TechStuff Classic: Ads on the Go

where we talk about everyone's favorite topic advertising. But as it turns out, it's important stuff and sometimes there are ways to do it well where it's actually helpful, and sometimes there are ways to do it really, really badly where it's intrusive or worse. So let's listen to this classic episode and i'll talk to you guys again in a bit. Any company that has a web presence and they are alone a company that is that is a

web presence period. Yeah, they're all concerned about this because they want to make sure that they're continuing to serve up and experience. There's a good experience for the people who are using the web on whatever device they happen to be on, and furthermore, something that can actually make the money. Yeah, And as it turns out, this whole mobile Uh, this move to mobile browsing is really disruptive as far as that goes. But it's the it's it's

a pretty big industry of UM. As of August, according to an insight company called e Marketer, the mobile advertising global market is set to be UH worth over sixteen billion dollars this year. That's a lot of money UM, which is a growth and I imagine that we'll see that number even go even higher because you're seeing when you start looking at sales figures for things like tablets and smartphones, there through the roof. And it's across the globe. Although I will say, and we'll get into the US,

different parts of the globe value different platforms. Some are very tablet crazy and some are like no, I want my smartphone right absolutely, But but the marketers also saying that the desktop ad market UM is set to peak at around thirty five billion and be on a decline after that. Yeah. And part of the reason for that is that we're seeing more and more people move away

from those traditional desktop and laptop platforms. UH. And we're also seeing because we're seeing this move toward mobile, that itself is in part devaluing advertising on those traditional platforms, right, So if everyone is moving to something else, then you can't sell your your website that's designed for a desktop as a an ideal place where you for advertisers to put ads, because if no one's using a desktop of you that website, then no one's getting that content right.

And when whenever you have that split, you're going to have some people who are who are very happy with their experience and some people who are not, just because of the way that the page was designed. As I'm sure everyone listening to this has has had the experience of in the past. Right. There's even some discussion and some debate about the value of, say a specific app for a web content creator versus a mobile browser. So

there are websites out there that have apps. How stuff works has an app, and then they also have a

presence on the web and actual website. And there are some people who who say that they much prefer the experience of going through a mobile website than using an app, even if that app has been optimized to to really feature whatever the content is of that website, Because I guess partial part of it is that when you're in a web browser, you have a lot more freedom to go from one place to another, and that may not be within the confines of whatever website you're visiting, whereas

if you're going through an app, that's pretty much what you're seeing, right. So so okay, so some of those more traditional method that's that that we're thinking are going to peak in the next couple of years. Right. So, of course, the one that we all know because these date back to the very earliest days of web pages, are banner ads, right. Those are the things that will that you'll see along the top or sometimes along the

side of a web page that you're viewing. Right, Yeah, some people, some people will go so far as to differentiate banner ads from whatever appears in the side but sidebar, but it's essentially the same thing. This is something that is part of the frame of the website you're looking at. So you're all familiar with this, I know, So I don't. I'm not going to go into great detailble it is because assuming that you're listening to a podcast, I'm pretty sure you've visited a web page has had a banner

ad on it. So uh, that's one version another course, or the dreaded pop ups and pop unders. These are the ads that will either generate a window on top of or beneath your web browsers. So if it's on top of your web browser, you start interrupts your viewing experience. If it's underneath, you'll see it when you finally close

your your page. Yeah, when you close your page or you close your browser and suddenly you see like eighteen different windows there, and you think, whoa, something starts making noise that you're not looking at. Man, Hey, Lauren, let me ask you is your favorite kind of add My favorite kind of ad, You know, the one that immediately starts to AutoPlay video with sound. That's my favorite. How

did you know? Yeah? It's also great when you're doing research at work and then suddenly you've got like, you know, despicable mean minions screaming at the top of their lungs. But then and you're like, well that those didn't plan

on treating everyone to that professionalism. Or if you're or if you're like me and you think I'm going to click on this link and walk away to get coffee because it's gonna take all on this page to load, and then you come back and there's a guess going on at your desk and all the writers and editors of how stuff work hate you even more than they did already anyway. So besides pop ups and pop unders, you also have floating ads. These are the ones that

actually float over the text. They may even move as you know, and block your view of it. And sometimes there's not even a way of closing it. You just have to wait and it goes away. And uh, expanding ads these are the ones where if your cursor goes over it, it suddenly expands to fill up and sometimes we'll then start playing music video. Yeah, that can also happen, but it'll it'll cover most of the web content that

you were going to visit. Then there of course ads that are are not as line text ads which are a little bit sneakier. Those those are the things that you might have seen like a double underline and article that you were reading that should you happen to click on it, it might take it. It will take you to some whoever is actually purchased the ad, and usually it's something that directly relates to whatether the term is.

So for example, if I were to write a blog post and I'm mentioning a particular type of camera, there might be a double underlined version of the camera's name, and if you clicked on it, it might take you to say Amazon dot com or some other retail site

where you can purchase the camera. So I mean that's what it's usually considered a slightly less obtrusive, but it can also be sneaky or misleading or just you know, it might be one of those things where you're really you've trained your mind in that Wikipedia approach where everything that's a link will just take you to a different article and you're expecting an article and you get information all rather than advertorial and you never know, you know, uh.

And then there are there's also search engine marketing. That's where you end up paying a search engine to feature your product on a results page that relates back to whatever that product is. Those those will be like a Google sponsored ads that pop up along the like usually the first two at the top and then maybe a few along a sidebar. Right. So it's generally are related to your search and and can be really very helpful depending on on the the algorithms that Google is using

for that particular ad. But um, but yeah, it has has been found to to create some confusion in some populations of Internet goers as to whether those are really the best search result or something that is sponsored. Some people apparently don't read the fine print right now, there are different ways that these ads are actually making money. Yeah, so we're going to take you into the inside. Come

along with us. Of course, if you've listened to texta for a while, you've heard that Chris and I did an episode about um web advertising ages ago, and you probably have heard these terms from that as well. But it's certainly important in our discussion about mobile advertising. So one of the very common forms of compensation is the CPM, which is cost per mill which is not cost per million, but rather cost per thousand. And we're talking about impressions

here or views. So it's every single time that page that has that add on it has been loaded into a browser, whether that's someone who has loaded it and then hit refresh a billion times or if it's a

billion people who looked at that page once. So it's counting up every time that page is loaded, because every time that page is loaded, that ad has been displayed, and so that's a certain amount of money for every in displays of the page and therefore the ad, right and then that amount of money has changed dramatically over the history of online advertising. There was a time where if you had a really heavily traffic site, you could demand a pretty high price for that. You know, we're talking.

You know, you might think thirty or forty dollars for every thousand views isn't much, but if you get million a million views per day, that really starts to add up. But then, you know, you have we talked about devaluing, you start to see that that amount go down even for the most heavily traffic sites because a lot of traffic starts to come in through mobile. And we'll talk about why that's a problem in a little bit. Right.

So after that, you've got CPC, which has cost per click. Yeah, now this is actually people who don't just see an ad, but actively click on that ad to go through and look at whatever the site is that that sponsors that add So in this case, it doesn't matter how many people view it. What matters is how many people click it. And you could argue that this is not entire really up to the content creator, because the content creator is just creating stuff that they want people to to look at.

The advertiser would have to create an ad that was enticing enough to get people to click, or tricky enough so that people click on it by accident. Although I think most people would argue that that's not very effective, not really to the benefit of all involved. Right, you know, it all depends on who's doing the marketing to Right.

If it's a third party marketing department that is creating these ads and all they are concerned with is throwing as much traffic to the to the advertiser as possible, then they might not really care if it's truly effective in getting people to convert. Where we talk about conversion numbers to convert over into buying something, what's the whole third one? That third one is cp A that's cost per action, and that is going a step further than

cost per click. It's when someone has has clicked through to a site and actually does whatever the advertiser wanted them to do, like purchase a product or or in er a free trial. So if you've listened, yeah, you've listened to us talk about our sponsors. We have several sponsors where they use this approach. So if our listeners go and they sign up for these things, then that means that the sponsor will end up paying whatever the

agree amount is. So, in other words, go and sign up for those things, guys, because that's awesome for us. Um also, I mean, our sponsors are great, so that helps too. So let's talk about the mobile ad problem. Now.

The problem is that a lot of these these traditional ads that we talked about, the banner ads and the pop ups, pop unders, the text ads are a lot harder to navigate or to see in a mobile platform, particularly when you're talking about something like a smartphone where the landscape of viewable area is really tiny, right right, and people are moving through at a pretty rapid rate of reading speed, maybe paying a little bit less attention. Yeah.

Or it may even be that in order to view whatever the content is of the website, they re size it so that they're only so that the text or whatever it is they're looking at actually readable, therefore blocking out the section of the page that had the ad. Yeah. Yeah, that stuff might not even appear on the screen. Share.

There's also a lot of programming bugs in which I mean, you know, we've got so many um so many mobile devices and carriers and os is that at a certain point it gets difficult for a single you know, web developer to create a website that looks good on everything. Yeah, a lot of these websites also have mobile versions of them that are optimized for the mobile viewing experience, which often means that they leave the ads off because there's

just no space for them. It ends up making the content look all squished, and that's a terrible experience for the user, which means that the user is less likely to go to that website. So that means that in order to monetize the website, we have to start looking at different ways to to to have kind of ads or sponsorships or whatever, because the traditional ways just aren't They aren't designed with that platform in mind. Right, And this is certainly not a new problem or a new

set of problems. As of two seven, mobile was becoming a priority among media and marketing executives. Um, I mean

that was before the iPhone guys. Yeah, um, you know, as of two thousand six, Nielsen had started tracking cell phone use across media, right right, Yeah, I remember that I could browse with my old had a Nokia phone that hey Microsoft buying them now, but I had I had an old Nokia phone that or Nokia phone that that could browse websites and you would just get in these little by texts and you'd have to you know, you wouldn't get any graphics at all, It's just text. Uh.

I rapidly decided that was not an ideal experience for me. Yeah, I believe I had a Samsung like a like a flip flip phone that allows you to do the same sort of thing a motor lay anyway, not important. It wasn't until I got a smartphone that I really started to use it to do things like browse the web. Yeah. So, um so some some of the trends that are going on right now, Yeah, let's talk about them. So I

got a lot of this information from Adobe. Now, Adobe does a big Digital index report every now and then. It's semi regular, is how I've seen it described. And part of it is the State of Mobile Benchmark study. And so these were some things that they found in their study. They found that tablets drive more web traffic than smartphones and may actually be a PC replacement when it comes to web consumption. Now it's not that way.

It's not like they've completely replaced PCs already, but that it looks like tablets are poised to take the place of PCs when it comes to just browsing the web and consuming content for those for those basic functions that are you know, and anything more simple than you know, complex photo editing or video editing like that. So in general, people visit se more web pages per visit on a

tablet than they do with a smartphone. So, you know, that just means that every time you get online with a tablet, then you're you're in general, you tend to be looking at more web pages than you would be

if you were using a smartphone at the time. Now, it may turn out that people use smartphones more frequently than tablets, and so maybe those numbers are a little misleading, because if you're using a smartphone a lot throughout the day, you may actually visit more web pages accumulatively then you would in one visit with the tablet. And and there are more smartphones out there in the wild than there

are tablets. There's absolutely true, there are far more smartphones than tablets in the wild, although according to Adobe, tablets are still driving more traffic um They said that people who use tablets to browse shops are three times more

likely to buy something than someone on a smartphone. But it's probably important now to look at some actual numbers because because you said there, like, wow, if I was if I'm using a tablet, I'm three times more likely to buy something than if I were looking at the same content on a smartphone. Hold on their big guy, So far, this is where we start talking about conversion, converting someone from browsing to buying. That's and that's that action.

That's that that's that cost per action kind of right that we were talking about earlier. Yeah, this is this is where we go from hey, that's a pretty pair of shoes to hey, I own those shoes now. So if you're using a smartphone, it said that there was a point seven percent conversion rate, meaning that point seven percent of the people shopping on a smartphone would buy stuff on a particular on a typical visit. And so three times that for for tablets, that would make it

two point two percent. Yeah, so when we're talking three times, we're talking from less than one percent to just over two percent. It's not it's not like some overwhelming number. But also for PCs, not that impressive. Actually, it's only three point three percent for PCs so again this is and so this is not actually a method that is working on on a particularly calculable level across the field. Yeah, and if you look at if you look at just

the mass number of purchases, it ends up being huge numbers. Right, we're talking billions of dollars. But when you're talking when you're looking at all of traffic that is going to these sites, it's a tiny little percentage. Now, if you were to compare that to say, a person who walks into an mortar store and how likely they are to actually walk out with a purchase, I'm sure the numbers are are pathetic. However, way more people can come to

your website than can come to a typical breaking mortar store. Yeah, you know, it's just the physical limitations there means that it's a totally different set of numbers. So even though it's a small percentage, it may still be a large number of people. Sure, that's still I don't know that. Nonetheless as to me that that possibly a better system could be found. Oh sure, if we can get to a point where we are compelled to buy, you know that we are punished if we do not buy, and

that world is coming, I said too much. All right, So the leading operating system in the United States mobile operating system, I should say in the United States is here's a big shock. Yeah, people love their Apple products. Sheep. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. My wife. My wife uses uh an iPad and an iPhone. She loves it. I actually really think that iOS devices are amazing. I

just happen to be an Android user. So while I make the joke, I am not one of those people who's like Android good, iOS bad, which is which is good because because I might we might have to fight. Yeah, and I don't want to do that because she's scrappy, y'all. I am elbows like knives. Um. But yeah, and that's despite the fact that there are more Android devices overall available in the market. Oh yeah, sure, by far, I

mean considering that the iPhone is one device. Yeah, you can buy an older iPhone, but it's still one line of products, whereas Android comes in all shapes, sizes, flavors, and problems. Uh. There's this whole fracturing of the market thing that we could talk about, but that's a different podcast. Uh, tablet versus smartphone use is not study across the globe. I mentioned that earlier that there are some places in the world where people prefer to browse on tablets and

others where they prefer smartphones. So for example, in the UK, about people use tablets, so that's the majority there. But in China, it's like nine of the people in China are using smartphones to browse the web. So so it's also hard to create a strategy, a mobile strategy that is going to affect the entire globe. First of all, being able to do business around the world is problematic too.

That that's sure, sure, And then that's why companies like I think that right now, Google owns more than half of the share in the mobile digital ad market across the globe. Google. When you think about Google, and we've said this before, to Google is not really a search company. Google is an online advertising company, right and and they've incorporated YouTube into that, and they've incorporated they've incorporated everything like tracking, GPS tracking, I mean, there's based upon what

region you're in. Now, a lot of this is opt in, so you're not forced to do it yet the compulsions coming people just telling you now, but no, you're not forced to do it. But if you do it, then

you up getting what we call targeted ads. Right. They're targeted to you based upon your behaviors, based upon where you're from, if if there are more demographic things known about you, like your gender and your age, that can go into targeted advertising, which I understand for some people it's really kind of a creepy idea, this idea that the advertisers know more about a lot of privacy issues wrapped up in this now personally, and this is this

is just personally literally, like just as it applies to me, I don't apply this to anyone else. I love targeted advertising, and the reason why I love it is because I'm seeing ads that are really much more relevant to my interests and I learned about things I never would have known about otherwise, and I love to to be able to do that kind of shopping. But I would not say that everyone wants to have that exact same experience.

And there are people who have had very disruptive things happened to them because advertisers were able to figure out

certain life situations and send the messages the unsolicited. Right, there's that one horse story of that target girl who is living with her parents and target based on her purchasing behavior, sent her a congratulations you're having a baby jacket, and then her father got all upset targets saying how dare you send this to her, and then send another lawyer's target saying I'm sorry, I did not realize my daughter was pregnant, and boy, yeah, so they're There are

definitely ways that this this tool can go wrong, all right, you know, it can be pretty awkward and pretty invasive. At the same time, I do have to say that, yes, I agree with you, Jonathan, and I personally am am happier when, for example, I've just gone through a terrifyingly bad breakup and Facebook is not sending me engagement ring ads. That's a that's a great day for me. Yeah, yeah,

personally I could see that. Okay, that's fair. Uh. The last point I have under the trends, this one I recommend we all take with a huge grain of salt.

And the reason is that, like you said Lauren at the top of the show, some of the sources we have for the information are from companies that have vested interest in online advertising, basically all of them, to which which makes things a little bit sticky, right because I mean, they might be saying, hey, you know, you shouldn't get out of desktop advertising because it's going to come back in a big way. And it turns out the reason why they say this because they have this whole advertising

strategy that they want to sell you. But in this case, there's a company called host Gator which is vested in mobile advertising. So again let's let's take the end to consideration. But they they say that they figure that mobile will overtake fixed internet access by fourteen. So we're recording this, which means next year we would see mobile browsing overtake Internet browsing, or at least mobile access to the Internet

overtake fixed access. Now, while that is coming from a company that is offering up mobile advertising strategies, it's also one of those things that I find easy to believe just based upon the trends we've been seeing so far. Now, maybe it means that it's not really twenty four teen, Maybe it will be a few more years down the road before we actually see this happen. But I think it is happening right, And you know, whether whether it overtakes it or not, it's it's clearly a a functioning

revenue source um or. Facebook reported that as of Q two, of mobile ads made up of its revenue. Yeah, and in fact, that was one of those things that when Facebook was having its I p O there was a little bit of a shake up because Facebook at that point had not really figured out how it was going to handle the mobile ads part of its of its revenue stream. And so they discovered that their um their their revenues for one quarter that year were lower than

what had they had projected. And it was partially because everyone was starting to I say everyone, So many people were starting to use the Facebook mobile app or or just to access Facebook on mobile platform, which again gives you a totally different experience than than on a desktop. It made it made a lot of investors lose faith in them. And in fact, this, this news, this Q two news um was basically what preempted the rebound and

Facebook staff this summer. It shows how powerful mobile really is. We have a little bit more to say about ads on the go, but first let's take a quick break. Okay, so let's talk about some of the challenges about mobile advertising. We've touched on some of them already, but we'll we'll kind of have to pull them all into this gigantic cloud of how do we do this right? So, the type of content you consume might depend upon the device you're using, because some devices use certain make certain type

of content easier to access or to consume. For example, if a website is in flash, probably you're not looking at that on an iOS device anyway. You know, Android for a while supported Flash for a while. Um, yeah, so you that that's a good example exactly when. I don't know about you, Lauren, I don't know how how frequently you you will occasion go out to eat at some place where you're not really familiar with the menu.

But if you've ever had the experience where you click on the menu thing and then you realize that the menu was programmed in flash, you probably have had some choice words. I have I have cursed the heavens multiple times based on that. Yes, when occurred grasp of hanger, which is the combination of being hungry and angry at the same time. Lauren and I both suffer from this. So you do not want to be in a room with us when neither of us have had a snack. Yeah, both both of us are are a tiny bit on

the hypoglycemic end and also have very particular dietary restrictions. Right, it makes us really entertaining. The longer our podcast, the longer our podcast goes, the more likely we are to come to blows, not because we don't like each other, but because we're angry. Well, I go into fits of rage when I try and access something like a menu

on on a mobile device. And that's a perfect example of how companies have to really take that into account when they're designing their their mobile websites or their mobile applications. They need to make sure that they are catering to a platform that has its own set of advantages and disadvantages,

things that can and cannot do um. And then there's also the concept of content grazing, which makes it even more complicated, and that is that is the concept that UM that most people when they're on their mobile devices are doing multiple other things at the same time, maybe watching TV, maybe on their tablet, maybe also checking their

smartphones simultaneous. Yeah, they might have. Usually it's too at least two screens, probably more than two screens for some of us, where we are consuming things on multiple platforms all at the same time, all of which have their own advantages and disadvantages, like I just said, so that may or may not be related. You know that. I think the hope like that, if you're watching television is that you're going to be on your tablet looking up

extraneous information about that television program. Yeah, but that's not necessarily the case, because let me tell you, I have frequently watched uh Netflix on my Xbox three sixty. There's gonna be a lot of name dropping here because I want to just point out how insane I am. So I've got my television on, I've got my Xbox sixty on. I'm watching Netflix for that, So that's one thing I've

got going on. Meanwhile, I've got my laptop up and I'm in Google Docs so that I can type in snarky comments about whatever it is I'm watching, because I'm probably doing this for another show I do. So. Then I've also got my smartphone there where I'm getting all of my status updates from various things because I don't want to have too many tabs open on my laptop. That slows things down for all the snark. So already I've got three screens going. I have a problem, and

I'm not alone. It turns out the problem right, and and and and people say all kinds of different reasons for doing this, and and it might be it might be that where you just don't want to put down all of your feeds, where you have the slight addiction to all of the information coming in. Are very kind to say slight, yes, but that is that is one. There's one where it's just I just want something on the background. I just I can't have it be quiet. I just have to have something on in the background

while I'm doing this other thing. And it's not that I'm paying any attention to that, but I have to have it on right or even that, you know, during commercial breaks or if something is if you're having load screen issues or something like that, your board exactly that your board, and rather than be bored, you want to switch your attention to something else to keep you entertained what you're waiting for the boring thing to stop. I am so guilty of that. That is really that's the

thing that I'm working on. But yeah, I fall into that same sort of category. And We're not alone. There are a lot of people, and of course everyone seems to think that they are the ideal multitasker, even though studies have shown repeatedly that the vast majority portion of the population is actually good at multitask like one or two percent of the entire population. Right, everyone else is

lying to themselves, me included, right, right, everyone else. Your performance on every individual task you are trying to do simultaneously declines for a few people, the supertaskers. This is not the case. But if you are wondering if you're a supertasker, you're not. I mean, I'm just safe to

say that statistically speaking. Nope. All right, So, um, there's also the idea that we had before about these these different screen landscapes, the fact that that websites are laid out in a different way depending upon what kind of device you're looking at. You know, if you're using a smartphone, you're going to get a certain layout. If you get a tablet's a different layout. That might be similar to the layout you might get from a laptop or desktop,

but it's still a little different. It's not you know that each one is trying to be optimized for the experience, because one size does not at all, Like you can't have one design of a website and expect that to work across all devices. I mean there's a lot of variety out there, right especially right Yes, and like like we're saying earlier, there are so many different screen sizes when you get into Android devices in particular that um

that it's yeah yeah, so so okay. So so you're working with a whole bunch of different device all of which are carried by many different wireless operators, working working upon many different operating systems from many different locations. Um. So,

so location based stuff has to be very particular. Um, the the the advertisers creating this content may not actually be personally using the mobile platforms that they're working with, and therefore might not be familiar enough with them to really have insight into what will and will work for for people. Um And and furthermore, um, you know, this is all a new, new issue new as of two thousands, I would say, I would say it's still very much

an emerging technology. I mean it's by now, I think from a consumer standpoint, we're looking at and saying this is a fairly mature technology. At this point. We're seeing we're seeing refinements, but not giant leaps and evolution from a consumer standpoint, But on the back end of it, the actual creation and delivery of content, it's still like, you know, corporations don't move at the speed of consumer merse. Alright, So we've covered the fact that mobile advertising is hard.

You uh, Let's talk about some of the strategies that have been applied to mobile advertising. We mentioned one targeted ads, specifically targeting your not just your behaviors like what your your past browsing habits are, but also your location. If you do enable that, Like I said, for most systems, it's an opt in situation, so you're not being tracked to do it right or you know, in some cases it might be an opt out like default on right.

I much prefer opt in obviously to opt out, just because it gives the consumer much more transparent control of what is going on with their data. But yes, you in those cases, you will have the ability to reach people and give them ads that are at least have a probability of being more relevant to them than just and you know, an ad from a database of sponsors.

Also video, it's a big, big deal with mobile advertising and mobile platforms because since people aren't necessarily paying, you know, they're they're not necessarily reading really in depth articles about stuff on their mobile platforms. They might be watching a quick video or listening to something. Yeah, there's a lot

more of video consumption on mobile platforms. Uh. And you know, I remember a few years ago when the the cellular speeds weren't really good enough to give a very good experience for video, and I was thinking like that, this is never going to take off. But of course, once those speeds got better, and once the processors got better and the battery life got better on these devices, it

became a viable uh thing, a viable feature. And so a lot of web content creators are making a slow move from traditional web content that you might think of as a uh, you know, a database of articles, and start to create more video content. Uh. And that's in part because that's the kind of content that people are seeking out. It's the it's easy to consume in these mobile platforms. And it doesn't mean that the content quality changes,

it just the actual delivery of it changes. So you then have a move to start inserting video ads into things. But even that gets a little tough. I mean, depending upon what you're using as a way of delivering video to your consumer. For example, if you're using YouTube, YouTube allows people to serve ads against their content, and if you do that, then you get a certain percentage of

the ad revenue and Google gets the rest right. And it's not an insignificant amount that Google gets, No, Google, Google gets a significant amount of that, you know, depending upon I don't know if all the agreements are the same across all content creators. I imagine that there are different ones, but at any rate, Google does take a cut of that. And on top of that, Google also has an algorithm where you can sometimes skip an AD.

If you've ever watched a YouTube video in five seconds, So skipping that ad, I suspect impacts how much money the the person who has that content will receive because you've you've just allowed the user to skip it. Why does Google do this, Well, it's for user experience, you know. They It's it's this idea that by doing this, you keep user satisfaction up. And uh, the algorithm is designed so that there are certain times when you are not

going to be allowed to skip an AD. And it doesn't necessarily mean that that particular AD is different from another, It's just that the algorithm has lined it up that way. Um, there are other ties where I guess there are ad deals where no matter what, you're never able to skip it, because I've I've seen some ads that didn't it didn't matter why video I was watching, that ad was going to play all the way through every time. Um, So

these deals are complicated. There's no one size fits all approach, even with YouTube, and that's just one delivery system. Now there are other ones that are out there on the web, but YouTube is just one of those that's incredibly well known. Right on top of that, you have social platform ads. So this is using stuff like Twitter and Facebook to kind of advertise, so you know, sponsored tweets where you'll look at your Twitter feed and you're like, I'm not

following Burger King, Yeah, why am I seeing this? And it's because it's a promoted tweet that that the company in this case Burger King has paid so that you will know that their latest version of the Whopper is available or whatever, and so you'll you know, you'll see that because it's been promoted into Twitter. Um. That's one way. Another is a course on platforms like Facebook where you'll see those ads that are maybe along the right rail

or occasionally you'll see sponsored inline. Yeah, you'll see sponsored stuff pop up in your feed, and again that stuff that companies have paid for and and in this case that also tends to be run through some algorithms, so that the ads that you see, Lauren are probably different from the ads that I see. Before we finish up with ads on the go, it's time for or well

an ad, let's take a quick break. I imagine that you get fewer ads for my aforementioned example, engagement rings than I do because I'm female and therefore I'm clearly interested in receiving a diamond from somebody. And I'm married, so if I start shopping for engagement rings, I'm going to have some serious questions to answer. Also, yeah, it's also based upon your browsing habits. I know this because

I was recently looking at a costume piece. I was looking for a specific costume piece, and I went to several different websites looking for this variations on this costume piece, and then I went up back over to Facebook and lo and behold, one of the things I was looking for was right there in the right rail with the other ads. So it was going beyond just my uh my experience on Facebook. It was looking at my browsing

history fun times. So um. It does then filter the various ads that you could get and goes with the ones that you are most likely to find relevant based upon your behaviors and what you've liked in the past. And it may very well be that perhaps that that ad I saw isn't related to my browsing history. Maybe I liked something in the past that brought it up. That's quite possible because it was just a coincidence that you that you noticed because your brain had been on

that exactly exactly. It could very well be a coincidence. I'm not totally on the this is the cause and this is the effect bandwagon. I'm just so um. But then there's also the suggestion that content creators have to find ways to make the stuff they generate easy to consume on mobile devices, and it has to be engaging and optimized, and then that means that it needs to be snack sized, kind of like we were saying with more content moving to video. This this is this is similar.

This say is you know, if you do have an article, have it something that someone can consume easily and quickly while they're on a mobile tablet, mobile platform, it might be a paragraph as opposed to an article. It might you know, you'll see a lot of things like images, slide shows, You'll see um, you know, quick quick things. Because the idea is that no one wants to sit and read an in depth article on a mobile platform, or at least that that's not what the majority wants

to do. Because as soon as I say that, I'm going to get a lot of people writing and saying I love reading along articles on my mobile device. I'm one of them. I write the train all the time, so I'll read. I read books on my phone sometimes, but I'll also read you know, really long pieces written in various uh publications, So I'm outside the norm. They're like I am, with lots of things. I can't help it. Uh. And then also there's the chance of seeing more sponsored

content on mobile platforms. So in this case, you might see a site or an article brought to you by something if I fill in the blank, yeah, espe Actually, if it's something that's related to whatever the content of that like if it's a blog that's about a specific thing, like a specific subculture or specific like it's you know, a movie commentary or whatever. You could imagine that that would be sponsored by a company that's related to that subject.

And um, I mean obviously that also means that you have examples of editorial content and then there's advertorial content where it's kind of that mixed between advertisement and editorial, and then there's just ads. It does mean that there's there's a lot more navigation needed on the part of

the user if they're if they're out for something specific. Sure, that's that's actually a huge problem for me while I'm while I'm researching especially topics like this that, um that it's hard to tell sometimes whether articles from from some of these marketing companies, yeah, are are just advertising around services or if they're making a valid point, right, I think that it's hard to say what the future will

be of this kind of thing. Um, I mean, obviously mobile is going to play a huge part, so we know that the question is, you know, people are trying to innovate new ways of putting ad content into into our our browsing experiences that is going to be um less disruptive and and more natural and and just work out better for everybody. You know. It's certainly nobody wants the user to have a bad experience. That's not going

to make someone more likely to buy a product. But at the same time, if there's not this support, then the people who are creating the content have to find other ways of making money because, you know, while there's going to be some content created for free on the Internet by people who are just very passionate about whatever it is they're doing, the reality is if you want to make a living at it, then someone has to

pay somewhere. Because we're not we haven't reached a point where I can release a podcast in return for a sandwich. I don't. I shouldn't say that because next thing I know, I could be brought in for my annual review would say, so here, you want to be paid in sandwiches? Um? I think. I think that's how money works. In fact, you can buy as many sandwiches as you want. Can I buy other things besides sandwiches? I suppose you could.

I'm sold on this money idea. UM. There. For example, while I was doing research for this podcast, I ran across a study done by a CEO of a app called pocket Change, and pocket Change is an apple lets you earn points for activity on other apps. So wow, it's a meta app. Yeah yeah, um so, so you know, you'll you'll go and you know, for for the number of pages that you browse, are the number of candies that you crush? I don't know what that is, you know,

et cetera. Um, you you'll earn points that you can exchange for rewards and and so it's a it's another form of advertising. And um so in this way, what what this app is doing is encouraging your engagement with other apps and other services, and in return, you get rewarded for it, similar to the way that you earned

might reward points on a credit card. That's ingenious. That is incredible, I honestly when I was doing my research, and that's such a simple, elegant way of encouraging people to consumeth do what you want to do, and right like, here are the things that's going to help you earn points, and you know, and hopefully along the way, you are

going to enjoy whatever that particular content is. Obviously some people would just be playing just to accumulate points, but the hope is, of course that they're doing going beyond that and they're actually consuming what it is that people are creating right right. Microsoft has started doing a vaguely

similar thing with some of their Microsoft Points. You can you can earn points by by playing games or by downloading new games, and um, and I'm not sure what you can exchange those points for right now exactly because I've earned a grand total of zero of them. But Lauren's an overachiever, and and you know that's not mobile. But but I think that this is that kind of gamification is something that people are starting to think about doing.

I can see that. Yeah, so there are some creative ways that people are exploring to try and and and generate money using the mobile platform experience. Because again, the the traditional one we've talked about is becoming less relevant over time. It's not like it's irrelevant now, it's not. It's just it's just slowly declining or it maybe maybe declines even the wrong word, but starting to plateau, and

then it looks like it's going to decline. So the writings on the wall really people have to find other ways of making this work or else entire companies could end up having to either restructure drastically or even go away because they cannot do business. Yeah. So, um, you know, and and you know it's it's It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. I'm sure that solutions will be proposed, implemented, discarded, and refined. We're gonna see it.

It's never going to be a super clean process that you can point from the beginning to the end and say and here's the story. It's gonna be complex and messy because that's kind of how humans are. But I do think that we will crack this somehow where it's going to be the kind of experience where no one is going to be feeling like it was, you know,

like like you're being punished for browsing the web. That that obviously would be the wrong message to show, because like you said, Lauren, I'm not likely to buy something if I'm irritated at my experience. But if it's an experience that is entertaining, it's compelling, I'm feeling rewarded, then I'm much more likely to buy something or to look at a particular vendor services. So it's just making that work. You know, it sounds like a simple idea, but making

it work in practice is a complex process. Well excited to see where it goes me too, because you know, I lax my smartphone, and I lacks my tablets and I lacks my laptops. Also like having a job. That's also good. Yes, considering that the way we work is very much dependent upon this. Uh yeah, it's it's important to us on a personal level. There's no getting around that. And no, we love it. So please help us, help us solve this. And that wraps up this classic episode

of tech Stuff. I hope you guys enjoyed that. Listen to an oldie, but a goodie. It is amazing for me to think about something from seven years ago and then realize that that's only about halfway through the run of tech Stuff. But we're gonna keep on going through and also giving you new episodes of tech Stuff on that subject. If you have a suggestion for an episode, send it to me via Twitter. The handle is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again

really soon. Tex Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H