One factor assisting 'mobile' right now is that SEO is less pervasive - mobile apps are focussed on UX which desktop webapps long ago ditched to get rankings (ramming as much content on page as possible, overusing keywords, reviews, ratings, UGC etc.).
I'm finding many mobile apps simple/clean to use - although the 'responsive design' movement is diluting that.
However, if the optimization for apps is based on usage, reviews, downloads, etc, then having a good experience is consistent with having good rankings.
Not so much with SEO where things like engagement and usage data don't factor much into rankings since it's not reliable
that's a story the link-counting-tool providers (i.e. seomoz) and linknetworks / linkbuilidng companies have been telling for years. and it is bullshit to keep the (crapy) status quo in SEO (because their business is deeply rooted into the status quo).
ux metrics (serp clickthrough, long clicks) are an a factor for ages, see i.e. the discussion about "long-clicks" in the exgoogler book "i'm feeling lucky".
plus: on big sites it is very easy (and i and other have done it multiple time) to test this UX factor. just make the UX of google referred visits significant poorer (i.e. via cloaking or performance delays) and see what happens to your overall SERP impressions and click throughs.
the same goes for reviews, there is even an publicly available googler paper about it.
Matt Cutts and the Google team themselves have publicly said that they tried looking at user data for rankings and determined it just wasn't a reliable measure. Think about stuff like finding addresses.. it's GOOD if a visitor spends 5 seconds there vs. 5 minutes because it means they found what they wanted. Sometimes usage data is misleading.
just test it (it's very easy to test on sites that get some decent traffic). well, "it's very easy to test" if you are willing to loose some traffic for some time (and as a SEO you MUST be willing to so such tests)
also i know the webmaster videos as well, they are more in the tone of "you have to be careful when you look at user behavior".
also your argument has huge holes: "it's GOOD if a visitor spends 5 seconds there vs. 5 minutes because it means they found what they wanted." well, there is an statistical technic called "standard deviation", if the SD is too big, don't factor it in. (i don't say that google does this, i'm sure they are more sophisticated, but it's a good counter argument for your example)
"Sometimes usage data is misleading." well, then G would just have to determine when it is misleading and with which probability.
i repeat: just test it. (and: don't read to much seomoz.)
> app stores are market-places. search engine are market-places. app stores are search engines.
I suspect that sucky discovery is somehow beneficial to Apple. This also makes me think that good discovery in app stores might be the key to Google competing with Apple.
Apple did purchase Chomp [1] to help with their app store search, since that (relatively recent) purchase they've changed their search and ranking algorithm at least twice [2] to generally positive response.
Citation needed. How on earth is bad discovery beneficial to Apple? With the size and profitability of their app store, they have the most to gain from good discoverability. That's why they acquired Chomp. Smart money says that the acquisition is going to lead to much-improved discoverability on the iOS App Store.
> Citation needed. How on earth is bad discovery beneficial to Apple?
Relax. The question was put out there genuinely, not as FUD. If Apple has so much to benefit from app discovery, why has it taken so long?
I suspect that a lot of people at Apple benefit personally by having the power to decide which apps are featured, and which are not. I know devs for which this makes a difference as big as a good middle class salary or more. I am agreed that it's to Apple's benefit to have better discovery, but as well governed as it is, Apple is not a monolithic entity.
Smart money says that the acquisition is going to lead to much-improved discoverability on the iOS App Store.
I would love for this to happen. I'm not so sure this is in an area of core competency for Apple, though. Acquiring Chomp was the right move, but acquisitions don't always pan out.
"If Apple has so much to benefit from app discovery, why has it taken so long?"
Because it's a hard problem to solve? Because app vendors are excellent at gaming any system for competitive advantage?
Curating apps is tough, whether it's delivered via an app store, or whether it's a publicly available app.
There's a reason it was easier to find apps in the PC era; there weren't that many quality apps. There were 1-2 word processors worth a damn, a few spreadsheets, and a few databases. Development costs were high because the apps were difficult to create, and distribution costs prevented developers from monetizing them easily.
Compare that with today's apps; small, easier coding, far easier distribution. You end up with millions of apps for Android and iOS. And there's no hallowed authority like BYTE or PC Magazine to bless your app;
Somewhere out there, someone is thinking along the lines of Page and Brin, thinking out of the box about how to make app discovery work; and when they do, we'll all slap our heads and think "why didn't we think of that?" And then the SEO guys will slowly adapt and app discovery will end up like web discovery.
I agree with this theory. People tend to buy more apps because they don't know "which tool" will solve their problem. I have done this at least 15 times this year, bought multiple apps to solve a particular task and then realized that there was another app that probably would have been better.
Chalk that up to the era of disposable apps -- Spending a few bucks during discovery doesn't seem like such a bad thing to a user, I guess, but in aggregate, is pretty unsatisfying.
The post sort of implies smartphone == mobile, but with African mobiles being used to transfer scrip, Indian phones already having good SMS based payment models, there are multiple models, markets and a lot of cultural sensitivities
The one preditiom I can make is there will be no more global phenomenon - one website taking off everywhere. Even just tacking on a new tld will not fix the local differences that mobile adoption is bringing
Basically people adopted themselves to the web cos it was so useful and new. But mobile phones get adapted to people.
I have to strongly disagree with that claim. India and Africa doesn't matter. Nobody wants to sell to people who can only pay a tiny fraction of what the product could be sold for in the first world.
This is super short sighted. There are billions of people in India/Africa combined, it doesn't matter that they can't pay that much individually because combined they represent a huge and growing market. So what you say might be true today, but it's not a good long term strategy. These are exactly the kind of markets that people should be targeting, uncrowded and huge huge potential
I don't agree. It is also about cultures: people buying pirated software even if the time spend on that is more than the price of the product. For example, in Argentina people can buy pirated software in the streets and nobody care about original software, even if they have the money to do so.
I had to put up with that same thinking about South America for years. But please, go ahead and keep thinking that! More marketshare for the rest of us. :)
There are about 50 million people who in middle class in India, which is about the entire population of say South Korea. That to me is market that shouldn't be ignored.
It also depends on what you're selling: I have a friend of a friend who works at IBM and they see Africa as their next huge opportunity for growth (although I'll grant you that they're doing B2B and government work).
O my! You need to brush up on the economics of these markets, companies are really attacking these markets on the mobile front. It is just that you don't hear about it in TechCrunch because it is very business oriented applications rather than social networks or photo apps. Since most people could not afford desktops or laptops cellphone penetration rates are very high and most innovation is done on the sms level. Blackberry is kicking butt in South Africa since they give unlimited internet for around $10 a month, which is huge since most could not afford to get internet in their phone. Take a look at mixxit's growth.
Also, something like square would be excellent for the so called spaza shop market. GPS applications for rural transportation, since most of the workforce use rural transportation and also easier payment methods. There are huge profitable markets to penetrate.
The gist of it is that APIs will become more important, and that they shouldn't stay as poorly designed as they are today. I try to think about how an API design could look like git's architecture.
But you could argue that once Twitter (and FB) tweak sponsored content to the point where it's no longer annoying or is actually share-worthy, that they've nailed this rev model.
Because then the advertising agencies will have a way to make content people want to read and share and therefore they can rely on people sharing it, at no cost to them.
However, ad agencies typically get paid more for spending more, so I don't think a "no cost" campaign works well for covering their costs.
Of course there's probably agencies out there that do/will pitch this type of campaign, and charge for the ideation + production. But virality is usually an empty promise.
Alternatively, increasing the k-factor on an already successful campaign is something agencies will want, so I believe they will fork out for these sponsored placements regardless.
All told, I really do think some secret sauce for targeting (aided by Twitter's/FB's data insights) plus some cool content produced by the brands/agencies will win out as the monetization strategy for social networks.
That is why Facebook should (and it looks like will) break its big monolithic web app into a bunch of small mobile apps. Messenger, Instagram (not yet owned by Facebook), and Camera are the model for Facebook on mobile.
I don't understand the complaint about Facebook not being mobile-ready. When I was on it, the mobile fb app worked almost as well as the regular website. That's how I'm guessing most users want the damn thing to work, the same across every platform and not fragmented because, well, it's on a phone. I'm trying to figure out why everyone thinks they're a non-entity on mobile.
Great post. I think one of the most interesting aspects of this is payments.
Throughout the history of the web most services and content has been free to consumers and support with ad revenue. But on mobile consumers are much more willing to pay and it is almost completely frictionless.
I wonder if in the next few years we will start to see more and more apps using the subscription model. If Facebook was started today as a mobile first business would they charge for the app outright, charge $1 per month, or use in-app purchase to charge for extra features?
Love this post. Monetization on mobile, as shown by Facebook's struggle to do well, is the next code to crack. I agree that as users are on mobile in a very focused state of mind, they are not open to advertisements, in particular not those that are in the way of achieving a goal. Subscription, in-app purchase might be better, also when users become more aware of the fact that if they are using a free service, they themselves are part of the offering being sold to the companies paying the bill.
Well you can't argue with that. But what says you can't build a successful business around the web? Why can't you build a successful business with a desktop application?
You can (build a successful business with a desktop application).
I think the degree or pace of success will be different for a mobile, desktop or web app. I also think that an app that's on all three will be more likely to succeed than one that's only on one or two of these.
A couple or so years ago Microsoft had this vision of being on every screen or something. I'd never heard anything that made more sense as a vision statement from a tech giant. Then cloud came along, and they dropped that vision for the Azure/Office 365 push. That was a mistake.
[Edit] To be clear, Azure/Office 365 weren't mistakes - they were/are good. Dropping that vision statement was the mistake.
Yeah, but I find the original post as a little backwards. Not everything makes sense on mobile. Not everything makes sense on the web. So why try to shoehorn it in there?
As with the web, it's not the shoehorned apps that are leading the charge on mobile. It's the totally new kinds of apps that didn't make sense until this platform came along.
You're absolutely right. Kindof like of your hammer is Java, then everything looks like a thumb. In that sense I guess his post is talking to what's hot right now.
I'm finding many mobile apps simple/clean to use - although the 'responsive design' movement is diluting that.