Google is forecasting huge numbers of mobile advertising dollars viewers who will be accessing content on mobile phones. However, there is one problem with this forecast in my eyes and that is the lack of mobile content that is properly formatted for viewing on a 3"-7" phone screen.Now that publishers are starting to see a huge proportion of their readers using iPad's and Android tablets to view their content its going to be critical for Google to start thinking about mobile formats for their customers. 15% of our readers are accessing our blog content DeadZones.com using a mobile browser and this number is growing quickly. Below is a chart of the various mobile operating systems of our readers.
I have been a Blogger.com publisher for as long as I can remember and there are likely millions of other publishers like me who make money off of AdSense. Blogger a great content management system (CMS) for small publishers and I have always resisted moving to WordPress which is the largest competitor. However, Blogger seems to be falling behind the times and needs to help publishers start formating for mobile content.
Google purchased Ad Mob to start monetizing content used n mobile platforms for advertisers but publishers are still trying to figure it out how to properly format their content. I don't want to use a developer to format content for hundreds of different mobile platforms because I will never see an ROI for me effort. This should be something that is included in the Blogger.com platform if they truly want make more money from mobile advertising.
So I recently went through the exercise of signing up for Ad Mob which was easy already having an Ad Sense account and I created a mobile WAP-based site. See our site at m.deadzones.com which we built using our Deadzones.com RSS feed and sending that to Mippin.com for formating. This was very easy to do but still requires my users to click on the WAP link to view the content in a mobile format. This is not efficient and the thus the bounce rate is very high for my mobile users. Blogger should be helping me auto redirect my users by detecting the browser. I am not an engineer but this seems like a simple fix that could add thousands of mobile advertising impressions to their inventory.
Auto-redirecting is one technique of automatically sending visitors who click on a link to your website to view a properly formated web page at a different URL without the need to click a link. Building a mobile app is another technique that requires users to download and application in an app store and is costly to develop. Embedding mobile content publishing techniques into any CMS platform seems to me like the next step for Blogger, Wordpress and any other platform. It should not be limited to developers or enterprise applications or servers and would like see it trickle downstream to the little guy.
