The recent growth in the mobile web is something that any serious affiliate can’t ignore. But as quick as it’s grown, it’s still a very new channel, so the questions remains: what’s the best way to enter this market?
Well, it looks like mobile apps are going to be particularly well positioned to help affiliates earn their mobile bread and butter. A recent article in AdAge reports that while Google remains the leader in mobile web content, they are now focusing more on apps and less on mobile web pages:
While Google has been able to translate its lead in desktop search to the mobile environment, owning 47% of the mobile search traffic to Yahoo’s 25%, according to ComScore, the web may turn out not to be the de facto entry point for search on the phone the way it had been for wired PCs.
[...] According to the Kelsey Group, U.S. mobile search advertising revenue, including mobile web and in-app search, is expected to grow from $39 million in 2008 to $2.3 billion by 2013, a compound annual growth rate of 126%.
Meanwhile, the latest data from AdMob suggests that more traffic is migrating to apps: More than 60% of the ad requests in its iPhone network come from applications, vs. 40% from the mobile web.
In a sense, that mobile apps seems poised to out-pace the mobile web scarcely comes as a surprise. After all, the user-experience of the mobile web is too distinct from what’s offered by the conventional web, so all kinds of marketers need to think differently about how to reach mobile users.
What this means for affiliates is that they should start thinking about how to reach their target market through mobile apps. A mobile app is better suited than a mobile site for delivering content and offers because they use technologies such as GPS, NFC, and LBS to hyper-target users, and that kind of hyper-targeting is exactly what the mobile web offers marketers over the conventional, desktop web.
I definitely agree. I think that mobile websites are severely limited especially if a certain interactivity is required or needed.