An overview of the top trends impacting consumer applications, which was presented in November, 2009 at Best Buy Headquarters.
Trends covered include mobile apps, social apps, browser add-ons, and desktop apps.
The presentation was meant for marketers and executive types versus developers, although developers would find use out of the presentation too.
13. AppStore over 100,000 apps Over 100,000 11/4/09 65,000 in July/09 Source: http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/03/26/iphone-app-store-30000-apps-but-slowing/
14. Only 5% have over 100,000 Active Users Source: http://mashable.com/2009/06/25/iphone-apps-admob/
32. Line between desktop and mobile is becoming blurred “The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report claiming that mobile devices will be the primary access point to the Internet by 2020.
34. Join the Application Discussion Join W3i Twitter AppNet Group on LinkedIn W3i Newsletter www.W3i.com Links on top right corner White Paper on Making Money with Apps Drop Off Card
Notas del editor
Welcome, I’m Rob (joke) and I’m Ryan (joke)
We founded W3i, which mission is to add value by connecting people to applications.
How do we do that?
We know users want applications for free.
So publishers of apps with consumer demand
Are connected to…
Advertisers of apps willing to pay for distribution.
Everyone wins! Users get free, valued apps. Publishers get paid for promoting advertisers’ apps. Advertisers get additional distribution to grow their user base.To date, we have distributed over 331M installs including: 36M security apps, 8.4M weather apps, 27M toolbars, and 14M shopping apps.
Enough with introductions. Now for why we are here.To answer: How big is the app market, how fast is it growing, where is the growth coming from?Today, when people think about appsthey usually think in this order:Mobile (iPhone)Social (Facebook)Browser (IE and Firefox)Desktop (Windows)Let’s walk through each of these app markets and try to answer these key market questions.
Quickly go over some app trendsW3i doesn’t currently have a mobile business but we had one until it was sold last summer. Can I see a show of hands from any of you that have mobile applications published today? You all should speak up if you see anything which you don’t agree with here.
I read a report from Flurry for June that showed that the iPhone & iPod Touch dominates app usage with a combined 91% of all usage. Android had 7%. Blackberry and Java each had 1%.
No surprise that with so many applications only a small % are seeing a decent amount of active users.AdMob defined active user as having used an app at least once during a month.Mashable covered the AdMob release shown above. We have a strange connection to the Editor In Chief at Mashable. He was a business partner of ours (never met him, he was from upper New York) when we were 16. Don’t you love technology?
Lots of free apps are going to be looking for ad revenues.
Show me the money!$2.7B worldwide mobile app spending in 2009$13B for 2012100% growth in 2010 and then about 70% growth for the two years that followFolks, you won’t find many multi-billion $ markets today growing at this pace. Mobile apps growing at a frightening pace and so very deserving of the attention they are getting.
Top categories: News, Reference, Weather, Health & FitnessFollowed by: Books, Utilities, Games, Lifestyle
Facebook is king. It may have been more interesting if MySpace was acquired by a technology minded company instead of News Corp.At one point early on, MySpace was burning $250K per month (mostly in bandwidth) and the parent company was considering selling it for under $50M. The former COO of Intermix, parent company of MySpace, who led the sale to News Corp told us that the primary reason they sold to News Corp was because of pressure from the venture capitalists who had grown impatient with their company.Anyways, lets talk about social networking app trends.
Facebook is clearly dominant as you can see here.LinkedIn for B2B might be an interesting area.Twitter is the up an comer here. I recently had a call with someone from ClearSpring. A company who helps applications and widgets with distribution. They said they were seeing the best success with Facebook, Twitter, and Email.
Show me the money social apps!Source is RockYou’s blog which itself cited numerous sources. $1.4 to $1.9B in revenue for 2009. The most significant growth will be within the virtual currency segment which grows by 50% yoy. The other social advertising is only expected to grow by 8% yoy.
Any browser extension (or add-on as some prefer to call).Toolbars, Sidebars, Command shortcuts, etc.W3i creates some very sophisticated toolbars for its clients plus we distribute Yahoo’s Toolbar.
Providing the user some type of utilility is what works well for these types of apps.Toolbars dominant this market today. Yahoo and Google share 70% of the revenue.While 50% of users don’t use toolbars at all. Many users though rate convenient access to the search provider as having a strong influence on who they choose to search with. This why the toolbars fulfill a utility value which influences users search behavior so much.Firefox has the greatest number of extensions today. Based primarily on the fact that it is easier to develop for. Microsoft requires compiled code due the security related to its integrating Explorer into the operating system.The past few years have been relatively flat for this category. Technology is quickly improving though to further enhance the support of extensions:Microsoft with IE8, Google with Chrome, and Firefox with its latest version and JetpackThere is a conference on December 11th in San Jose called the Add-on conference. Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla will be there along with 200 other browser extension developers and business folks. Some very cool apps will be represented there. Our company is one of the sponsors. If anyone is interested in attending, let me know afterwards and I’ll send you information as well we may be able to get you free passes.
Leveraging data from ComScore I was able to show the web-site visitors received, by app category, for the month of January of 2009. Each web-site was qualified as having downloads. The conversion rates from visitor to download likely do vary quite a bit. So this is really an estimate of the key categories and not highly accurate.
Creating opportunities for start-up developers, cutting down on overhead costs.
As the browsers get better on mobile, the web pages and applications will begin to be more alike.Earlier this year, AdWords changed default setting for advertisers such that their normal web paid-search ads will be shown on Google searches conducted on iPhones, G1s, or any other mobile device that features a full web browser.
Recap: How big is the app market, how fast is it growing, where is the growth coming from?Mobile (iPhone) – $2.7B this year, $13B in 2012Social (Facebook) - $1.5B this year, 2.9B for 2011, virtual currency the fastest growing sourceBrowser (IE and Firefox) - $1.75B this year, has been relatively flat, but enhanced support from browsers shows some signs of growthDesktop (Windows) – Still a multi-billion dollar industry, however, retail sales show a 12.9% yoy decline