Mobile Is Where The Growth Is
If you look at any of the top web properties on comScore, Quantcast, Alexa or any other third party reporting service you will see that they all have been fairly flat over the first half of the year. You might think that all these big web services are flatlining.
Context & Ripple Effects
A year after AllThingsD asked whether the web itself was shrinking, Fred Wilson's post supplies the answer's first half: the top web properties look flat on comScore, Quantcast and Alexa because the growth has moved to mobile. comScore's own data trail backs him up — 91.4 million US smartphone users at 39.1% penetration as of November 2011, and its February 2012 finding that mobile web and app usage had reached parity.
The measurement layer is scrambling to keep up: comScore launched Device Essentials in April 2012 specifically to count traffic by device and local market, an implicit admission that desktop-centric panels understate total audience. That makes the 'flatline' visible on third-party dashboards partly an artifact of what those tools were built to measure.
First-order effects
- Publishers running top web properties now report flat desktop reach even as their real audience grows on phones and tablets, so any valuation or ad pitch based on comScore/Quantcast/Alexa numbers understates them until cross-device reporting becomes standard.
- comScore's Device Essentials push puts it first in line to sell the device-level measurement everyone suddenly needs, while Quantcast and Alexa's desktop-oriented panels risk looking blind to half the market.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers follow the audience to mobile, but mobile monetization is still immature — echoing both the 2007 skepticism of Mobile Ads: Not So Fast and Wilson's 2010 case that mobile economics would trend toward web economics — so expect a transition period of cheap mobile inventory and pressure on blended CPMs.
- The developer allocation question Wilson posed in December 2010 resolves itself: with usage at parity and desktop flat, mobile-first stops being a bet and becomes the default for new products.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry's reporting and valuation norms — built on desktop pageviews — get rebuilt around per-device and per-user metrics, and 'web company' quietly becomes 'multi-device service'.
- Competitive advantage migrates toward whoever owns the home-screen relationship via apps, since the browser-based desktop pageview is no longer where audience growth accrues.
The trend: Digital media is crossing over from a desktop-pageview economy to a multi-device audience economy, with measurement vendors' tooling lagging the shift and setting the pace at which publishers and advertisers can follow it.