Many of you have read about AdMob’s decision to no longer support mediation
players in the application developer space. Below is a letter that we sent to
an application developer community, detailing our position.
An Open Letter to iPhone Developers Meetup from Andy Miller, CEO Quattro
Wireless
Since so many of you have reached out to me personally to
discuss Quattro Wireless’ position on AdMob’s decision to no longer support
mediation players in the app space, I wanted to take this opportunity to address
the developer community as a whole with this open letter.
As many of you know Quattro Wireless is a leading ad network
serving billions of impressions a month worldwide in apps and mobile web sites
big and small. From day 1 we threw our support behind mediation players like
Mobclix, AdWhirl and Tapjoy as we felt that companies like these got it,
accurately represented the needs of the developer community and served a vital
role in the monetization strategy of this exploding space. Many of you have
found Quattro directly and signed up at our website. Many more of you have come
through the folks listed above and are (hopefully) enjoying our ad flow and
innovative ad units. Mobile in-app advertising is in its nascency. We believe
there are, and will be, many strong choices for developers to monetize their
apps. Choice, ease of integration and control are the keys to helping this
industry prosper. Quattro Wireless will continue to support the mediation
players in addition to our own direct developer efforts. Our hope is to grow
this space alongside of your innovative work.
Happy to discuss one on one with any of you. amiller at quattrowireless dot com
Apple previewed its iPhone OS 3.0
software yesterday, revealing a bunch of new features.
On the consumer side, more than 100 new
features will be available to iPhone and iPod touch users this summer,
including cut, copy and paste; MMS; landscape view for mail, text and notes;
stereo Bluetooth; syncing Notes to the Mac and PC; Push notification for Email
and IM and parental controls for TV shows. Push Notification brings iPhone
closer to the Blackberry world for messaging apps.
For app developers, the game-changing feature
set is the combination of Subscription Billing and the ability to sell stuff
directly from within the app using iTunes Billing. Why is this game-changing?
The combo of Subscription plus in-app Billing
essentially extends the ‘consumer lifetime value’ for app consumers and
provides many more business model permutations.
On the game
app side, rather than buying the app for $2.99 now and playing for a while and
discarding, users could buy a monthly Subscription to the app for $2.99 and get
upgraded features every month or the user could download a free version of the
app that only goes to Level 2 of the game and have to pay 99c within the app to
upgrade to the next 5 levels.
On the
media/content app side, rather than paying $2.99 for a Blip.tv app (as a
made-up example) for the top Blip episodes, you could end up downloading a
$2.99 Blip.tv subscription that has all hot episodes included but an extra
$1.99 per Featured show.
For those
familiar with the mobile content/ringtone space, Subscription plus in-app
billing may mean that the Thumbplay etc ringtone guys now have a play in
iPhone, with $9.99/month subscription apps for 5 ringtones/month and $2.99 for
extra.
We are fortunate to be working in a space
where in some ways the whole ‘ecosystem’ is innovating faster than any one
player – makes us all race to catch up with each other but also means lots of
consumers and media company interest and $$.
Quattro is mobile’s trusted ad network. Sure, we serve up advanced
technology and innovative methods. We make mobile accessible and
turnkey. We are committed to transparency. We are tireless in
service excellence. It’s what we do and how we do it. But, the most
important aspect of our network is our partners. It is a cliché, but our
partners truly are our success.
Our premium publisher partners have helped us become the largest premium
publisher network in the world. Quattro currently serves billions of quality
brand and direct response impressions a month to over 25 million unique monthly
visitors. Our advertising and direct response marketing partners have
given us incredible momentum by trusting us to manage over one thousand
campaigns last year. We are leading the mobile advertising industry with
innovation, transparency, technology and reach. And, because we are that
kind of business, today we have announced a Quattro milestone with $10 million
in Series C funding from Highland Capital Partners and Globespan Capital
Partners.
It is a fitting announcement on the heels of our recent International
expansion (hundreds of new partners in 15 new strategic markets in 2 short
months), our Microsoft Atlas strategic partnership (simplifying media tagging
and tacking on mobile), our continued premium publisher network growth (30x
impression growth from January to December 2008) and our incredible momentum
with Fortune 500 advertisers and leading direct response marketers.
Seeing the trust you all have put in Quattro to help maximize your advertising
spend made it easy for these investors to do the same with their investment
dollars.
We will earmark the new raise to accelerate international growth, continue
development and fine tuning of our industry-leading predictive mobile targeting
technology and to scale our business with new strategic hiring both
domestically and internationally. These plans, already underway, are
dedicated to making our business better for our partners. Like you.
I know none of you are shy, so please continue to reach out to me at amiller at quattrowireless dot com and let me know how we can do better, what your core unmet needs are and how we
can build a business together.
We look forward to making great headlines together in 2009, and as always
we appreciate your trust.
The Apple iPhone revolutionized the mobile industry in 2007 by
launching a full-featured portable computer complete with a built-in cell phone
and high-speed Internet connection. Apple’s subsequent launch of an iPhone App
Store and accompanying application development platform took the revolution to
the next level – the App Store now has over 15k applications in every category imaginable. Other mobile device vendors like Research In
Motion, Google, Nokia and Microsoft have all quickly followed suit with their
own mobile application stores and development platforms.
You cannot just build it and expect people to come to it.The successful build of an iPhone or other mobile
application demands best practices.
The best iPhone apps usually succeed at doing one thing very
well:they promise the end-user a
specific piece of functionality and deliver on it in a simple yet comprehensive
manner. Whethera Tip Calculators, a portal
for US Historical document archives ora
2-player Air Hockey games, these apps succeed because they promise and deliver
on one very cool or very useful thing.
Second, a great app isn’t just a repurposed web site with a
slapped-on iPhone GUI. Typically, it is built from the ground-up to be rich,
fast, personalized and very interactive and fetches content from the Internet
only when it has to. It leverages the touch user interface, it capitalizes on
the brilliant and crisp display, it dares to be fun by encouraging you to
‘shake it’ with the accelerometer and it unobtrusively slips out and fetches
new content from the Internet.
Finally, a great app is working hard to establish a clear
brand identity from all the other me-too apps out there. The good news here is that if you followed
the first two pieces of advice, you are likely to garner great user reviews,
which is great leverage in staying ahead of the app pack.
Featured
in
Mobile Marketer's "Classic Guide to Advertising"
on August 5, 2008.
This year will be viewed
as the year that the mobile Web went from a question mark to a reality, thanks
to the Apple iPhone and its full Web browser capability.
Since the iPhone’s
launch, mobile Web traffic statistics from AT&T, Google and the Quattro
Network show that the iPhone audience is one that should be catered to and
capitalized upon as new and active browser territory.
Yet despite the
preponderance of mobile Web usage on the iPhone, there is still an opportunity
to enhance the experience.
To see
what I mean, check out the iPhone-specific sites for companies such as Facebook
(http://iphone.facebook.com), LinkedIn (http://iphone.linked.com), CollegeHumor
(http://iphone.collegehumor.com) and Realtor.com (http://iphone.realtor.com).
Compare them to their
“wired” companions on an iPhone. I think you will agree that the wired
equivalents are comparatively difficult to browse.
The adapted versions of
these same sites show a giant leap in site usability and performance with
optimal content layout, intuitive navigation, better display
and navigation for ads without sacrificing any of the site content.
Let’s drill down into the
design choices made by these iPhone-adapted sites and provide a rationale for
the decisions.
Lightweight pages
The average 300k wired
Web page will take about 90-100 seconds to download fully on an iPhone on the
AT&T EDGE (2.5G) network.
It will take 30 seconds
to download on the faster 3G network when AT&T and Apple upgrade completely
from 2.5G to 3G. A useful page size rule of thumb is to assume three seconds
for every 10k of page content on an EDGE/2.5G network and slightly below 1 second
per 10k on a 3G network. Assuming you want to have your pages load in the
3-7 second range, you should set your page size metrics to be no more than
25k-30k – thus allowing for more data because of image content in your pages.
One finger/thumb
navigation
The iPhone provides a
very powerful pinch-and-zoom technique to drill down within a page, but the
user gesture requires two hands for page navigation. Given that mobile
navigation is primarily done with one-hand (e.g. the other hand is holding a cup
of coffee), it is important to be able to navigate a site primarily by thumb
scroll and tap. Additionally, image galleries can be made much more
interactive by leveraging the iPhone browser’s JavaScript capabilities to
provide a dynamic click-and-zoom capability for individual images.
Fewer, more prominent
ads
One of the issues of
having a wired Web site rendered as mobile in the iPhone browser is that the
ads on the site appear small, illegible and difficult to click-through.
Reduce the number of ads on the page – perhaps down to three to four,
placed strategically along the page scroll – and ensure that the click-through
is easy and prominent.
Absence
of Flash
The iPhone does not run
the Adobe Flash Player. Recent statements from Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple,
indicate that it is unlikely to ever run the Flash player. You therefore have a
dead-zone for all the Flash sections in your site. You should consider
replacing the Flash sections with Ajax-equivalent interactive content.
iPhone users are increasingly getting used to and coming to expect a quality
and snappy user experience from their favorite sites. Consumers may not
know or care that the site was adapted for the iPhone. But based on traffic
patterns that we have observed on our network, your extra effort will be amply
rewarded with more repeat visits and deeper page views per visit.
iPhone 2.0, iPhone 3G, iPhone applications and the arrival of mobile browsers like Skyfire are prompting a lot of questions about the future direction of content adaptation for mobile and mobile advertising. As an entrepreneur who thrives in times of change, it is awesome to be wrestling with these huge strategic questions in a fast-moving, extremely visible space with lots of innovation and marketing dollars (and Euros, and Yuan and Rupees) at stake.
Let’s start with the full browser on the phone. Skyfire seems like the real deal (at least from the videos on the Skyfire site) – supporting all major Web content types with slick performance to boot. Safari on the iPhone just got a boost with 3G speeds and Blackberry will be arriving soon with a full Webkit-based browser (same as Safari). So is this good or bad for mobile adaptation specialists like Quattro Wireless?
I think it’s great that we’re getting real Javascript/Ajax browsers on mobile. It will make our creative and development lives much easier – basically we win on the mobilization side if we blow away both publisher and advertiser expectations on what mobile could be for them – what better way than if we had a real browsing platform to build on.
As for the publisher/advertiser who wants to leave their site alone because they don’t believe they have to adapt? The most compelling argument we can make to them is to show better click-thrus and higher ad revenue/eCPM on an adapted site versus an un-adapted one.
We’re working on such a study within Quattro right now (more to come soon) but the intuitive argument is pretty simple – take your average 1024x768 designed wired web page with perhaps 5 ad slots from Doubleclick, Google Syndication, AdBrite and the like – that works out to about 15-20 ads per page. Can all the ads actually be seen on a small display? Can the text CPC ads be read? Why have wired-targeted, wired centric ads that point to wired centric landing pages when you could be bringing in mobile targeted and mobile specific ads (with higher payouts) with smaller, lighter landing pages and microsites? Once you buy that mobile-targeted ads might be a good thing to try, shouldn’t you adapt your overall content user experience a bit with fewer ads and better targeting and placement?
What about the threat or promise implied by the iPhone application platform?
When I play Texas Hold’em on the iPhone, I realize that what I have in my hands is a whole new mobile content paradigm and it just throws out what we know about apps/Flash/web/mouse/trackball and replaces our old phone-with-data quaint notions with a handheld, touch-screen computer that happens to be a phone.
I believe that the new mobile platform, as now defined by iPhone 2.0, will be embraced by major media and consumer companies as their handheld portal or integrated remote-control – they should all race to provide their full content catalog within branded apps - especially the video catalog – perhaps with subscription, sponsorship and advertising tie-ins to their TV and cable offerings. I would expect to eventually see the phone app have remote control capabilities to drive what’s playing on the closest household TV or airplane seat TV monitor – maybe knocking off one of the 3 screens (Web) down to 2 (mobile and television). Of course, they’ll have an adapted mobile web site as well but it may be where a subset of the content catalog resides (e.g. the popular stuff).
What this means for mobile content and advertising platform providers like us is to realize that we have to adapt to a hybrid world where both browser-to-server and full-feature-app-to-server co-exist and where we should support the bigger matrix of content revenue models that these hybrid experiences open up. Like I said at the outset, it’s awesome to be wrestling with these questions – since behind them lay huge opportunities to add real value.
If the various mobile phone OS vendors were to be considered
professional sporting teams, I think it’s safe to say that the playoffs have
begun with the Nokia acquisition of Symbian. Here’s my rundown of the top
playoff contenders (the Power Rankings, so to speak) and as an added bonus,
since the playoffs are all about the matchups at key positions, I will
elaborate on key matchups between the teams.
You may be shocked to read this, but I must nominate Nokia
as the top seed simply by respectfully acknowledging the 40% worldwide handset
market share for Nokia plus the 5-10% additional market share for other
Symbian-based handset vendors such as Sony Ericsson.
The other top tier players and likely never-say-die
contenders are Microsoft with Windows Mobile, RIM with the Blackberry platform,
Google with the new Android platform and Apple with the Mac OS platform on
iPhones.
When you see this list of contenders, you may be tempted to
conclude that this playoff season may never end, resulting in five
fundamentally different platforms for the foreseeable future. I think that the
ultimate deciders of which of these platforms remains will not be the wireless
carriers or us consumers, but rather the unaffiliated handset vendors like LG,
Samsung and HTC – the companies who will build for any mobile OS as long as
they can make a volume-based profit.
What about standards-based platforms like J2ME (Java 2
Mobile Edition)? What about the rush to open source all of these platforms as is
being done with Android and LiMo? I think that the mobile application and OS
environment is too nascent to derive any true competitive benefit because you
proclaim that your platform is standard or open. And the guys subsidizing the
price of the devices, the handset vendors and wireless carriers, ultimately
want someone with deep resources to call when they have an issue or want a new
feature – and certainly not participate in some open forum where they reveal
precious roadmap secrets to all comers.
So there you have it – top six playoff contenders named
Nokia, Microsoft, Apple, RIM and Google. What about the key matchups?
I organize the key matchups around the key constituents that
the OS contenders must cater to – consumers, wireless carriers, handset vendors
and finally, application developers.
Apple obviously leads with the consumer, or does it? Does it
actually lead with a specific class of consumer – someone who can spend
approximately $2000 over a 2-year period to own a beautiful piece of mobile functionality?
Because if you ask the ‘who leads with the most consumers – and why?’ question
the matchup goes to Nokia, who makes very functional and affordable devices for
a billion-plus people around the world. By the latter metric, Nokia remains the
leader in this matchup category.
As for the wireless carrier driven matchup, Google jumped in
hard with a truly open approach to cater to carriers (and device makers) with
low to minimal platform licensing fees but they have hit a few carrier-related snags
that are pushing the Android launch out. The first snag is the carrier
demanding UI customization (as Sprint has reportedly done) that fundamentally
changes the phone UI from baseline Android. The second snag is something that
bites most software companies, its just surprising to see Google join the club
– difficulties porting the platform features and functions to Chinese
multi-byte character sets for China Mobile.
RIM, on the other hand, has always done a masterful job of
catering to the carriers despite stepping out and creating its own consumer
identity with the Blackberry family of devices. I wonder if RIM’s next major
move should be to license the Blackberry platform to other device vendors as a
way to leverage great carrier distribution and relationships and dramatically
expand market share.
The handset vendors obviously loathe licensing software
platforms from other handset vendors – even if the licensing cost was free. The
only two contenders who do not make phones are Google and Microsoft. Until Google
ships Android in volume, the matchup winner in this category therefore has to
be Microsoft. Unfortunately, Windows Mobile is a usability clunker, at least in
my opinion, and is but a minor cog in the giant Microsoft wheel, so I’d day
Google will win this matchup in very short order.
The final matchup is for the hearts and minds of people like
me, the developers. I honestly have to confess to being completely underwhelmed
across the board. As a modern Java (or .NET) shop, do I really want to hire back-to-the-future
specialty C/C++ developers to code to the Microsoft, Apple or Nokia platforms?
Do I train my existing Java developers to code to the proprietary Google or RIM
Java APIs? And if I spent these developer dollars, am I assured that the apps I
have built will actually work across the specific family of devices?
Given these thorny (and costly) issues, my mobile developer
view of this matchup is to write-in a new contender – the mobile internet
browser on the phone. There’s an actual “stack” of features and functions I can
design for and code to around the mobile browser – simple pages for simple
phones and rich Javascript-driven pages and features for iPhones and the like –
with my developer cost and training requirement being that I teach a standard
HTML/CSS/Javascript Web Developer all about mobile.
My conclusion is that while the playoff contenders are all
global technology heavy hitters, there really isn’t one that is a clear first
or second place finisher across all key matchups. All this points to several
more years of jockeying, working on higher layers of platform usability,
finding ways to get developers more involved and excited and constantly
courting device vendors and wireless carriers with cost or customization
incentives. For us mobile veterans, it seems that the plethora of platforms
song will remain the same.
