Tag: mobile app

YouTube recreates its experience over mobile devices

| July 30, 2015

The new smartphone app will be designed to make it simpler for users to create and find videos.

YouTube is redesigning the experience that it provides to users of mobile devices, since over half of the views to their video platform are now coming from smartphones and tablets.

This move was first revealed by Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube, in California at VidCon.

According to the statistics that are being generated by YouTube, itself, there are over one billion people around the world who use that platform. Over half of those views are being generated through mobile devices. Moreover, the revenue generated over smartphones and tablets for the platform is increasing by over 100 percent per year. In the new mobile app, there will be an additional three tabs added in order to make it simpler both to find videos and to create them.

The three new YouTube tabs for mobile devices will be: Home, Subscriptions, and Account.

Mobile Devices - YouTubeThe new Home tab will provide the user with an intelligent video list that has been selected for that individual based on his or her viewing history. The Subscriptions tab will provide a list of the most recent videos from the channels to which he or she has opted to subscribe. There will also be a notification option that can be turned on so that the user can receive a notification when one of those channels has released a new video. The Account tab will provide the user with a list of every video that they have uploaded, as well as their watch history.

The mobile app will make it possible for users to record their own videos and to upload them. From the application, they will be able to trim them, add music and filters, and upload them.

The new mobile app is already available for Android users and on the mobile web. That said, users of iOS mobile devices will still need to wait a little longer. It is on the way but at the time of the writing of this article, it had not been released at the Apple Store. According to project managers Omri Amarilio and Omri Amarilio, users can expect to see even more features being added to the application and the mobile web experience before 2015 is through.

Mobile security issues are costing marketers $1 billion in ad fraud

| July 29, 2015

Malicious mobile apps are becoming an increasingly problematic expense for advertisers.

Forensiq, a fraud detection firm, has now announced the results of its recent research, which indicated that mobile security issues produced by malicious apps are generating an additional cost to advertisers that is close to $1 billion every year.

In-app advertising has become a tremendous business, worth an estimated $20 billion in the United States.

This rate is continuing to grow along with the popularity of smartphones. However, of that amount that is being spent on mobile marketing, it is being estimated that about a twentieth of it is actually being wasted. Mobile security issues in the form of fraudulent and malicious apps that can hijack smartphones and convert them into ad-viewing botnets could be costing as much as $1 billion of that $20 billion in advertising money.

There are now many different known forms of these mobile security issues that plague device users and advertisers.

Mobile Security Costing Billions in FraudWhile there are a broad spectrum of different types of mobile fraud, which includes gadget emulation, location spoofing, and mobile user-agent spoofing, in addition to user acquisition scams, Forensiq says that it doesn’t stop there. It claims to have identified a new type of fraud, which it calls “mobile device hijacking.”

What that involves is the use of a malicious app that pretends to act as a human on a device by loading new pages or using various different application functions, each of which cause the device to load advertising. That said, while this may somewhat replicate human behavior, it also loads a much larger number of ads than would be the case with normal usage – up to 20 ads each minute. Often, this occurs in the background while the application in question isn’t being used, so that the owner of the device won’t even see that it is happening.

This mobile security problem is leading to an estimated $1 billion in lost dollars for marketers, but it also causes the device to eat through a user’s battery life and bandwidth. This means that it’s not just advertisers who are paying for this fraud, but the device owners, themselves, will also often face increased costs.