Despite phenomenal growth in the last few years, the Mobile industry has remained, in some areas, quite marginalised. As much as mobile ad revenue, for example, has expanded at a crazy rate; it still only accounts for less than 10% of the total ad revenue takings across all advertising properties. This has confused more than one app user, where it seems to be standard issue to have ads floating around every free app you own. How can something as common as that not generate massive income? Well, it was largely about a numbers game, and for the first time, mobile apps aren’t just a big part of where audiences are going to, it’s becoming the place where audiences go.
(UPDATE 2017: Looks like the tipping point was right around when this article was written.)
Aside from also challenging TV veiwership numbers, app useage numbers are now roughly equal to those who are using laptops and PCs. This is something of an amazing statistic when you realise how common it is for households to have 3 or more computers that are regularly used. But the data doesn’t lie, and according to the mobile market researchers Flurry, there are now 224 million app users to 221 laptop and pc users out there.
App usage is also starting to dwarf more traditional types of media consumption options. Flurry found that during the “prime-time” hours of 7-10pm, there were on average 52 million people using ap
As the above graph shows, app usage is strong throughout the day, with the gradient going up until about 9-10pm where it starts to tail off. Interestingly, unlike other forms of media, weekday and weekend usage didn’t change an awful lot, with weekdays still getting 75% of the usage of the weekends. This points to the flexibility and portability of smartphones and mobile devices being a key component of their success. You can use any app you have, any time, anywhere. This causes much more consistent usage than say, TV, where you’ll get massive spikes and troughs, and maybe newspapers, where you get probably big spikes of use around breakfast and lunch, then a steady trail off into nothing by the evening.
But to even hit the number of 52 million simultaneous users, you’d have to combine the prime time viewing numbers of the 3 top TV shows and the top 200 in circulation newspapers.
So clearly, apps are becoming the thing when it comes to grabbing an audience, which means there’s no better time to be an app developer. Your app could be part of the 500 “prime” apps used across smartphones and tablets in that 52 million person spread. And the only way to make that happen is to get down to business and develop that app.
Sometimes that can be tricky though, especially if you need a Mobile Backend and don’t know how to program one effectively. Well, fear not, because that’s where we at Kumulos step in with our Mobile Backend as a Service. Made by app developers, for app developers, it’s designed to make creating a Mobile Backend for your app that much easier.
So why not talk to us today and see what Kumulos can do for you?
