Apps will generate revenues of $25 billion in 2013; $16.4 billion will come from smartphone apps and $8.8 billion from tablet apps. Of this $25 billion, 65 percent will come from Apple’s iOS ecosystem, 27 percent from Google’s Android, and the remaining 8 percent from the other mobile platforms. In 2018, app revenues will be worth $92 billion with tablet apps being worth more than smartphone apps, forecasts ABI Research.- MobiThinking.

The second most popular app category, overall, after games is messaging apps, also known as over-the-top (OTT) apps, according to Portio. It is estimated that there are at least 1 billion OTT messaging apps users around the world. The most popular of these are: Facebook Messenger (700 million users worldwide); WeChat (300 million); What’sApp (200 million); Viber (175 million); Line (100 million); Kakao Talk (70 million); BBM (60 million); iMesssage (45 million); ChatON (10 million); Skype (10 million).

According to Insights from a Mobile Campaign study looking at 378 mobile campaigns with over one million impressions, Rich media, in-app campaigns outperform banner and mobile web.

Rich media campaigns performed far better than standard banner ads, sometimes as much as 400%. Breaking it down a bit further,rich media ads served within mobile applications were more compelling than those served on the mobile web. Users clicked on in-app ads 1.53% of the time, vs. 1.12% for mobile web ads. Standard banner ads, by comparison, average a 0.39% click-through rate when served in-app and 0.32% when displayed on a mobile website.
In-app ads perform 1.7X better than mobile web, but they are still the minority. The number of ad campaigns and impressions on the mobile web vs. in-app is nearly a 3:2 ratio.

A report on The Mobile Consumer published by Neilsen in February 2013 gives the details on App Usage and use of mobile video across countries.

Key Takeaways

1. Mobile consumers interact with rich media campaigns better than the web browser campaigns.

2. Targeting the mobile consumer with apps that are popular with the audience segment will give a better audience reach and CTR either with in-app advertising or browser based campaigns linked to apps.

3. Mobile Web is the preferred way to watch Mobile Video and the consumers see advertising while using the app and the internet, they reportedly did not see the ads while viewing the video.

4. Games, Social Networking and Video Movie apps are more popular than the Shopping Apps in the US and are likely to give better audience reach for Mobile Campaigns.

Source: mobiThinking, Neilsen, Opera MediaWorks

Image Courtesy of Goldspotmedia.com