Tag: socialmedia

German Interview with Google’s Eric Schmidt

Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat down with the Frantfurter Allgemeine (FAZ.net) to discuss things mobile and social networks among other things.

On mobile:

Just take the success of the iPhone: It has the first really powerful web browser on a mobile device – and many more are still coming. Nokia has one coming, Blackberry has one and Motorola has one. They are all supposed to be released this year. By these products, the advertising gets more targeted because phones are personal. So targeted ads are possible. And that means the value of the ads will grow. The next big wave in advertising is the mobile internet.

On social networks:

MySpace did not monetize as well as we thought. We have a lot of traffic, a lot of page views, but it is harder than we thought to get our ad network to work with social networks. When you are in social network, it is not likely that you´ll buy a washing machine.

Some good stuff in there. I recommend the full article.

Mobile Dominates Social Media

With all of the buzz this week about Google’s Open Social, everyone’s attention is focused on the web-based social networks and missing the impact of mobile technology on social media. Per usual, the Communities Dominate Brands blog is ahead of the game on this one.

In Tomi T Ahonen’s latest post on Communities Dominate Brands, Tomi points out that:

Informa’s latest Mobile Industry Outlook report for 2007 reveals that yes, mobile social networking services did continue their dramatic growth for the past 12 months, and are already worth over 5 billion dollars in 2007.

$5 billion dollars! This again dwarves the revenue associated with web-based social networks. Tomi’s post echoes one of his posts from a year ago where he put the then $3.45 billion in mobile social networking in perspective:

3.45 Billion dollars this year! Wow. A bit of context. All of iTunes revenues last year were about 400 million dollars. TV-interactivity (voting for Big Brother, Survivor Island, Pop Idol etc) were worth 900 million dollars. Internet gaming revenues, all multiplayer games etc, were worth 1.9 billion dollars. All internet adult site revenues were worth 2.5 billion dollars in 2005… Oh, just to be clear – that mobile digital content revenue is more than all (non-mobile phone based) online social networking revenues combined. In only two years, the mobile side of digital communities has shot ahead of the online world. Amazing!

There you go. If you weren’t previously convinced that mobile is the next big thing, it’s hard to dispute the fact that today’s big thing–social networks–is already bigger on mobile devices than on PCs.