So Chitika puts out a comparison of mobile and non-mobile clickthroughs across their ad network. Mobile clickthroughs were at 58% of non-mobile clickthroughs when shown exactly the same ads. To Chitika, this means “mobile Internet users are disinterested in advertising at an extremely high rate.” It actually means that unoptimized ads perform suboptimally – you stick a big online banner and a high-res site on a little mobile screen, and it’s not going to look right, if the users even scroll over to your below-the-teeny-tiny-fold ads at all.
More interesting is the overall share of traffic going to mobile – 1.5%. If not optimizing for mobile cuts your revenue in half for that share, well, that’s a loss, but it’s not much of a loss. At this time it still feels too small for all but the largest publishers to care, especially if putting together the mobile template has upfront costs.
