On mobile experience and advertising technology

2013 IDC report on smartphone shipments has been released.

The title:

Worldwide smartphone shipments top one billion units for the first time.

It is to no one's surprise that the growth of smart mobile devices continue to surge and replace the PC needs in certain applications. Yet, it feels like back in the early days of internet business when the industry tests out all things to find way to generate money via mobile commerce. Beyond the closed ecosystem of app and micro transactions, the existing PC-based model and technology is yet to find new light.

It is quite interesting to see the rate of technology breakthrough for the smartphone has been astounding, yet people are still scratching their heads on optimizing the web design, advertising, payment, and etc. Marketing activities and technologies associated with e-commerce have also been rapidly retrofitted for mobile devices. There are arguably numerous significant differences between PC and mobile user experiences. The single most critical difference is the canvas size. By reducing the canvas size, it is trivial to realize that we pad so many distractions onto a website.

"PC first (and mobile later)" has been the only development paradigm up till now due to the restriction of technology and economy model. Traditionally, PC-based design has existed, e.g. e-commerce site, when mobile user base is so small, optimizing for mobile devices means using the least costly option, often that means changing the CSS only while keeping the rest of the infrastructure the same. When the screen is so limited, you want every pixel to be used to display the most critical information, thus when optimizing for mobile experiences, advertisement or banner-based information is most likely the first ones to be cut. This is going to inevitably hurt advertising and search business going forward. Many ventures have been diving into the mobile only field, but only a handful is making profit.

"Mobile first" has been the focus in recent years. Even the search giant has been reversing its UX designs philosophy going from mobile to PC or rather, i.e. starting with smaller canvas and increase on-screen information based on canvas size. This approach conflicts with the traditional PC first approach in the sense that marketing technology has always been piggy backing on others for main contents generation. In the reduced canvas mobile world, these marketing contents are inevitably fighting for on-screen time and space which often reduces user experiences.

While our time with computing devices increase tremendously, the time on PC is steadily decreasing while the time on other devices are increasing. We are now at a tipping point of computing time share. The time we have on the devices are supposed to be helping us reaching our objectives more efficiently, be it work or just killing time. With the reduced canvas and direct-to point-use case on the mobile devices, displaying ads smartly is not as valuable as it used to be. The mobile advertising offering needs to offer value not only for the merchants but for the users at the same time. To offer valuable information to users require user information, and for now, the only ones who really own that information are the mobile OS providers. I can't shake the feeling that one day our mobile devices might become an advertising pocket monster in our pockets eating our wallets.