A quick note on some recent numbers that may make some of our readers smile..
Angry Birds the enormously addictive smartphone game (which has only 220 levels haha) has passed the 50 million download level on the iPhone and Android. Angry Birds was developed by Finnish game developer Rovio headed by our friend Peter Vesterbacka the Mighty Bird. Back to the stats. Most early iPhone downloads of Angry Birds were paid, most later Android downloads are free versions. How is it doing? Try 200 million gaming minutes per day! And is it making any money? The game cost 100,000 dollars to develop and earns a fresh 2 million dollars every month. Half of the income is directly from gamers, half from advertising (source for the above, Advertising Age 18 January, 2011)
Then lets look at the Guardian and its mobile strategy. The Guardian has an iPhone app, but it is not blinded by iSyndrome (the mistaken notion that creating an iPhone app is tantamount to having a mobile strategy) - rather the Guardian believes in no phone left behind.. So we have the numbers. May I have the envelope please? The iPhone app has been downloaded 214,000 times. Quite nice. Now what of mobile web users of the Guardian mobile website? It has 3 million unique users monthly. How much bigger is the mobile web than smartphone apps? 14x bigger thats the number, according to Guardian's users.. (the data from Mobile Entertainment 19 January 2011)
Then what of the hottest tech story right now, Augmented Reality and its poster-child, Layar the Augmented Reality browser from the company based out of the Netherlands? The company is now a year old and there are over 1,700 separate 'layers' created. How many users? One million active users of Layar. (Source Layar presentation at XML conference in Malmo Sweden 21 January 2011) Congrats guys! (Oh, PS: Layar CEO Raimo van der Klein kindly wrote the foreword to my 10th book, you can read the foreword in total here)
Then how big is mobile advertising today? It only passed a Billion dollars in value just a while back. Now we hear from JP Morgan that the total value of mobile advertising in 2010 was... 11.5 Billion dollars! Even from the biggest numbers I saw reported for the 2009 number, that is still enormous growth in just one year - at least 2.5 times growth in one year! Was last year the year of mobile advertising? It sure was haha.. (source Nothing but Net report by JP Morgan January 2011)
What of my fave service ie SMS text messaging? Informa counted that the total value of SMS was 105.5 Billion dollars (source Informa 28 January 2011).
And how is the hype with the app stores? We get ever more revealing numbers. Now Appsfire reports of their survey of iPhone and iOS device owners, that the average iOS device has 88 apps on it that were downloaded by the user (and another 20 that were pre-installed on the phone). 28% of all apps that have been downloaded by the users were paid apps, and 72% were free apps. Games formed 32% of all downloaded apps (source Appsfire 28 January 2011). These numbers mean that the revenues earned by the paid apps are decreasing per paid app, not increasing! So the economics of the app store are deteriorating for the app developers since I did my landmark app store economics study here on this blog haha.. The truth is slowly emerging, that at least paid apps are a miserable economic opportunity many many times worse than the typical hits businesses like pop music, hollywood movies, books, etc.
There you go, enjoy! We will return with more stats as soon as we get them haha.. And for those who maybe missed it with the holidays, my Fortune 500 CEO guide on how to build a winning mobile strategy in 2011 is here.
Thanks for the quick numbers.
Any thoughts on Friday's announcement by Nokia?
The US press seems to be certain that they're going to go with WP7 - which would constitute the final triumph of the US blogosphere over all reason.
Posted by: agoedde | February 08, 2011 at 12:08 PM
Foul!
Tomi, I enjoy the site and thanks to you, I have been able to create several posts on my site. But this I must protest.
You are throwing out *disconnected* numbers.
So, SMS is valued at over $100 billion and apps still just a few billion? Fair enough. But -- which one has the most growth? If not for the *iPhone* then Angry Birds would be relatively unknown! Further, if you're a few guys in Finland with coding skills (or advertising skills) which is going to be a better route for you to make money? Apps or the much larger SMS market *controlled* by carriers?
Posted by: Brian S Hall | February 08, 2011 at 04:18 PM
even if guardian has been downloaded 214K, that does not mean 214K users are reading guardian on the guardian app, those people might still be reading guardian on the web through RSS,google search,facebook shares,Twitter etc
Posted by: Evan | February 09, 2011 at 05:47 AM
also has advertising caught up to paid download in terms of scale. Rovio is expecting to make 1 million dollars per month on android
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/03/angry-birds-android-1-million-advertising/
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those people might still be reading guardian on the web through RSS,google search,facebook shares,Twitter etc
Posted by: mulberry | March 23, 2011 at 04:30 AM
Just what do you think people are buying smart phones for? They can send SMS on the cheapest of phones.
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Divide all the revenue derived from web sites by the number of web sites
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app is tantamount to having a mobile strategy) - rather the Guardian believes in no phone left behind.. So we have the numbers. May I have the envelope please? The iPhone app has been downloaded 214,000 times.
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Posted by: Office 2007 | May 31, 2011 at 02:58 AM
Games formed 32% of all downloaded apps (source Appsfire 28 January 2011). These numbers mean that the revenues earned by the paid apps are decreasing per paid app, not increasing! So the economics of the app store are deteriorating for the app developers since I did my landmark app store economics study here on this blog haha.. The truth is slowly emerging, that at least paid apps are a miserable economic opportunity many many times worse than the typical hits businesses like pop music, hollywood movies, books, etc.
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Posted by: Yves Saint Laurent | August 08, 2011 at 02:49 AM
ast paid apps are a miserable economic opportunity many many times worse than the typical hits businesses like pop music, hollywood movies, books, etc.
Posted by: Cheap Beats By Dre | August 08, 2011 at 07:58 AM
So how many is the 'unique' user count? That is 3.7 billion people. It is already over half of the total population of the planet - and considering most of the planet lives in very poor conditions, mobile phones are by a very wide margin the most widely spread technology on the planet. Yes, 54% of all people alive on the planet have a mobile phone.
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