Link: ‘Breaking Silence: The Editorial / Developer Relationship is Broken’

Great editorial from Jeff Scott (@TheAppivore), editor-in-chief of SlideToPlay, on the difficulty ad-supported mobile gaming sites are having attracting advertisers.

Mobile game sites, like every web site on the internet, are paid by advertisers looking to get their product in front of the eyes of the siteâs readers. We provide a platform with a targeted, often incredibly influential, audience and advertisers in turn offer us the monetary fuel to keep that platform running. Not too long ago every available ad spot was sold and the media side of the mobile gaming industry thrived. Sites expanded, added staff, and started investing in apps and other services to make their platform even better.

â¦Everything was great until studios shifted gears away from traditional advertising to directly acquiring users via CPI campaigns and similar services. This inevitably led to a steep drop in ad revenue which resulted in staff layoffs, less content, fewer page views, and wellâ¦ Editorial mobile game sites large and small are in a real bad spot right now. Ad sales have tanked in the last couple years. The sites that still exist are publishing way less interesting content â all in a bid to up the page views and pay the bills. Many sites have folded and more inevitably will this year if this trend continues.

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The whole piece is well worth a read, and paints a pretty grim picture of the future of ad-supported mobile gaming publications.

While this piece focuses entirely on the world of mobile gaming publications, I do think the problem goes further than that. There are two very important reasons why mobile gaming sites might not be getting advertisers, and they have nothing to do with anything inherent to the mobile gaming ecosystem:

Display ads do not work well on mobile devices.
Mobile gaming websites have a high percentage of visitors using mobile devices.

I feel like these two points are critically important to understand why all ad-supported websites, not just mobile gaming sites, are feeling the hit right now.

Ben Thompson at Stratechery recently addressed why display ads donât work well on mobile; Iâll quote his reasoning here:

Mobile display ads stink. Unlike a PC browser, which has a lot of space to display ads alongside content, content on mobile necessarily takes up the whole screen (and if it doesnât, the user experience degrades significantly, making quality a casualty once again). This results in mobile ad rates that are a fraction of desktop ad rates (and remember, desktop ad rates are already a fraction of print ad rates)

Second, on mobile, clicks are expensive from a user experience perspective. Not only do PCs typically have faster broadband connections to download assets and more powerful processors to render pages, they also have multiple windows and tabs. On a phone, on the other hand, clicking on a link means you can do nothing but wait for it to open, and open quite slowly at that. The cost of clicking a link, already quite high because of the deluge of crap content and particularly-annoying-on-mobile ads, is even higher because of the fundamental nature of the device.

Advertisers arenât stupid. They know all about these problems, and theyâre choosing to spend their ad budgets elsewhere. The same money that could be spent on a mobile ad banner is spent instead on Facebook, where ad-click experience is tightly managed, or on desktop, where mobile display ads actually have a chance of working.

Addressing the second point, itâs fairly self-evident: mobile gaming sites are about mobile games, and thus have a high percentage of visitors using mobile device. My site gets about 1/3 iPhone, 1/3 desktop, and 1/3 iPad (which has many of the negatives of mobile device ads for advertisers).

This makes mobile gaming publications a particularly bad target for spending your ad budget on.

This isnât going away. As mobile gains more and more prominence, more sites will start feeling the squeeze as they struggle to convert their existing monetization strategies to a more mobile audience. Mobile gaming sites happen to be at the forefront of this trend, but it isnât a problem exclusive to them.