We like to think about the mobile app market from every possible angle, and consider anything, no matter how crazy, that may positively impact developer’s revenue share (trust us, we’ve had some zany ideas that will never see the light of day). However, before you can start dissecting the governing dynamics of the system and the non-rational purchasing patterns of customers, we must first organize and understand the various players within the mobile application ecosystem.
Definitions & Governing Dynamics
- Mobile Analytics Providers: these companies provide “census” data that tracks usage within a mobile app and aggregate data such as usage, geo-location, type of users, and device information. Think of the service Google Analytics provides websites, but for mobile applications. Some examples include Pinch Media, Flurry, and Medialets. By the way, Google just launched their own version of mobile analytics yesterday. Read more about that and our ideas for the future of mobile analytics here.
- Advertisters: the major advertisers are actually ad exchange networks, such as Mobclix, Admob, and TapJoy, with the biggest issue being fill rates. Interestingly, TechCrunch just wrote an article on TapJoy’s potentially future market dominance in this space, as they’re boasting a 99.9% fill rate and a 250% increase in ad revenue for free apps. Check out the article here.
- Developers: well, you know who you are, and you know what your most important issues are. We are not presumptive enough to assume we know or can understand all of the specific and granular issues you’re facing on a daily basis, but would love to understand so we might figure out a solution together.
- Mobile Apps: clearly, if you’re reading these or unless you haven’t turned on the TV or left your house in the last few years, you have a pretty good understanding of what a mobile app is. And guess what? There are more than 100,000 in the iTunes app store now.
- End Users: we like to call this the holy grail of app development. We need to spread the marketing effort across the customer journey: ignorance > awareness > consideration > purchase > usage > advocate. The more advocates you can produce, the more viral your app will become and, well, you know the rest. Think about where your current market efforts have been focused, evenly across this customer journey? We’re guessing that you’ve mostly only focused towards the beginning on the ignorance and awareness steps. How many advocates are you trying to produce?
Special thanks to Greg Bunch for his innovation in the customer journey area.
