I was expecting it to exist (if it did) as a "FM Radio" app, not as part of the "Music" app.
As far as TV goes, it's probably a lost cause. As a practical matter, a high end Android phone already has 80% of the hardware it needs to receive HDTV, and roughly half the remaining 20% consists of "an appropriate antenna" (believe it or not, the ATSC tuner is the least of your problems... it's a single chip that converts 8VSB-modulated radio into a ~19mbit/sec bitstream that the phone's existing hardware can deal with downstream). So, why don't manufacturers bother? Mainly, because American 8VSB-modulated HDTV is hard enough to reliably receive with a PROPER antenna, let alone a pair of headphones plugged into a headphone jack. Don't believe me? Buy a 99-cent UHF loop on eBay, connect it to your HDTV (through an appropriate 300-to-75-ohm balun if necessary), and see how many channels you can actually tune indoors with it. If you're lucky and live in the mid-suburbs approximately 5 miles from the local antenna farm, you might get one or two reliably. If you're downtown, you'll be lucky to get any at all.
It's a fundamental problem with 8VSB modulation. Back in the early 90s, engineers told the FCC & "Grand Alliance" they could optimize for range or robustness, but not both. They were told to optimize for range, and they did. With a proper 2-3 story tall directional high-gain yagi pointed directly at the transmitter, properly grounded, you can receive most American TV stations from 60 miles away with minimal effort, and up to 100 or so miles away if you really work at it. However, the moment multipath distortion (basically, echoes from signals bouncing ricocheting off buildings and mountains) becomes a factor, you can forget about receiving a viable ATSC signal at all. Analog UHF manifested multipath as "ghosting". Digital ATSC manifests multipath as "no signal".
HDTV tuners work in many other countries, because they went with a competing modulation standard called COFDM. COFDM's engineers made the opposite choice of American engineers. Instead of optimizing for range, they optimized for robust reception in conditions where multipath distortion would normally be a problem. The downside is that even a great antenna is unlikely to receive a viable COFDM signal more than 50 miles away. The upside is that you can sit in a moving vehicle driving around the central business district full of skyscrapers in some Asian boomtown and have a perfectly good signal to watch.
As bad as 8VSB is today, it was even WORSE 10 years ago. At least now, it's possible to semi-reliably tune with an indoor antenna if it's a GOOD one. You're still unlikely to get anything consistently watchable from the modern equivalent of a coat hanger (a pair of headphones plugged into a jack). Unfortunately, we've now come about as far as we can with DSPs, and future improvements to 8VSB are going to require extensions that will be backwards-compatible (ie, won't screw up existing tuners), but won't do anything to HELP old tuners. The work has been in progress for the past few years, mostly at the behest of FEMA, due to a very real fear that the next time a hurricane like Andrew roars ashore, people old enough to remember watching newscasters huddling under their desks in Miami during Andrew won't have a viable signal AT ALL, because just the wind-induced antenna motion will be enough to nuke the signal for many viewers (8VSB makes HEAVY use of phase relationships that all pretty much assume an antenna that's stationary, or at least moving in a straight line along a single plane of motion relative to the receiving antenna; flex and wobble the antenna, and that assumption goes out the window). The last time I checked, ATSC-M has been held back by a few things, not the least of which is the knowledge that they're going to get exactly one chance to fi