By Jacqueline Koch
Recently, The New York Times measured the mix of advertising and editorial content on the mobile home pages of the top 50 news websites, their own included. What did they discover?
That more than half of all data came from ads (as well other content filtered by ad blockers). Examining the seconds needed for sites to load, they found that large photos and video ads were typically the main culprits of data consumption. Yet it was Boston.com’s mobile site that topped the list, with mobile website ads averaging 30 seconds to load on a typical 4G connection. As the adage goes, time is money. The estimated equivalent of 32 cents—in ads alone—per home page visit over the course of a month could ring up charges of approximately $9.50 in data usage just for advertising.
Ads are driving mobile traffic
According to some, ads are just part of an increasingly complex and burdensome jumble of content within mobile traffic. Currently, consumer and business appetites for mobile data are growing quickly and rapaciously, causing providers to struggle to deliver enough bandwidth. The resulting slow downloads and other manifestations of poor user experience are generating a lot of excitement—and anxious anticipation—for the next generation of mobile networks. 5G is promising to be more than 1,000 times faster the current 4G LTE standard.
This is not news, especially to those who work in the trenches of IT. But The New York Times article delivers a potent reminder to the rest of us. The bottleneck is here now and it’s threatening to overtake the incoming infrastructure before it’s even in place.
The pervasiveness of smartphones—cannot be overstated. A recent report from the Pew Research Center finds that 72 per cent of adults in the US own a smartphone. In the UK, the figure is 68 per cent. Today, even in the developing world eight in 10 people now own a mobile phone. According to a the GSMA mobile operator trade association, there were more than 3.6 billion unique mobile subscribers and more than seven billion mobile connections globally at the end of 2015 (They define mobile Internet devices to include smartphones, tablets, computers, and other devices that provide mobile connectivity to the Internet through mobile network providers).
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