Mobile traffic to media sites is growing, but it is difficult to monetize

Photo: Vedomosti

Now a large number of users access the network using mobile devices. At the same time, mobile traffic to the sites of most of the media in just one year increased by several tens of percent. Plus, the time that mobile users spend on news sites increased by 40%, and the number of new subscribers increased by 55%, Vedomosti reports. The problem is that the revenue of such sites is growing much slower. Market participants even came up with a special term for this situation - “mobile abyss”.

Monetizing mobile apps with ads can be problematic. The fact is that advertising banners on smartphones and tablets are not very effective, plus everything, keeping track of user preferences and creating targeted advertisements in such a segment is not an easy task.

As for social networks and mobile services, their creators, for example, the companies Facebook, Google and Twitter, make the most of the money that is allocated by advertisers for mobile advertising. Facebook alone in 2014 accounted for 37% of all mobile advertising revenues in the United States.
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According to The New York Times, about half of the readers of the electronic version of the publication use mobile devices to access the sites. At the same time, revenues from advertising on mobile devices from the company account for only 15% of total revenues.

A similar situation is observed in other media, including The Wall Street Journal and Forbes. Users of desktop devices still generate about 70% of all advertising revenue. All of this has a negative effect on traditional media publishers, who are trying to maximize revenues from digital content.

Interestingly, a similar problem is observed in the media, which always came out in electronic form. For example, Neil Vogel, the CEO of About.com (a division of the IAC), reports that readers using mobile devices to access the media generate revenues that are one and a half to two times lower than desktop readers.