Vested Interest & other matters, page-2

On the front page of today's International New York Times there is a story about the $4.4 billion USD deal between Verizon and AOL in which the future of mobile advertising features prominently. The article is too long to repost here so I have included a link at the end of this post, but I will at least post some of the key points below.

In a memo to employees after announcing that Verizon Communications would buy his company for $4.4 billion, Tim Armstrong, AOL’s chief executive, offered a rhapsodic hymn on a single subject: mobile.

The future of nearly all media, and consequently the future of nearly all advertising, he said, is about our phones. “If there is one key to our journey to building the largest digital media platform in the world, it is mobile,” he wrote, by way of explaining why AOL, a company known for its news and entertainment sites and its dial-up subscribers, was merging with a cellphone carrier.

Mr. Armstrong ended his memo, which was otherwise puffed with jargon indecipherable to many outside the world of advertising and media, with a clear message that could double as the catchphrase of his entire industry: “Let’s mobilize.”


His words — and the deal with Verizon he just helped engineer — are just the latest corporate reaction to a staggering shift in the way people across the globe get their news and entertainment. Over the last couple of years, we have collectively decided to use our phones to reach the Internet more than we ever used our computers to do the same thing.

At the moment, except for Google and Facebook — which together control more than 55 percent of the $42.6 billion worldwide mobile ad market, according to eMarketer — few companies have managed to navigate the transition from desktop computers to phones. The shift has shaken up just about everything for everyone, such as Internet portals like AOL and Yahoo; carriers like Verizon and AT&T; and eCommerce ventures like Amazon. Some industries — music and newspapers among them — were just figuring out the switch from physical media like CDs and print to the web. But the switch from the web to our phones is happening even faster than the transition away from physical media, and in many ways it is more profound.

As Benedict Evans, an analyst at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is fond of pointing out in a presentation he calls “mobile is eating the world,” the smartphone industry is now shipping nearly three times as many devices as the personal computer industry did at its peak. Smartphones have led to more consumption of media than we ever thought possible; we spend just about half the time we’re not sleeping glued to some kind of screen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/t...trove-could-help-aol-score-with-ads.html?_r=0

There is another even longer article also in today's International New York Times on the future of mobile in the business section of the paper. Click on the link below to access it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/business/dealbook/verizon-to-buy-aol-for-4-4-billion.html