It could be that things are changing. Here is Mark Zuckerberg saying he's going to make tons of money from mobile ads. Could be a pipe dream, could be a fact, but nobody knows because Facebook is the one figuring out right now what mobile ads should look like. It's a brand new space that we can guess about, or say how it is working now compared to other media, but none of that means that it won't improve or change as the industry adapts.
I got the sense from yesterday's class that mobile is this cast-off, dysfunctional, unprofitable space. All that may be true, but if it is, it is only because media and advertising companies haven't learned what to do with it yet. But as they start to figure it out, look what happens. This report shows that the two most common uses of smartphones and tablets are news and social media. In fact, the report says that mobile users read, on average, more news than desktop web users. If this is true, maybe mobile apps and sites are not inferior products. Actually, the report suggests that they may be complementary, having an "additive" effect on media consumption rather than displacing consumption of other media.
In short, I'm not giving up on mobile yet. I still think it will turn out to be one of the most important arenas for both news and advertising in the coming years.
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