I went to the Mobile Monday on err…Monday in London. By the way, I’m involved in founding the MoMo here in Germany too, so drop me a line if you’d like to be kept informed.
The theme was The Real Mobile Web and speakers included Ray Anderson from Bango, Barbara Ballard from Little Springs Design, Jan Standal from Opera, with demos from my old pal, Ed Moore from Widerweb, Vinay Philip Mathew from Jataayu and Richard Marshall from Rapid Mobile Media. An interesting evening all round.
As usual, I was there with two hats on - AdMob and of course, MobHappy, so I spotted an implication that many people missed. I did try to ask a question at the end, but wasn’t spotted. C’est la vie.
The issue was that the last 4 companies in list of presenters basically repurpose web content to fit it on the mobile. This means, that they could potentially strip out website publishers’ content, which includes advertising. Indeed, they could also put their own advertising around other people’s content.
I last wrote about this back in March when Google went down this route of removing ads from sites and it proved to be one of the most commented posts I ever wrote:
For a publisher, or a content owner, this is pretty hard. For the most part, online publishing is all about selling ads round the content. Any publisher who needs to make money from his site (ie they are a business) has to sell those ads, or the site will disappear - it’s that simple. So by stripping these ads out, Google is effectively depriving publishers of income. You can’t argue (like Google News) that you’re sending traffic to sites by offering a taster of the content. They are simply taking traffic away from exposure to the publisher’s advertising.
Of the companies presenting, for Opera and Jataayu, this merely represents a potential threat to publishers and I have no reason to believe that they will go down this route.
Ed’s Widerweb already strips out ads, but it’s fair to say that he’s aware that this is controversial - he actually emailed me last year to ask for my opinion and input. In this case, he’ll either work with the publisher to serve ads (he actually does this for MobHappy actually) that can be featured from a tech point of view, remove the publisher altogether on request and is working towards a few other alternatives.
Richard’s solution is to serve ads as interstitials while pages are loading. This is the most clearly controversial to me, as they’re serving ads around other people’s content. It’s like Firefox or IE starting to serve ads within the browser. In this case, you could argue that it’s the trade off for being able to use their technology, but a publisher would certainly not see it this way.
I’m also uneasy about the use of interstitials and other aggressive marketing techniques on the mobile, but that’s another point really. I do worry that from a user experience point of view that this will confuse and potentially poison the well for other less intrusive marketing techniques.
This is a hard post to write as it would be very easy to see Ad360 as a competitor to AdMob, but frankly, I don’t really think they are for lots of different reasons. But my concern here is primarily as a publisher myself (not that we make real money out of MobHappy - I wish!) that I’m uneasy about a third party benefiting from our content that we work hard to produce.
I’m also uncomfortable about the lack of clarity that surrounds the ability or right of other companies being able to strip out my content without permission or debate.
I’m not having a go at Ad360 though and in fairness, it could be that they have plans to introduce revenue share agreements for publishers but if so, this wasn’t mentioned in the MoMo meeting.
What do you think? This issue isn’t going away, so we should encourage debate and conversation and try to come up with some more elegant and definitive solutions than currently exist. Specifically:
1. Should anyone have the right to change how a website is presented, without the publisher’s permission? Google think so - do you?
2. Should anyone have the right to benefit financially from serving advertising around or in others’ content without their prior permission?
3. If you’re a publisher and someone offered to share revenue with you when they altered your site (assuming there’s a good reason for them to do this), is this OK?
Hi Russel.
I can only comment on question 1) since its the only applicable for Opera. We do not consider this as a problem since we encourage web designers and content publishers to adopt strategies like the CSS media type “handheld”. Such the content publishers are left in 100% control of the user experience, and can insert include content like mobile ads on their pages.
- Jan
I’d heard the evening was controversial and had stirred up a lot of chat. Sorry I missed it.
Even as a part-time blogger, I don’t want my content messed with by third parties. I don’t have a problem with RSS feeds as that helps drive traffic and is, overall, a positive thing, but to repurpose my site without my permission, knowledge or control over the matter, I find worrying - regardless of whether that’s on mobile or pc or mac. It’s messing with my copyright as far as I can see. Equally I don’t like it when people rip off my content online, which happens. It’s flattering, but I still don’t like it. It’s the same deal to me. It’s messing with my copyright without my permission.
If I was also making money via advertising on my site (I generate beer money, but that’s ok, I like the odd beer or two [http://swedishbeers.blogspot.com]), then I’d be seriously upset if my revenues were being cannibalised by any of the kinds of services you mention. And I’m not nearly technical enough to be able to add in extra bits of code to adapt these services one way or another to suit my personal preferences. I’ve only just got my head round adding widgets on my blog, and that’s just a cut and paste job. I am not a web developer so expecting me to get my head round CSS or other kinds of coding is not gonna happen as a personal publisher. And where does this leave brands promoting their wares onmobline and having half their sites mutilated? And why should we be leaving mobile development to web developers? Don’t you need a smattering of understanding about mociology? There aren’t *that* many developers around who understand both pc and mobile customer perspectives. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but you get the gist.
Re Opera, many made for mobile wapsites are almost unusable using the opera browser unfortunately as you can’t detect the handset/network the customer has (or that’s what my techies tell me anyway). The browser reverts to showing the web or PDA sites - both with larger screen capabilities - and that just means lots of scrolling and bigger file sizes which means a poor user experience and costlier data charges. This is a shame, because it renders websites very well on mobile and I can put up with some scrolling in that instance as I know it’s not a made-for-mobile site.
Just my 2p for the day.
h
Interesting discussion, Russell. I missed this month’s MoMo and I haven’t seen the offerings from the particular companies you mentioned so hopefully I’m not too wide of the mark here. But here’s my 2p for the day…
1. Should anyone have the right to change how a website is presented, without the publisher’s permission? Google think so - do you?
Surely every browser technology already does this? It’s a rare website that truly follows standards and cross-browser compatibilities to such an extent that the site always appears as it’s intended. With some exceptions, surely most site owners are mainly interested in reaching as many people as possible. Making sites available on mobile devices at a time when many site owners aren’t aware or aren’t capable of making their sites compatible is surely, on balance, a ‘good thing’
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2. Should anyone have the right to benefit financially from serving advertising around or in others’ content without their prior permission?
The enabling technologies you mention are (potentially) offering a service to both the viewer and the site owner, and therefore it seems reasonable that they could charge end users or site owners or generate revenues through advertising in some way. However in practice this is likely to raise lots of issues - what if the added advertising is against the site owner’s beliefs or doesn’t fit with the content? Or competes with the existing advertising? Also, if the ‘enablers’ are stripping out existing advertising, I imagine in many cases this is actually increasing the costs to the advertisers - they do have to actually visit the site and therefore increase the ‘impressions’ without anyone actually seeing the ad. Surely the adverts can be repurposed along with the rest of the site content?
Is it realistic to expect the enablers to obtain permission from every site they repurpose? Conversely is it realistic to expect site owners to opt in or out of every repurposing technology? I’d be more inclined towards the latter - something like a repurpose.txt file (along the lines of robots.txt files for search engine robots) that forbids people from delivering the site through such technologies could be a solution? In the absence of a ‘handheld’ style sheet reference and the absence of such a repurpose.txt file, these guys and others could reasonably repurpose a site. But I would suggest that they should not have the right to strip out advertising from the site without permission. After all, search engines already present repurposed content from sites - including cached versions - unless the site owner forbids them from doing so using their robots.txt file. Surely this is a similar situation - an attempt to bring the site to more people’s attention and in the general interest? Search engines do already generate advertising revenues whilst delivering such a service and this seems pretty acceptable to most site owners.
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3. If you’re a publisher and someone offered to share revenue with you when they altered your site (assuming there’s a good reason for them to do this), is this OK?
Of course it’s OK - if you agree to them doing this. But as I’ve said this kind of situation is pretty far-fetched. Every one of these technology owners isn’t realistically going to be able to even approach the vast majority of site owners let alone come to an agreement with them.
On the subject of content repurposing and reformatting: in the Mobile Web Best Practices working group (see http://w3.org/Mobile) we are recommending the use of handheld CSS style sheets as well as server-side content adaptation on the part of publishers to ensure that the mobile presentation of their site is what they want. We’re also working on something called MobileOK - it’s a machine-readable trust-mark for mobile content that publishers could embed in their sites to announce to anyone up-stream (such as a content adaptation engine or search engine) that the content is already mobile friendly. Mobile Web Best Practices is done as of last week and MobileOK should be ready by early next year.
Also — I originally tried to make that comment using Opera Mini but quickly ran up against its input field character limit. So we’re not there yet.
Ad360’s business model is nothing to do with publishing other people’s content. We happen to distribute an ad-powered demo RSS reader. It’s just a way of showing how the interstitial ads work. In any case there are no real ads in the demo, so we’re not making any money out of the RSS feeds.
Our model is to provide a revenue revenue source to the publishers with whom we are working, ie a route to monetise mobile content. I did actually say this in my presentation, but it was very time constrained so I can understand how it went unheard.
On the general theme of the post, I have to say that anybody offering RSS must expect it to be reformatted/mash up/fiddled with, as that’s what an RSS feed is about.
Just re-read my post (sorry about the typos) and realised that there is actually a more complex issue at play here: is the person adding the ads adding value to the process?
The content creator is not the only person in the value chain. The reformatter may have some very special technology that they are monetising (eg something that reads out the RSS data for visually impaired users), or the people providing the data capacity might be covering their costs, or the terminal supplier might have given it away for free in return for watching ads.
Perhaps a simple rule is that someone “rebadging” your content via the same channel certainly shouldn’t extra money from it as they have not added any value.
@ technokitten;
Opera Mobile works fine on wap sites. There are some issues with Opera Mini, but I believe most of these are being resolved.
I do also appreciate that you don’t have the technical skills to develop a mobile stylesheet. You should off course not have to relate to this either. Perhaps you should change your blogging provider to someone supporting it?
/jan
Sure, transcoders need to earn money too. Cry me a river. But stripping out ads is denying revenue to publishers with no gain to the transcoder. And replacing publishers’ ads with ads of their own is economically equivalent to reselling other people’s content without permission. Companies like Gator tried doing this on the desktop and got sued (although I will assume that the transcoders are acting in good faith.)
My proposal:
Publishers can already tell search engines not to index their sites (robots.txt). They can detect old desktop browsers and tell users “sorry, upgrade or go away.” In the same way, publishers should be able to tell transcoders (a) do with us as you please and keep the money, (b) transcode our ads too or nothing at all, (c) do not attempt to reformat our main site, here is our lovingly-crafted mobile version, or (d) go away.
If the publisher opts out of transcoding and fails to offer a mobile-friendly site, the publisher loses a potential customer. On their head be it. The transcoder can simply report “Sorry, the owner of this web site does not want it to be viewed on mobile phones.”
1. Should anyone have the right to change how a website is presented, without the publisher’s permission? Google think so - do you?
I agree. In fact I think the choice should extend upto the consumer. Google is making a mistake by automatically removing Ads. It should say - do you want ads or not? In the say way they do for GWT and images.
Greasemonkey is already doing it for Firefox.
If you look at RSS content - the presenation and data are totally isolated!
2. Should anyone have the right to benefit financially from serving advertising around or in others’ content without their prior permission?
Well, this is questionable. As long as the reference to the original source is there I think its okay - else it comes to down to plagiarism! After all if someone like the content in the way it is be alternatively presented (in this Google) they should benefit somehow.
3. If you’re a publisher and someone offered to share revenue with you when they altered your site (assuming there’s a good reason for them to do this), is this OK?
Oh yeah - you better.
that is if you are smart. One way or another - content will find its best way to be hacked! (my 2c though!)