Listen Up! The Prairie's Podcast.
Get your headphones on and listen up to our latest episode about Facebook’s IPO! The transcript for this episode can be found below.
Transcript
Georgia: This is Listen Up! the podcast for all West Texas A&M University news, provided to you by The Prairie, the WTAMU student newspaper.
[ Narration begins while ambient sounds of someone surfing the web play in the background. ]
Georgia: If you haven’t heard already, Facebook recently went public, and some people are wondering how this move will affect users. In order to find the answers to that question, I recently interviewed some WT experts.
Drumheller: He’s… Zuckerberg’s trying to figure out how to get more advertising enabled on the mobile app. That’s kind of the latest thing. So we do see… a push on “how do we increase advertising” and that could be coming out of the IPO.
Georgia (Narrating): That is Dr. Kristina Drumheller. She is an Assistant Professor of Communication at WTAMU and is part of the MediaBuffs research group.
Georgia: Isn’t a large percentage of Facebook’s userbase mobile now?
Drumheller: I would imagine so, that people are at the very least checking their mobile even if they’re not doing everything on it.
Gerlich: Yeah, uh, let’s see… they’re [mobile ads] going to come as early as… it could be here as early as next month, mobile ads.
Georgia (Narrating): That is Dr. Nick Gerlich. He is a Professor of Marketing at WTAMU and also part of the MediaBuffs research group. The two are currently conducting a survey on Facebook’s timeline, which can be found on the MediaBuffs web site.
Gerlich: Given the fact that your screen size is a lot smaller, I have a hunch that the annoyance factor will be a lot higher. You know, when you’re looking at an 11-inch monitor, it’s a lot easier to avoid the right-hand pane. But when you’re looking at an iPhone, it’s going to be hard to miss it.
Drumheller: It depends on how prominent it is, right?
Gerlich: Yeah.
Drumheller: You know, in the game apps, a lot of those ads are kind of at the bottom. Those banner ads? You can ignore them pretty easily.
Gerlich: They’re so small.
Drumheller: Yeah. We still don’t know how intrusive the ads are going to be.
Gerlich: But, this is the thing that is really critical for Facebook. With 845 million users, about half of them are using mobile devices to access ads. They’re not getting a single one! And so, this is the missing link for Faceboook’s revenue stream. Because they’ve totally missed it for all these years. They haven’t gotten a nickel off all those mobile eyeballs.
Georgia (Narrating): One of the things the IPO revealed about Facebook is that it’s not very pleased with its current ad sales. Though advertising is a major source of revenue for the company, its sidebar ads currently found on the site have not been as effective as desired.
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