Tag: mobile marketing

Ad blockers are becoming a threat to the survival of some sites

| September 29, 2015

Those advertisements that have become a nuisance to the mobile web may be vital to its existence.

Among the frustrations that are the most common about the mobile web are the ads and automatically playing videos that cause us to have to wait excessive amounts of time for a page to load, but the ad blockers that have been providing relief from that experience may now be threatening the existence of some websites.

The reason is that many free sites depend on the display of advertising for their livelihood, to make them worthwhile.

iPhones and iPads now have the opportunity to be able to use apps that function as ad blockers and millions of mobile device users have chosen to download and install those applications to speed up their experience on the mobile web while avoiding annoying accidental ad clicks. At the same time, websites and publishers often depend heavily on advertising revenue in order to make their very existence worthwhile, as the ads pay for the amount of time that is put into maintaining them.

This has some sites watching the rise of ad blockers with bitten-down nails as their primary income is threatened.

Mobile Ad BlockersAdvertising revenue is vital to companies ranging from tiny to giant such as Google, The New York Times, and Hulu. While panic has yet to set in for the majority of websites, they certainly have their eye on this trend and some websites are already working hard to be able to reduce any annoyance that their ads may be causing so that their regular users won’t be driven to ad blocking altogether.

According to the Harvard University director of the Nieman Journalism Lab, Joshua Benton, “It is possible to be too alarmist about ad blockers, but it’s a very real phenomenon.” It all depends on the proportion of mobile device users who opt to install these apps. He explained that there will be a very big difference between having 5 percent or 80 percent of iPhone users installing these mobile apps.

He cautioned that if advertising practices become too annoying, it could lead consumers to take action through ad blockers in order to make them disappear, going the way of the pop-up window (a technique that is automatically blocked by many browsers due to user frustration).

Mobile ads are disliked by Boomers

| September 24, 2015

Only a very small percentage of baby boomers have said that they would buy products advertised on smartphones.

Mobile ads have been taking off at an exponential rate in the United States, and as younger device users are enjoying the convenience and ease of m-commerce, baby boomers aren’t nearly as enthusiastic.

People in that generation are far less likely to enjoy receiving advertising when they use their smartphones.

According to the results of a study from eMarketer, almost three out of every four American cellular phone users – that is, 59.3 percent of the entire U.S. population – is a smartphone owner who uses his or her device at least one time every month in 2015. Smartphone penetration is greatest among younger generations. For instance, among device users between the ages of 25 and 34 years old, 90.2 percent have smartphones. Comparatively, in the age group of people aged 65 years and older and who own mobile devices, only 40.7 percent own smartphones that they use at least once monthly. Baby boomers are in the middle of those two groups, with a penetration rate of 64.4 percent.

That said, while they are mostly open to using the tech, they do not like receiving mobile ads.

Mobile Ads - Boomers not a fanResearch conducted by Experian Marketing Services showed that Boomers like mobile ads far less than Generation Xers and Millennials. This study revealed that among baby boomers, only 28 percent agreed that “my mobile phone connects me to my social world.” Among those in Generation X, the figure was 46.2 percent, and among Millennials, it was slightly higher at 53.5 percent.

Baby Boomers were also much less likely to say that they felt that text messages were as meaningful to them as spoken conversations and were less likely to say that they used their mobile phones as their primary devices for accessing the internet.

Still, as much as boomers don’t like mobile ads, they are still considerable buyers of digital content, as about 2 out of every 3 baby boomers will make a digital purchase at some point in 2015, which is only a handful of percentage points behind the leaders, the Millennial generation.