Google & Yahoo! sing equivocally on Mobile
It is fascinating to see how certain technology and Internet behemoths really invest for the future. I will never forget Yahoo!’s negligence to Search business in the early days, which cost them dearly. Well, it turned out to be a great content aggregator no doubt. But no one expected the boom of web-based Search to take off. Google did precisely this and landed up where it is today.
Both these companies are gunning at an equal pace when it comes to ‘mobile’. They are equivocal about their ambitions here and are leaving nothing to chance. Quite evidently, the results have been fascinating to say the least.
If there is one legacy that Marissa Mayer will undoubtedly leave behind, then it would be her quick assertions to fire up Yahoo!’s mobile business. Today, nearly 575 million of Yahoo!’s 1 billion users access its offerings on mobile devices. The very first year that the company actually reported a separate mobile revenue figures was in 2014. And we are talking north of $ 1 billion.
Google too recently made a tectonic change to its search algorithm when it announced that it would automatically make “mobile-friendly” sites bubble up in search results. Today, Google gets more search queries from mobile devices than people browsing the web on a PC. The trend is similar across 10 markets including Japan and US. Interestingly, Google’s ad prices on mobile do not command the same premium because people often search within apps rather than type on Google search bar. So there is huge action unfolding at Palo Alto to make its ads for smartphones a lot ‘smarter’.
Users have clearly migrated to mobile as their prime discovery platform. The quest for discovering every practical need through specialized apps constitutes what we know as the ‘app economy’. More start-ups were funded in the Bay Area in 2014 on this premise alone — the art of indexing and discovery on mobile — and apps played a big part in all that. Start-ups are beginning to challenge Google aggressively. Be it app discovery, apps talking to one another to enable users to multi-task or a smarter search result via cool search apps, every possibility is being explored. Recently, InMobi conducted to a study to understand how brands are investing on mobile. Key findings included:
a) Entertainment was the top vertical in 2014, followed by CPG and Telecom. Automotive was the fourth largest vertical spending on InMobi platform in 2014. Food & Drink, Social Media, Retail, Technology, Telecom and Travel were the fastest growing verticals in 2014.
b) Video, Native and Rich media creative ad units showed a phenomenal rise in engagement
c) Engagements peak on Friday evening and weekends across verticals. Engagements are high in the morning, likely during commute; and remain low in the afternoon before peaking in the evening. Consumers engage with ads on mobile when they are playing games, are on social media or consuming content related to Entertainment and Food & Drink.
In short, your mobile device is already powering discovery of every kind. Google and Yahoo!’s big bets to cater to this mobile-first generation is only warming up.
