People use mobile phones in addition to desktops. They might be doing a price check on a mobile phone and then actually purchasing on their desktop.<p>They might be reading the news, which is roughly 50%-99% PR placements depending on the publication, which pushes them down some sales funnel or another. They're just browsing higher up in the conversion funnel. Searches higher up in the funnel tend to be less valuable in terms of costs per click than searches which are closer to the purchase.<p>Everything in the news is marketing anyway, and it's just as paid for as it is when it's an ad -- often times it's more expensive, because access to the news is rationed by publicists and PR firms rather than by the advertising department. Further, the bulk of social media is the effluvia of PR as it reverberates through people who talk too much on the internet. As far as Google is concerned, that propaganda consumption is just likely to stimulate more searches later on which can be advertised against.<p>The flow might be: Check Facebook App -> Click Gossip Rag Article -> See fabulous new shoes in celebrity photo -> Order lunch on Seamless App -> Go home from work -> Remember to Google "buy red high heels kim kardashian" -> Click ad -> Price check, bounce (Google gets paid) -> "red high heels discount" -> Click ad (Google gets paid again) -> Buy shoes.<p>When they are ready to buy, they will pay for the $10 click -- maybe multiple times across different advertisers -- on their desktop or $15 app download on their mobile phone.<p>The headline that this author uses is also really loosey goosey. Google's ad products on mobile are also increasingly more biased towards generating paid phone calls. When you search for a locksmith or auto repair, you want to get a guy on the phone right now, and are likely to need to buy immediately.<p>So, this isn't really Google's "growing problem" -- Google as an organization is set up to use machine learning to figure out how to make money off of mobile search behavior. The company is still learning what it has to do to make money off of mobile search behavior and how it differs from behavior on desktops.<p>Also, as far as Google's customers (advertisers) are concerned, if a desktop search results in people subscribing to an e-mail list that they read on their phone, the advertiser earned measurable results from the money that they gave Google. If their customers don't like to buy on mobile or they behave differently, campaigns can be configured accordingly.