The Mobile Marketing Blog - TellMyCell

What Are iOS and Android Gamers Spending Money On?

Mobile analytics provider Flurry just published a study that examines the rapdily growing mobile gaming market. How fast?

Last month, we published two posts about iOS and Android freemium game revenue.  The first showed that, over the first half of 2011, game revenue in the App Store shifted dramatically from premium to freemium, with 65% of all revenue generated among the top 100 games now coming freemium games.  In fact, at the time of writing this blog post, all of the top 5 titles in the App Store top grossing category were freemium games, and 22 of the top grossing 25 were games.  The second post revealed that consumers spend an average of $14 per transaction when making in-app purchases in freemium games.

Today they're looking a bit deeper:

With in-app purchases in freemium games driving the bulk of revenue generation in the iOS and Android app economy, Flurry devotes this post to what consumers actually spend their real dollars on.  With over a year’s worth of data, Flurry categorized over 57 million purchase transactions across a set of freemium iOS and Android games that averaged over 2 million daily active users.

And the results:

The chart shows that over two-thirds of all items purchased in iOS and Android freemium games are consumable, goods that users deplete.  Measured another way, approximately half of all real dollars spent within all apps are for game items consumers don’t keep.  Based on our data, the most popular virtual purchase, consumable or otherwise, is for “premium” in-game currency

...

Next, durable items represent 30% of all in-app purchases in freemium games.  From a game design standpoint, it's important to have a good selection of durable items in a game as it offers important variety to the consumer with respect to the core gameplay, such as erecting buildings in a city.

For the entire report, head over to Flurry's blog.

Horace Dediu On The fate Of Mobile Phone Brands

The always interesting ASYMCO blog has some great insights (with charts!) on the mobile phone industry. It's well known that Apple takes the lion's share of profits when it comes to mobile phones - but what about marketshare? More specifically, what can we learn by look at the past few years:

The violence with which new platforms have displaced incumbent mobile vendor fortunes continues to surprise.

• Nokia’s Symbian platform has gone from 47% share to 16% in three years
• Microsoft’s phone platforms have gone from 12% to 1%
• Other platforms have gone from 21% to zero
• Although far less dramatic, RIM’s decline from 17% to 12%  is causing acute pain and anxiety

This while entrants have grown share in spectacular fashion:

• Android from zero to 48% (A two year period)
• iOS from 2% to 19%
• Bada from zero to 4% (two quarters only)

Head over to ASYMCO for more charts and analysis.

Is Google Bringing A Digital Newsstand To Android?

As we we get ready for CES, 4G deployments, and perhaps the long awaited CDMA (Verizon/Sprint) iPhones, intomobile reports on an interesting development in the Android end of the mobile universe:

The Google newsstand will allow those using Android phones and tablets to purchase digital magazines and newspapers all from one place. People familiar with the matter said that Big G has approached publishers like Time Warner, Condé Nast and Hearst Corp for their upcoming service. It’s rumored that Google could be willing to take a smaller percentage of every purchase, and may give users’ behavioral data to the publishers to help with marketing campaigns.

Although its become conventional wisdom that iPad magazines haven't worked out as well as hoped, Mashable recently took a second look at the data:

When you compare digital sales to print newsstand sales, however, it becomes clear that digital sales numbers aren’t nearly as poor as they first appear. In fact, after an initial spike, the sales performance of issues on the iPad and iPhone roughly correlate their performance on the newsstand (note that except for Wired, sales data is relative):

Head over to Mashable for a thorough analysis.

Don't Forget SMS - 75% Of Americans Still Don't Own A Smartphone!

The number of Americans with smartphones is growing - quickly - but don't confuse what the marketplace will look like in a couple of years with its current state. If you're thinking about launching a mobile marketing campaign only SMS can deliver 100% of consumers.

A whopping 60.7 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in October, up 14 percent from the preceding three month period, representing one out of every four mobile subscribers.

And if you're thinking about building an iPhone app, make sure to consider the data:

RIM was the leading mobile smartphone platform in the U.S. with 35.8 percent share of U.S. smartphone subscribers, followed by Apple with 24.6 percent share (up 0.8 percentage points).

Google Android saw another month of strong growth, rising 6.5 percentage points to capture 23.5 percent of smartphone subscribers.

Read more at Mobile Marketer.

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What Will Android 3.0 Look Like?

The rapid development pace of the Android mobile OS shows no signs of letting up. Most Android phones are running some version of 2.x. But 3.0 is just around the corner:

Android 2.2, or "Froyo," may still be in the process of rolling out to users, but Google is already hard at work on "Gingerbread," the upcoming version of the mobile operating system that most expect to be numbered 3.0.

Not only is the Gingerbread software development kit widely rumored to be planned for release next week, but it looks like video chat will likely be among the new version's top-billed features.

"We support video chat today with Google Talk Video," said Andy Rubin, Google's vice president of engineering, in an interview last week. "It works on the desktop. Whether that can be repurposed and made appropriate for sipping bandwidth for mobile, it's an exercise that's under way."

Combined with the increasing incidence of front-facing cameras on Android devices, the evidence does seem to suggest that video calling could be on the way. That, in fact, could be one reason hardware makers working with Nvidia's Tegra 2 processor recently said that Gingerbread will "change the way we use our phones."

Head over to PC World to read more.