Facebook’s Mobile Ad Problem…is Not a Facebook Problem

Every morning I watch CNBC before work. Over the past few months, I’ve gotten pretty sick of hearing about Facebook’s stock price and how it’s chiefly a problem with monetizing mobile (and the fact it was way overvalued in the first place).

Tom Krazit in his Gigaom article at the end of May said it best, “Everyone has a mobile problem: not just Facebook.”

According to Mary Meeker from Kleiner Perkins, while mobile traffic now accounts for 10 percent of overall traffic, companies built around desktop ads are worried about the value of mobile ads–shown as 5 times less valuable than desktop display ads.

The biggest problem is that advertisers are still not thinking through the user experience. In “researching”(formulating my opinion on) this issue, I clicked on various mobile ads from my iPhone and my iPad. The experience was typically terrible.

1. I could not get back to what I was originally doing on my iPhone or iPad (frustration).
2. It was purely an advertisement (annoyance/lack of value).
3. The ad took me to something not mobile-enabled (slapping ad team upside the head).

Bottom line, much like the issue with GM pulling its Facebook ads, this is much less a platform (i.e. Facebook) issue and much more a lack of understanding by advertisers around what will be a desirable user experience.

Once advertisers think more about the user experience and are judged for results, and not just for winning awards for cool creative that is voted on by a jury of their peers, that number of “5 times less valuable” will shrink.