"Today has confirmed the scale of opportunities for mobiles and highlighted the diversity of its customer base," was the closing statement of Futuresource's David Sidebottom at the DCM Europe's pre-conference Mobile Summit. "In a couple of years will we be at this conference talking about digital content profitability rather than monetization?" Key to making money, as a Yahoo! team of Head of Video Pietro Lambert and Director Mobile EMEA Ed Laws explained, is knowing your audience and how they want to consume content.
"People are spending more time on mobile devices and less time on traditional methods of content consumption compared to a year ago," said Laws. In particular, people now prefer to consume news on small device, which provide more flexibility - mobile devices are now the reading platform of choice for the bathroom and "longer visits" he pointed out. Most people are now disappointed if a news website not optimized for mobile.
Lambert ran through some figures on how people treat their TV viewing - for instance, in the US 98 million people multitask on their mobile while they are watching TV. A breakdown of what the 100+ million people who watched last year’s Super Bowl did during the ad breaks showed a spike of Yahoo! front page traffic, with search queries relating to TV ads during Super Bowl significantly increasing. “Commercial time equals mobile prime time,” he stated. “Mobile web traffic during live TV events is strongly related to ad breaks.” That means, he asserted: “If companies want to take advantage of those viewing figures, they need to not just advertise but also also make sure that their website will support searches and provide sufficient information for those viewers searching in the ad breaks.”
