How Big is the Mobile Apps Business?

It's getting harder to figure out how big the mobile apps business is, despite its growth. Actually, it is because of its growth that the tracking is becoming more difficult. A few years ago, one only had to track sales of mobile apps, or use of mobile apps, or downloads of mobile apps.


In 2012, mobile application revenues from in-app purchases will pass pay-per-download revenues, according to ABI Research.  One might argue that "revenue is revenue," but there is a big difference between gross revenue and net revenue. 


To be sure, apps sold in most app stores represent about 70 percent "net" proceeds for the app supplier. But proceeds from in-app purchases can be a different story, depending on what it is that is being sold. Up to this point, arguably most in-app purchases were digital goods designed to be used inside an app. 


But someday that will change, and more of the in-app sales volume will be of all sorts of products, and one has to anticipate that more of the sales volume over time will be of products that do not provide 70-percent "net" proceeds to an app provider, because the products are created by third parties, while the app serves mainly as a sales channel. 


In such cases, revenue for the sales partner will be quite minimal, compared to sales of in-app digital goods that essentially are parts of the app experience. 


“As a revenue model, in-app purchase is very limited today,” says Mark Beccue, ABI Research senior analyst, mobile services. “The vast majority of current in-app revenue is being generated by a tiny percentage of people who are highly-committed mobile game players.  We don’t believe the percentage of mobile game players making in-app purchases will grow significantly, so for in-app purchase revenues to grow, mobile developers other than game developers must adopt it.”


Despite these challenges, in-app purchases will successfully spread outside of games. Total mobile app revenues from pay-per-download, in-app purchase, subscriptions, and in-app advertising will soar over the next five years, growing from $8.5 billion in 2011 to $46 billion in 2016, according to 


A 2010 study by Chetan Sharma Consulting, commissioned by the GetJar app store, projected that the global mobile apps economy is set to be worth $17.5 billion by 2012. 


Mobile app downloads were expected to increase from over seven billion downloads in 2009 to almost 50 billion in 2012. 


The study also found that in 2008 there were just four apps stores, while there are 38 in 2010. 


ExperTech, a recruiting firm for information technology professionals, notes that  “82 percent of our clients have said they plan on developing a mobile app in 2012,” says Joe Budzienski, XperTech EVP.

And it would be hard to miss the dramatic growth of the mobile apps trend. Trade group TechNet says mobile app development is creating jobs at a dramatic pace.

According to a new TechNet study, there are now roughly 466,000 jobs in the so-called “app economy” in the United States, largely defined as jobs involved in the creation of apps or jobs at firms that create and sell apps. 


That’s a dramatic improvement over 2007, when the number of people involved in the mobile apps business arguably was close to zero. Mobile app employment study

Apple is in a Class By Itself

Apple is in a class by itself, both financially and in terms of its leadership of the technology industry. Consider that Apple represents a 3.8 percent weighting in the Standard & Poors 500 Index. 


In the fourth quarter of 2011, S&P 500 firms grew earnings 6.6 percent. But remove only Apple from the index and S&P 500 and the index grew at only a 2.8 percent rate. In other words, Apple performs so much better than most other firms that it distorts perceptions of the market. 


In the product area, though many firms "compete" against Apple, few can approach it. In very real terms, there is not yet so much a "tablet" market as there is an "iPad" market, as Apple holds a 62-percent share of unit sales.


In smart phones, the story is not so much unit shipments as profit. In the third quarter of 2011 Apple earned about 61 percent of total smart phone profits, globally, all by itself. 


Although soaring sales of Amazon’s Kindle Fire and other low-priced tablets trimmed Apple Inc.’s media tablet market share in the fourth-quarter, it was Apple’s own newly introduced iPhone 4S that proved to be the strongest competitor for the iPad during the final three months of 2011.

 

Small Signs of Change in TV Habits

The vast majority (90.4 percent) of U.S. TV households pay for a TV subscription of some type (cable, telephone company or satellite), while 75.3 percent buy broadband Internet.

Changes are brewing, however, as consumers seek out the subscription service that makes the most sense for them, NIelsen says.

Some of the changes involve simple shifts of market share. The number of homes subscribing to wired cable has decreased 4.1 percent in the past year at the same time that telephone company-provided and satellite TV have seen increases of 21.1 percent and 2.1 percent, respectively.

But nearly a million more homes are subscribing to broadband while skipping a traditional paid TV subscription, a fact that might lead some to argue that users are using their broadband connections to watch streaming video as an alternative to buying a TV subscription.

There are also are 5.1 million broadcast-TV-only homes that buy broadband, another potential sign that people are substituting streaming video for a subscription.

But most of the market buys both video and broadband. Some 80.8 million homes are in that category, while 22.3 million homes subscribe to cable TV but do not buy broadband.

Though broadcast only, but broadband-buying homes comprise the smallest subscriber group, the number of these homes has increased by 22.8 percent since the third quarter of  2010.

The increase in broadcast-only/broadband homes is not necessarily an indication of downgrading services, though.  


Though less than five percent of the television households, U.S. consumers in homes with broadband Internet access and free, broadcast TV stream video twice as much as the general cross-platform population . They also watch half as much TV. You might conclude that evidence of change in TV consumption is most clear in this segment of the market.

Deutsche Telekom Evaluating Everything Everywhere Sale?

Deutsche Telekom AG is said to be evaluating its options for selling or otherwise monetizing its stake in the Everything Everywhere joint venture in the United Kingdom, an apparent direct result of the failure of the AT&T deal to buy T-Mobile USA. 


Deutsche Telekom had been counting on proceeds from that sale to support investment in fourth generation networks in Germany and elsewhere. Deutsche Telekom and AT&T Inc. in December 2011 called off a $39 billion deal that would have allowed Deutsche Telekom to cut its debt by 13 billion euros and repurchase five billion euros of its own shares. 


The problem now is that Deutsche Telekom still needs cash to accomplish those goals. 

Will Tablet Sales Eclipse PCs?

No product in Apple’s history has sold faster than the Apple iPad, about 55 million units so far. “It took us years to sell iPhones, Macs and iPods,” says Apple CEO Tim Cook. “This thing is on a trajectory that's off the charts.”

That inevitably raises questions, such as whether tablets as a product category will displace PCs. Apple has definite opinions. The tablet market will be bigger than the PC market, ultimately, Cook argues. Right now, it is hard to argue with that forecast.

Cook says he does 80 percent to 90 percent of his work on an iPad. It wouldn’t be hard to see that being the case for many knowledge workers or executives who mostly consume content rather than create it, sales forces that mostly use screens to make presentations, or customer service personnel who mostly interact with information, rather than creating it.

In consumer settings, as there are many people who find the way they use Internet apps can be handled by a smart phone, others might find that, most of the time, the things they “use PCs” for actually can be done on a tablet.

The extent to which that means they will buy more tablets, and fewer PCs, is probably not debatable. People are shifting discretionary spending into purchasing of tablets. In multi-PC homes, that probably means “most” of the devices will, over time, come to be tablets, not PCs.

Most multi-PC homes will continue to have a PC. But the incremental spending likely will be on tablets, one might argue.

Perhaps in large part, the iPad resonated with consumers because they had been “prepped” for the device. “The iTunes Store was already in play, the App Store was already in play,” Cook says. “People were trained on iPhone.”

“They already knew about multi-touch,” for example. “Lots of things that became intuitive when you used a tablet, came from before.” 

What seems to have happened is that the tablet enables about 80 percent of the activities people use PCs for, even if tablets do not enable the final 20 percent of activities that have to do with content creation.

It isn't that PCs do not have unique value. It's just that what most people do, most of the time, seems not to require all that value. So, yes, it would be reasonable to predict that, in the future, tablets will outnumber PCs.

How do you Monetize a Browser?

You might, from time to time, wonder how any number of application providers that "give away" their products actually make money.

Browser providers traditionally have made money from advertising, so it is no surprise that Opera Software has purchased two ad-serving networks.

Opera has bought Mobile Theory and 4th Screen Advertising, and in 2010, Opera purchasedAdMarvel, another advertising company.

By swallowing Mobile Theory and 4th Screen Advertising, Opera said it hopes to "better monetize" the traffic flowing through the Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers. Opera buys mobile ads networks

Smart Phone Sales Up 67% in Europe

In 2011, demand for mobile phones increased by 67 percent, according to analysts at GfK.

In 2011, 258 million handsets were bought by European consumers, a 3.2 percent increase on 2010.

In 2010, smartphones only constituted 22 percent of the sales market, but in 2011 this figure increased to 36 percent. In December 2011, the share climbed to 45 percent.

Retailers in all 25 surveyed countries in Europe registered high double-digit sales, ranging between 35 percent in the United Kingdom and 105 percent in the Eurasian countries of Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkey and the Ukraine.

With a volume share of over 17 percent, the United Kingdom is the biggest market for smartphones in Europe at present, followed by Germany, Austria and Switzerland with 16 percent overall.

The average price of a mobile phone in Europe increased by eight percent between 2010 and 2011, to EUR 200. Demand for smartphones higher than ever before in Europe