There is an old saying in Internet world, you can get business value as long as you can achieve user value.
Is this statement outdated in mobile Internet era?
This statement originated from PC Internet era, but now the time users spend on PC drops and user behavior tends to be stable and conservative. In contrast, people are more willing to stay on mobile devices. The difference between PC and mobile is that users are freely to move around on PC end. People can navigate from one link to another link easily, while on mobile end, it's not so convenient to jump from one app to another app.
There is one feature named short path on mobile end, user behaviors are restricted inside the app. Users are used to open many independent apps to get information and it's very difficult for them to jump around different apps. Also due to the size of the screen, the position to put ads and its performance is not competitive with PC end as well.
Come back to PC end, when one website achieves user value, i.e, if it can get 10 million unique visitors per month, then it can transfer the traffic to other websites with sales model to get profit. The sales method is flexible. That means large user base can easily get business return.
How about on mobile end, how to transfer the traffic? What's the performance?
So far the traffic transfer in business value chain is very slow and low efficient. They either choose jump to e-Commerce platform to get paid or choose to jump to AppStore to earn CPA or CPM. These two are both not so appealing. Even if you can get millions of users, it's still very hard to get profit. Some people from VC don't understand how they can get paid back for their investment in mobile era. For those are relative optimistic, they also want to ask when they can get balance of payment.
Balance of payment? No one has the answer. The business eco-system is not mature enough yet on mobile end, business value doesn't increase with the huge amount of user increment. The mobile industry is still in the phase of money burning.
This is determined by features of app: short path and weak advertisement. In general, there are three ways to get revenues in apps:
- Apps have some relationship with some online or offline products and service. This can attract users to do in-app purchase.
- For apps with large amount of users, it can provide an excellent advertisement placement.
- Get data which has business value through app such as Instagram.
What's in common with above three ways is app's business prospect depends mainly on product model and architecture setup. If people think they can make money if the product is popular, then they are overly optimistic.
User value doesn't necessarily bring business value. But it's worth the wait.
Source : http://firecacada.blog.163.com/blog/static/707437620130280233991/
