I’ve struggled with ideas about monetizing my passion for writing about mobile technology, but I must admit it’s been quite the struggle. The original plan was to be ad-supported and run affiliate links for products. However, with the ongoing recession, most major companies have drastically cut back on ad-spend, and it sure has cut deep into any plans for ad-sense to run on the site. Furthermore, affiliate products and those types of nurtured relationships come with specific strings that make a pure review difficult (but not impossible). So I find myself returning to the keyboard and Ipad where this all started contemplating the future of mobile internet gateway in the face of this monetization apocalypse.
Passion does not a business make
I love writing about mobile technology and the advancements in the tech space. It provides an outlet for my creative side as my day job requires me to abide by enough governmental regulation to turn even the freest of thinkers into conformist drones. In many ways, 2022 has been a disaster for mobile technology if you dig just below the superficial surface of an everything is alright if not gloriously bright future. Dark trouble is ahead for mobile devices.
Dark clouds on the horizon for mobile internet
Foldable phones, which were supposed to be the next best thing, with some even on their fourth generation of refinement, have peaked in demand. Overall demand for mobile devices here in the USA appears to have stagnated, if not outright plateaued, given it sits around 72% of the population has a smartphone. That number is not budging by much. Due to its zero covid policy, China torpedoed its own economy and, by extension, demand for smartphone shipments worldwide. This contagion of lower worldwide demand and lack of rewards for innovation only breeds small iterative advancements respective more of the auto industry than the rapid form factor and technology innovation we have come to expect from the smartphone world.
The Hidden hand
The hidden hand of regulation is also upon the throats of the major carriers worldwide. Smartphones, tablets, and 5g laptops are extremely bandwidth hungry. That means they need more spectrum to keep fed at speed with data. But rules set long ago profoundly interfere with carriers to leverage all the bandwidth they have. Divestment rules to prevent one company from hogging too much bandwidth compared to others prevents carriers from leveraging their large war chests in ways that directly benefit consumers. Instead, it’s spent on lawyers in tit-for-tat complaints with the FCC rather than real reform with teeth. My suggestion is that they can have the spectrum they pay for, but if they don’t use it in the timeframe provided to them, penalties equal to what they paid should hit them each month they delay. That would sure move the needle if the carriers spent 1 billion acquiring spectrum but then faced that as a fine each month if they didn’t deploy hardware with those frequencies in a consumer-facing way.
The wind is against you
All this pre-framing to say that I find the headwinds facing mobile internet for the consumer strong and not conducive to much innovation. The wild wild days of swivel screens and wild new form factors to be behind us and a much more bland, boring irritative future ahead of us. That might be a good thing as the refocus on core fundamentals has been needed for some time. Software innovation has stagnated at Apple, and Google has been more interested in preserving its frenemies than it has in developing android into a true threat to its core fundamentals. Here is the rub, though… With Google and Apple so worried about cannibalizing their own offerings that they are willing to kill all development on their own of these features means that there is an oppertunity for someone to do it better.
The future is here before you know it
Better might be here sooner than both Apple, Google, and all the major three carriers might lead us to believe. There is always the illusion that the status quo is here today as it was yesterday and will be here tomorrow. But this is simply not the case in the world of technology. Before Facebook, there was myspace. Before Google, there were Yahoo and AOL, and those companies, much like today, were more focused on not cannibalizing their own product lines and failed to see the looming threats out of the left field. Here is the thing about disruption, though. Everyone expects it to resemble the previous paradigms of disruption, i.e., to look at how Facebook or google did to AOL or yahoo. Disruptions never ever look like what they replace as a good case study; my space was all about getting friends to visit your “space” on the internet. Where Facebook was all about showing you what your friends were up to without searching the internet via a timeline, a truly innovative feature of its time. Now with Facebook on the decline and google stagnating, the time is ripe for innovation, and that could very well be Chat GTP.
What does this have to do with mobile technology and improving the internet on the go?
Sure, it’s poriferan, but if you truly think about chat GTP and other AI like it, the premise happens to be core to how we experience the web. When we plug in a question to google, we want an answer. But the way google incentivizes websites to play an SEO game, we end up with three ad’s not related to what we were searching for and a top four of five results optimized for what we wrote but not solving what we are looking for. This results in hundreds of thousands of hours lost and whole new skill sets developed to help search and analyze google results so an informed solution could be formed in our mind. But step back for a moment from the present abyss and ask yourself what if when you ask a question, you get a simple yet deeply informative answer. Free from SEO website lists and the ads that accompany them. This google search freedom potentially spells a tidal shift for knowledge workers to focus more on content and engagement with readers than filling their articles with a thousand and one variations of the SEO trigger words that they need to get into google. Sure it makes monetization more difficult for writers, but the system as it is… is broken and needs to be fixed, which leads me back to my conundrum. Monetizing my passion here on mobile internet gateway… Like the industry giants in many ways, I am a product of the system that’s only irritative and not as dynamic as I was in my youth. But If I am not afraid to cannibalize existing systems and ideas to find new growth, then my lack of innovation means that this website will die. Something that I do not want to happen if I can avoid it.
So I leave you here, my dear reader, with a question. How do you plan to meet this new wave of change?
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