Media's Future: Go Mobile, Young Person!
Whenever I can tear myself away from my grisly daily duty of witnessing the end of media as we knew it, one image of our common future presents itself with exquisite clarity — and that is, of course, that we’re all going mobile.
Of course, only in America could we even be having this conversation. In Europe, Japan, India, China, and most of the underdeveloped world, mobile devices have long been the digital tool of choice.
Here, we have had to first go through the desktop and laptop phases of the cycle, discovering the joys of email, web surfing, search, social bookmarking, blogging, social networking, twittering, and cloud computing — more or less in that order — while sitting on our derrieres, before we could reach that next moment in our cognitive development to grasp the obvious.
Some relevant facts to consider:
- ComScore reports that the number of people in the U.S. who used their mobile devices to view news and information on the Internet more than doubled from January 2008 to January 2009, to 63.2 million Americans. Probably more importantly, the number of news addicts (those accessing daily) rose to 22.4 million in the first month of this year — and that is certainly a significant media market, by any standard.
- Thanks to geo-coding and other technologies embedded in “smart phones,” advertisers can now track user behaviors and locations in ways that enable highly targeted ads just at the moment users most need them– such as advertising the location of nearby restaurants at lunchtime.
- Then, there is the fascinating phenomenon of the “cell-phone-only household,” where land lines no longer roam. Did you realize these compose roughly one in six U.S. households now? For that 18-29-year-old demographic, (you know, the group everyone in media lusts after), the figure of households where land lines no longer are relevant is above 40%!
It doesn’t take a software engineer to put this altogether and surmise that the future of media lies in designing apps for mobile devices, but, psst!, will somebody please tell this to the worried execs at your favorite newspaper/magazine/radio/TV company of choice?
In addition to serving as a BNET Media analyst/blogger, David Weir is a veteran journalist and the author of several books. Weir is a co-founder and vice-president of the Center for Investigative Reporting, as well as an editorial board member of The Nation.
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