Advertising and Mobile: More than a Platform Shift

Introduction: State Of The Art

As traditional media lose audience, they are also losing advertising revenue. American newspapers now sell substantially less than half the advertising that they used to sell (Mutter, 2014). Those lost revenues are largely moving online, but not to the newspapers’ websites. Mutter, a former media executive who now carefully tracks the rapidly changing media market in his weekly Newsosaur blog, noted that print advertising between 2005-2012 fell 25 times faster than the newspapers’ digital advertising grew (Mutter, 2012). Between 2005 and 2013, American newspaper advertising, including digital, dropped from $49 billion to $21 billion. All digital ad sales combined for just $13 billion in 2005 but rose to $43 billion by 2013, of which only $3.4 billion (8%) went to the newspapers for their digital products. At that same time digital advertising, overall, caught up and surpassed broadcast TV advertising (Mutter, 2014). Instead of going to the long-established traditional media, paid advertising is moving rapidly to such new media sites as Facebook, Twitter and Google. Other advertising resources are being dedicated to “free” inbound PR/marketing strategies, such as ebooks, white papers, webinars and viral videos, which still require organization resources to develop.

Broadcast, cable, and satellite TV are losing audiences at a much slower pace, but the trend could reach tipping point proportions in the near future. Due to numerous factors, including enhanced average bandwidth, improved server software, and the rapid overall growth of Internet devices, especially mobile broadband, the number of online videos viewed in June 2012 compared to June 2011 skyrocketed by 550%. Phenomenal growth has not stopped. In June 2011 the number of videos viewed online in America was 6 billion; one year later 33 billion (xStream, 2013a); and by August 2014 the number of videos view per month worldwide crossed 300 billion (Nguyen, 2014).