You Have an App for That… Now What? With more consumers using smartphones and connected devices, there is no avoiding the importance of mobile apps. For example, apps are responsible for 56 percent of all activity on Android smartphones according to data shared by Jonathan Carson, CEO of Telecom at Nielsen, during Nielsen’s Consumer 360 conference. Carson also welcomed Hiroto Ebata of Coca-Cola Japan, Heidi Browning of Pandora and David Young of Hotels.com to share insights on their experiences with mobile apps. What works? Carson noted that branded apps that “give back” are much more popular than other apps. Rewards apps are particularly popular. When it comes to promoting and marketing an app, Carson underscored the importance of “word-of-mouth.” For Pandora, Heidi Browning, noted that their strategy for mobile hinged on three key points.
Carson detailed additional musts for a successful app: Define success in advance: Who are you trying to reach? Key Findings. Mobile phones have become a near-ubiquitous tool for information-seeking and communicating: 83% of American adults own some kind of cell phone. These devices have an impact on many aspects of their owners’ daily lives. In a telephone survey conducted from April 26 to May 22, 2011 among a nationally-representative sample of Americans, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that, during the 30 days preceding the interview: Cell phones are useful for quick information retrieval (so much so that their absence can cause problems) – Half of all adult cell owners (51%) had used their phone at least once to get information they needed right away.
Young adults (those between the ages of 18 and 29) are especially likely to say that they have encountered several of these situations recently: Text messaging and picture taking are the most common uses of cell phones outside of voice calls; Smartphone owners take advantage of a wide range of their phones’ capabilities. eMarketer: 12 Digital Marketing Predictions for 2010. eMarketer is one of the most cited resources for internet marketing trends, so when I received some tasty predictions for 2010, I thought they were too useful to keep to myself. These insights include future monetization models, the effect of transparency on advertising, social and search, mobile, social commerce, public relations, social advertising, Twitter, video and mom/pop internet usage.
Enjoy! Hybrid Plans that Combine Subscription Fees with Advertising More marketers will increasingly embrace online video advertising, supported by the twin boom of video streams and video ad networks. Further support for video ad growth will come from sites that offer a deeper catalog of professional video content—such as whole seasons of TV shows (both present and past), exclusives of entire sports events and other premium content. Such offerings will attract larger audiences. From consumers, that will mean greater use of ad-blocking software or browser add-ons and more deletion of cookies.
eMarketer Webinar: Mobile Advertising and Marketing—Key Trends and Benchmarks – The eMarketer Blog. Friday, October 28, 2011 To listen and watch playback of the webinar, Mobile Advertising and Marketing—Key Trends and Benchmarks, click here. You can view the PowerPoint deck below. The webinar addresses the following key questions: What are the outlook and growth trajectory for mobile advertising and marketing? Which formats show the most promise? How are smartphone and tablet adoption shaping the mobile marketing landscape? About Noah Elkin Noah covers trends in mobile marketing, usage, content, devices and commerce.
Sponsored by Savvis. How to Encourage Mobile App Discovery and Usage. Mobile apps are used as marketing tools by many brands, but they need to be marketed themselves in order for app users to find and then download them. Mobile app users depend heavily on word-of-mouth and social media to choose which apps to download—and the price must be right. May 2011 research from MTV Networks found that recommendations from people they know and user reviews or recommendations were nearly tied as the top factor in discovering a new entertainment app for purchase or free download. When deciding to download a free entertainment app, mobile app users said the app store ratings were most important (50%), followed by personal recommendations from a trusted friend (43%). For paid apps, price was the leading factor (63%), with the availability of a lite version to try for free enticing 49% to download.
Once an app is discovered and downloaded, the question turns to whether users will keep that app loaded on their smartphones. Keep your business ahead of the digital curve. The App Economy – Who Is Really Making Money. It has been an interesting few months for APP Developers and marketers. With Apple hitting 500,000 Apps and 10 billion downloads from its App store and Google racing towards 300,000 Apps and 3 billon downloads. You would think that every developer with the word mobile in their resume is making a killing but as you will see below the big numbers and hype does not "make it rain" for all the players. So who is really profiting from the App Economy? 1) Apple is making a killing. 2) The mobile Ad networks and exchanges are profiting handsomely from App developers fighting for discovery in a crowed and hyper competitive landscape. 3) The incentivized CPI (Cost Per Install) players were profiting wildly in the recent past. 4) The big developers and publishers keep getting bigger. 5) Small development / freelance shops are making small sums of money.
Who is NOT profiting from the App Economy (this may surprise you) 1) The average App developer isn't making money. 4) Microsoft is just hanging out. Tapjoy reinvents itself as well as app discovery [PRESS RELEASE]AndroidGuys. Tapjoy Reinvents App Discovery with the Tapjoy Personal App Marketplace Tapjoy’s app marketplace delivers personalized recommendations based on a user’s individual tastes and interests; also fosters deeper engagement, social sharing and joint discovery San Francisco, CA – November 3, 2011 – Tapjoy, Inc. (www.tapjoy.com), a value exchange mobile ad network, today announced the beta launch of a new kind of personal marketplace that aims to forever change how consumers find, share and engage with mobile applications. The new Tapjoy personal app marketplace delivers customized app recommendations based on your likes and dislikes, what apps you’re currently using, what apps your friends are using, and other factors that predict which apps you’ll enjoy the most.
With more than 550,000 apps in the Apple App Store and 300,000 more in the Android Market, it’s not uncommon to get overwhelmed with choice when searching for new mobile apps suited to your individual tastes. About Tapjoy Article Tags. New Mobile App Advertising Network Launches For Consumers. According to a Nielsen report published this year, mobile apps are distributed mostly via app stores but the irony is this: apps are discovered only 58% of the time there. App developers and branded app owners are increasingly cluttered out of these stores and getting their apps found is a problem. MobileApps.com’s app advertising network helps apps get discovered out of the app stores and distributed via any web properties on the internet. The solution uses the open web as the distributions network for app discovery and help app owners avoid the over-crowded stores.
As brands join in the mobile app revolution, they too, are facing the same discovery problem in the app stores. According to the same survey, consumers search for branded apps only 21% of the time in the stores, resulting in low downloads for the branded app owners. The widgets act as mini app stores which is plugged into the web property. 33 ways to make your app a hit: VentureBeat's Discovery Directory. As app stores multiply and the number of publicly released apps — just the ones we can see and count — approaches 1 million, content developers are having a hard time standing out from the crowd. That process is known in the app world as discovery, and it’s getting harder with every new app, as developers fight for the attention of consumers and app-store managers.
“This is one of the key problems of our time,” said Savinay Berry, a vice president at Granite Ventures. That’s why we’re tackling the subject of discovery at our second annual conference, DiscoveryBeat 2010, on October 18 in San Francisco. This year, the problem is only getting worse. The Apple App Store has more than 250,000 apps. There are new app stores coming or already in place from many other platform owners, from cell phone carriers to independent app catalogs. Today, VentureBeat is showing off a bunch of the solutions aimed at solving the discovery dilemma. We have analogies for this kind of complexity. App discovery startup Appsfire gets $3.6 million investment.
Mobile application discovery startup Appsfire closed a $3.6 million funding round from French investors Idinvest, according to a Gigaom report. Helping consumers easily find new applications that interest them is increasingly important to developers and businesses looking to distinguish their product from competitors And considering the multitude of apps emerging from Apple’s app store, the Android Marketplace and Amazon, there is a large opportunity to make money from an app discovery platform like Appsfire. Appsfire, which is available for both iOS and Android devices, seeks to provide some clarity to the sea of new apps.
It works by scanning a user’s catalog of downloaded applications and then generating lists of recommended, featured and hot apps based on their interests. The company’s first discovery app launched last year and now has over 2 million users. App discovery News. Canalys analyze the growing App Market Revenue | Radio Mobile Tech. Can Social Gear Up to Solve the Mobile App Discovery Problem? - Liz Gannes - Social. In recent weeks, details have emerged about Facebook’s designs to become a mobile app platform. Part of the rationale behind Facebook building an HTML5-driven experience for other people’s apps was supposedly “to use Apple’s own devices against them to break the stranglehold they have on mobile app distribution.” That can’t be right, because the point of HTML5 is that it works on any compatible browser, and not just Safari. And while HTML5 is coming along, it still doesn’t rival the power of native apps, especially on Apple’s integrated hardware and software platform.
In fact, the more that I thought about it, and the more I spoke with mobile app developers, I realized there is a nugget of powerful compatibility between Facebook and Twitter and mobile apps that’s being glossed over, and it’s not about HTML5. Instead, it’s where Apple — and to an even greater extent Google’s Android — has largely failed: Helping users find new apps and keep using them. For instance: Said Sarver: App stores' direct revenue to exceed $14 billion next year and reach close to $37 billion by 2015. Canalys today announced that app store direct revenue from the sale of apps, in-app purchases and subscriptions across smart phones and pads combined will hit $14.1 billion next year, up 92% from an expected $7.3 billion in 2011, and will reach $36.7 billion by 2015.1 This equates to a four-year compound annual growth rate for 2011 to 2015 of just under 50%.
According to the analyst firm, this projected revenue growth presents an excellent opportunity for mobile network operators (MNOs) to compete with vendor app stores. MNOs have a strong platform on which to offer an improved customer experience, leveraging their detailed subscriber data. ‘The leading stores already have hundreds of thousands of apps, so it’s hard for operators to compete with those numbers,’ said Canalys Analyst Tim Shepherd. ‘On the other hand, too much choice brings serious problems in terms of application discovery for both developers and users, which operators can turn to their advantage.’ About Canalys. Research firm puts app downloads at 183 billion by 2015 thanks to in-app purchases. We’re continually hearing about how the mobile app market keeps growing, with the iTunes App Store leading the charge and pulling down a whole lot of money.
But the pace of that growth is something that’s up for debate – is it really fast, or is it really really fast? Research firm IDC says it’s really really fast, hitting 183 billion downloads by 2015, according to a report from Pocket Gamer. That’s in contrast to the numbers released by another (rival) research firm, ABI Research, in March, which put the number at 44 billion by 2016. The big difference between the two analyses is, as IDC says, in-app purchases. Here’s a quote from the Pocket Gamer story: “The firm states that, rising from a base of 38.2 billion downloads in 2011, nearly 182.7 billion app downloads will be made globally by 2015 as ‘developers create apps for virtually every aspect of a mobile user's personal and business lives.’”
Freemium model already a success That said, 186 billion? Research firm expects app revenue to jump 92 percent by 2012, mobile carriers to join in. Another day, another research firm releasing an analysis of the mobile app market and making predictions about how huge it will be in X amount of time. Yesterday, IDC released a report stating it expected mobile downloads to reach 183 billion by 2015, backed by the power of in-app purchases to make money and drive more developers to make their apps free to download.
Today, Canalys, another research firm, took the prediction in a slightly different direction: It released a report that says we should expect mobile app revenues to leap up by 92 percent, just by next year, putting the entire industry at $14.1 billion by the end of 2012. The story comes from PocketGamer.biz, where they’re reporting that much like IDC’s analysis, Canalys is seeing the growth of the mobile app market driven by in-app purchases and subscription models. Canalys sees revenue for next year increasing over the $7.3 billion already generated in 2011, with continued growth to $36.7 billion by 2015.