Response to Vibhu Norby’s post: Why We’re Pivoting from Mobile-first to Web-first
My TL;DR
An ad-revenue based mobile app necessitates a fast-growth strategy that pushes high volumes of new users. The tools to optimize that conversion funnel (a/b testing) don’t work on mobile because of the clunky update process. With all the discussion of apps vs web, it’s easy to lose sight of the critical point in this article: sign up friction is A KEY REASON for apps being unable to monetize.
As I said before, ad-supported companies need to grow very large, very fast, and I said that that is at the cost of your privacy. I made my case for why web companies can retain and acquire users easier, and the way to do that is through testing and the web’s ability to provide quick and perceivable value to a user. What follows is my theory: All advertising-based companies will innovate and iterate to approach zero set-up time, zero friction user actions, and a maximum viral factor, because that increases their growth and revenue.
In order to get to zero set-up time, in the best-case scenario a user will be shown a highly targeted list of suggested friends, auto-follow people, or not have to sign-up at all. In any case, they will not be provided customization options. Also, the user will be shown interesting and relevant content immediately, which requires a vast amount of viewable and public content. In order to achieve zero-friction user action flows, like searching or sharing, it will provide few or zero advanced sharing options and in some cases even share automatically on your behalf. Lastly, to increase the viral factor of the app, invitations will be sent seamlessly or automatically and results and content will be available for any user preference or search."
Persona will continue to innovate on these issues to provide real value to both end users and devs. Identity is still in its early days. There’s much to be done to build an identity system that’s fully fit for the web.