FIPP 2009: Can Mobile Work?
E-readers are a medium that’s poised for serious monetisation – the audience hasn’t got used to material being free on them yet, so will be easy to persuade into buying content, plus they’re another screen to support advertising, however little the margins might be. The scepticism from certain quarters – “I’m not fretting about it”, said John Smith of BBC Worldwide – is unfounded, but as a standalone format they are likely to pale next to the mobile phone as the major medium for the written word in the 21st century, particularly considering the traction gaining in the developing world. As one FIPP delegate noted, while there are nearly 700m mobile phone users in China, that means there’s still over 600m left to sign up.
The question is how best to do mobile content, and there was reluctance on more than one occasion to allow Apple or any other application store to get a slice of the action – the challenge is seemingly to create autonomous apps. It’s something I spoke about with William Kerr, chairman of American magazine and media group Meredith.
“I think mobile is a major opportunity, and I think a lot of it has to do with the software that’s invented in the chip – you’d rather be in a situation where your application is part of the chip rather than something that has to be downloaded, and I think the flux in that area in the next two or three years will be where an awful lot is played out, and I can’t predict how it’s going to end up.” We can expect the content wars with Google to start to be replicated in software wars with Apple and the rest.
Of course, the question of paying for content reared its head again. While you might expect mobile content to be easier to charge for than regular online content, Sophia Stuart, executive director of the award-winning mobile content at Hearst, says otherwise. “When you have any emerging technology, people are very unfamiliar with it and so in order to get them used to looking at mobile content and seeing how it works for them, I think putting a charge on there would be a barrier to entry that would be ultimately detrimental”, she told me after her panel discussion. “Mobile internet penetration in the US is still only 24%, and until we get to real broadband, I think it will be very hard to charge. So at the moment the ad model works for us – advertisers want to be on mobile with us.” Their CPM – cost per thousand page views to advertisers – is an impressive $15, and have the likes of Fox, Disney and P&G signed up.
Nevertheless, this is the sort of thing that had Rob Grimshaw of FT.com asking of consumer media: “What are you waiting for?” He said: “I’m uneasy about making it free for a long period and then introducing a pay barrier, because people do get used to an idea of getting certain sites or certain services for free, and then when you put down a barrier it’s quite hard to row back from that position.” If the business is sustaining itself with advertising, then fair enough, but the fact is that it’s not too late to start charging for mobile – people aren’t used to getting it for free yet. If you can get people to sign up for ringtone packages, then hopefully media packages shouldn’t be too great a leap.
Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | May 8, 2009 11:45AM |