The Myth of Mobile Migration

Mobile, like the Internet, replicates some features from previous media: people still read, listen to audio, watch video, send emails and text messages, and perform other tasks that were previously done in older channels.   It's implied that mobile will evolve away from this in time, and those who are enthusiastic about the mobile channel routinely proclaim that it will become the "one and only" channel for which the user will forsake all others.

I’ve heard this very same argument before – when the Internet first came along, people assumed that every newspaper and magazine in the world would go out of business overnight.   That didn’t happen then, and it’s not going to happen soon.  While many print publications have folded or migrated entirely to the new medium, many have not - and fanboys don't seem to want to pay attention to this, or even acknowledge it.

I expect that some amount of traffic will shift to the new channel, but what proportion of that traffic will shift is entirely debatable.    People will still read books on paper, and people will still watch television on a television set, and I don’t believe that either of those behaviors are going away just because a new channel has emerged that has me-too capabilities for doing those same tasks.   It is not enough simply to have the ability to do something with a gadget – the gadget must be well-suited to the task and must do so in a manner that is as good as or better than previous methods of accomplishing the same task.

Simply stated, Mobile devices are not very good at the delivering the content of older channels.   Mobile has unique advantages – chiefly its portability, storage capacity, and digital capabilities such as search and bookmarking – but in terms of content delivery, the moment in which the user consumes the content, it is still severely lacking.  The claims of enthusiasts that mobile will get better in the future are merely hubris and puffery – the alleged future capabilities of the channel are less of a factor than the present behavior of actual consumers, who even now do not choose to use mobile for all the things it is presently capable of doing.

Consumers do not adopt a new technology simply because it is capable of doing things – they only do so when technology does things better than their present way of doing them.   In the rare instances that technology enables a completely new task, it is usually better than “nothing” – though the choice not to do something at all remains entirely valid – but in most instances a new technology merely supplants an existing way of accomplishing a goal, and to become the method of choice means that it must be better in the aggregate, not just in certain ways, than other methods.

The specific things that mobile does better and worse than alternative methods depends entirely on the activity in question – both in terms of the task and the context in which a user is doing it.   As such, it’s difficult to draw generalizations, but I can easily provide a few examples of the tasks at which mobile fails, and is unlikely to overcome:

• Mobile fails to deliver content to multiple users.   Television and video consumption are shared experiences in that people get together to watch and interact with one another.   And while it is theoretically possible to synchronize a video program among several devices so that people can see the same thing at the same time, the social experience is still not the same.
• Mobile fails to deliver content in sufficient quantity.   The size of a printed magazine or newspaper enables the user to see a few thousand words of content at a time, allowing them to browse and read at a brisk pace.   Because of small screen size and low resolution, mobile devices cannot do this, but force the user to read a few sentences at a time before scrolling or refreshing the page.
• Mobile fails to deliver content in sufficient complexity.  Mobile is narrowly focused, allowing the user to consume a single thread of content, and does not permit complex consumption.  A person who is studying history may have a textbook, a dictionary, an atlas, a timeline, and multiple reference works open at the same time, moving quickly from one to the other.  Mobile forces the user to pay attention to one thing at a time and does not facilitate switching between sources, at least not with a single device.

Granted, mobile enthusiasts can suggest ways in which these limitations might be overcome – but it requires speculating about features and capabilities that do not presently exist, or proposing labor-intensive techniques that provide a partial work-around that is highly inconvenient and unsatisfactory.   Most people are not enthusiastic about mobile, and rather than attempting to accommodate or sacrifice their experience to the channel, they will simply not adopt the channel.

It’s likely worthwhile to explicitly state, for the binary-minded who seek to pronounce mobile as entirely good or bad, that there are also a number of ways in which the mobile channel is almost universally better than traditional methods of content delivery, so to give it equal time, here are a few examples of the capabilities mobile brings to the party:

• Mobile is portable.   The most obvious advantage of mobile is that it can betaken along for the ride everywhere a user goes, and studies show this is actually happening.  For many users, the mobile device is on a bedside table when they sleep, picked up as soon as they wake and carried with them until they return to bed.   While other technologies have been made portable, they are not actually ported by users, except on occasion.
• Mobile has vast capacity.  Granted, the device storage capacity of a smartphone tends to be rather paltry, but its connection to a network makes a universe of content available to the user.  This is simply not possible using traditional media: a person can carry a book or a magazine with them, but not an entire library, nor a suitcase full of CDs and DVDs to have a selection of music and video.
• Mobile is bite-sized.   While not all mobile content is well designed for the way people use the channel, there is a considerable amount that is very well designed in that it makes it very easy to find a “bite” of content without having to search or scan the entire device.   Even with the Internet, there are often several steps to get to the very thing you want – mobile is designed to serve it quickly: a single paragraph of text, a ten-second video clip, etc. are much easier to locate on mobile than in traditional media.

At the risk of generalizing, I suggest that those applications that are extremely popular on the mobile platform are these and others that are geared toward leveraging the unique or superior aspects of the channel to deliver an experience that cannot be had when using other media.   And it is in these areas that mobile users excel.

That said, an isolated assessment of capabilities is not sufficient.   When it comes to predicting adoption, consumer behavior is critical – that is, mobile may be capable of doing something, but it is not until users actually begin to use it for that purpose that the feature becomes meaningful.  Granted, there are statistics that suggest that mobile has high adoption rates, but I strongly suspect those are rigged to aggrandize the channel.  For example, enthusiasts spin the statistics to suggest users view ten times as many videos on mobile than they do on television, but this conveniently omits the fact that it was ten thirty-second videos (five minutes total viewing time) compared to “just one” program or movie on a television screen (thirty to 180 minutes of viewing time).  So that may be technically true, but entirely misleading.

Ultimately, my sense is that mobile will become part of the user’s diet, but never a staple food.   It will become one way that people read or watch video, but it seems highly unlikely to become the only way or even the preferred way, no even widely adopted for a specific task (e.g., a person may watch a two-hour movie on mobile when it is inconvenient to use a television, but when both are available they will choose television as the better medium).    A complete switch is unlikely to occur until mobile overcomes its limitations … which it presently does not, and in some ways it seems inconceivable that it ever will.