Is App Usage Really on the Rise?

Worldwide smartphone use continues to rise at a rapid rate. In 2011, there were 38 million smartphone users worldwide; in 2012 the figure is at 84 million with the rise in numbers of users comes a rise in the range of apps on the market. Popularity of apps seems to be at an all-time high, with the average user’s smartphone containing on average 41 apps, compared to 32 in 2011. The average user is spending 39 minutes engaging with their apps a day in 2012, a slight rise from 37 minutes in 2011. Competition among app producers is similarly at a high point, with up to 20,000 downloads in the last 24 hours needed for an app to be listed in the top 25 of its kind. This number was 10,000 six months ago.

Despite these soaring statistics, is app usage really on the rise? Only 20% of smartphone users revisit a free downloaded app the next day, and a staggering 5% reuse apps a month later. This has a significant impact on advertising within these apps. For these ‘free apps’, if they were used on average 12 times by the user (a figure which seems unlikely for the typical smartphone user), the application would have to “bombard its users” in order to match the money it would make from paid sales. In dollar terms, the app would need to generate $8.75 per thousand impressions (CPM) to match such revenues raised by paid apps. Currently the average free app generates $0.50 to $2.00 (CPM) from advertising. Despite the growth of apps on the market, Facebook, Youtube and Gmail are still the most popular apps available. Another point of note: deal of the day websites have been used by 87% of all smartphone users.

What conclusions can be drawn from these figures? On the whole smartphone use is growing at a rapid rate, with this comes an expanding market for free downloadable applications. Is app use rising at an equivalent rate? While the average number on apps on a smartphone has risen, the actual usage of such apps drops off very quickly after the first day. This surely attributes to the inability to gain revenue through advertising to match that which paid apps can generate.

Mirror Mirror On The Bus Stop, Who's The Prettiest Prive Winner Of All

A few months ago I wrote this post about the blurring of lines between outdoor and digital, with a few examples of outdoor using X Box Kinect technology to create some interesting engagement experiences for users in overseas markets. 

A simple but effective execution has been put into market by Spark to promote the Samsung Galaxy release via Vodafone.  Vested interest disclaimer here – yes, Spark are our traditional media kin folk, Vodafone our client.

Simply stand in front of the bus shelter ad shel, the camera reads your movements and reflects  them in the form of an astronaut in space in the digital screen, highlighting the prize offering that Samsung are offering up as part of the launch promotion, a trip into space.  Includes projecting your face in the astronauts helmet to give you that greater sense of winning.  By the photos and video we’ve seen (thanks AdShel, the media owner partner) hundreds of pedestrians of all ages have been engaging in the piece, dancing and carrying on like a carefree 6yr old (including even a big bank brand Marketing Manager that we spied in the video, and we know how tough it is to make them happy).

In place until mid July outside Britomart train station, so have a tutu with it if you’re in that part of town.  Or catch a train and go there specially.

Google Penguin Update

On April the 25th Google released an update that rivalled both the Panda and the Florida updates.  The Penguin update, initially called the ‘Over Optimisation Update’ by Google wreaked havoc amongst the SEO fraternity as the update was rolled out across all of Google’s global indexes.

Matt Cuts, Google’s ‘Top Dog’ at fighting web spam, announced Google’s intent to target over optimised websites earlier in the year however very little was known about exactly what the update would target.

Six weeks on and the Penguin update appears to have focused on:

• Comment spam;
• Content spam;
• Links from blog networks (blog farms);
• Paid links;
• Site-wide links from footers or sidebars;
• Anchor text spam (unnatural anchor text links);
• On-page keywords stuffing.

Although Google sees this update as a positive step towards reducing web spam, it did come, initially at a cost to the user and some unsuspecting webmasters.  Google’s mantra has always been to provide a quality product, relevant search results.  However, there were several instances where the quality of the search results had been negatively impacted. Searchengineland.com wrote an interesting article comparing search results before and after the Penguin update but by most accounts, the NZ results have been largely unchanged.  

Innocent webmasters were also affected by this update with many respectable sites experiencing a drop in organic traffic.  An example of this is WPMU.org a highly respected developer resource and a distributor of free WordPress themes. Organic traffic to this site dropped from 8,590 visits per day to 1,527.

      Image supplied by webpronews.com.

The Sydney Morning Herald interviewed Matt Cutt’s about WPMU.org’s situation and was told by Cutt’s that backlinks from questionable sites linking to WPMU.org may have been devalued and thus damaged the sites rankings.

This has led to the fear of ‘Negative SEO’ attacks where competitors could hire Blackhat SEO’s to spam sites.  Aaron Wall from SEO Book wrote about this in length and provides a case study where a website owner experienced a negative SEO attack.

Been Hit By the Penguin Update?

Matt Cutts pointed to two very specific videos in recent interviews that people should watch if they want to clean up their sites and recover from the Penguin update.

What Media Multi-tasking Really Means

I stumbled across this interesting chart on warc today:

'Screens to the nth – What People Are Doing and Why' IAB

There has been a lot of talk about media multi-tasking and how new technologies are driving efficiencies for consumers, but what this demonstrates is we are just trying to fit more into less time.  We are working more, we are consuming more media and somehow finding more time for leisure but because a day still is only twenty four hours we are doing it all at once. 

This begs the question - with our attention so divided how effective are we being?

Furthermore, as marketers, we can never count on having consumers undivided attention.  This poses an interesting challenge - how do we capture consumers attention in such a distracted world?

Spotify in NZ

Spotify is an online music listening service that may change the way we consume our music in NZ. The application is simple and easy to use which can be installed on a computer or device with internet access.

What separates out Spotify from products that offer similar services is that it has secured its contract with record companies, making it legal. It has also included a social aspect where it can connect your Facebook/Twitter account to the application. Now you can see which One Direction song that old mate Bobby Bob is listening too or even send Bob a song to listen to.

First launched in Europe in 2006 it has amassed over 10 million users and is soon to hit the Australasian market. For New Zealanders the uptake shouldn’t be an issue, it would be the mobile data plans that would hinder maximum potential.Spotify bridges that gap of pirating music and paying for music closer together, record companies would be insane not to sign up as it’s a another revenue stream.  From a consumers perspective all is not for free as there is opportunity to advertise on this platform and consumers will see the brunt of this. However you can pay per month to get Spotify’s premium product which will allow you to access it on a mobile device and see no advertising.

Spotify launched on the 22^nd of May here in NZ and discovered some handy features:

• Apps
• Friends list
• Playlists
• Radio (to connect artists with similar artists)
• Importing your local content from hard drive onto Spotify

I’ve had a bit of fool around on this and it has somehow become part of my life, goodbye iTunes and illegal file sharing. As everyone has different personalities in our office I thought it would be good to see what music inspires us in our day to day work. I have compiled a playlist of PHDiQ’s pickup tracks - which you can subscribe to “PHDiQ Work Out Songs” to experience our full emotions.

• Anna Woods: “Back on the chain gang” – Pretenders
• Polly Williams: “Dutchies” - Shapeshifter
• Christophe Spencer: “Greatest American Hero theme”
• Graeme Douglas: “I believe I can fly” – R Kelly
• Brendan Hewitt: “Lightning Crashes” – Live
• Mike Harland: “Call me maybe” – Carly Rae Jespen
• Gareth Treacher: “Saved by the bell theme song”
• Jane Crabbe: “Welcome to the jungle” – Guns & Roses
• Ivan Atkins: “Unchained Melody” – The Righteous Brothers
• Shay Young: ”What makes you beautiful” – One Direction
• Stephanie Sokolich: “Love Story” – Taylor Swift
• Phillip Sue: “Juicy” – Biggie Smalls
• Nikki Rogers: “9 to 5” – Dolly Parton
• Craig Whitaker “Getting No Where” – Magnetic Man
• Isreal Hartley: “Eye of the Tiger” – Survivor
• Keila Bituin:”Raining Blood” – Slayer
• Nick Sadler: ”Lovefool” – The Cardigans

Why I won’t be buying in the Facebook IPO

I was asked by a publisher recently where the most innovation would come from in the next three years.  My answer – it hasn’t been invented yet.  Sure, it sounds like a cop out, but  when you look at the exponential rate of change in the digital environment, predictions become unreliable and giants (even the mighty Facebook) seem less solid.

Consider these facts on the speed of adoption:



Whitefireseo.com

(the G+ reference is a bit of a misnomer – as Google migrated current users rather than building an audience from scratch).

And Pinterest did it in 2 years.

So, if speed is anything to go by the current leaders should be invincible right?  Actually it could be their downfall.  George Anders describes it well in this post on Forbes.  He talks about something called the ‘liability of obolescence – a growing mismatch between an organization’s inherent product strategy and its operating environment over time’.

When ‘time’ becomes compressed, such as in the accelerating speed of change in digital, companies operating in that space have a much shorter natural lifecycle (AOL, Myspace, Bebo anyone?).  Sure there are companies that have survived, thrived even (Amazon, Apple), but will they be able to continue to adapt as the pace of change quickens? 

To look at it another way – the Pinterest example shows a subtle shift: from the social graph (who people care about) to the interest graph (what they care about) [paraphrasing Josh Constine, Tech Crunch].  It’s a distinction not many commentators have picked up, but an important one.  To look at the Anders example, where he pits Web 1.0 against Web 2.0 against Mobile – what happens when the change isn’t linear?  As it splinters into ever more directions, it gives more credence to  Anders’ thesis –

Those who own the future are going to be the ones who create it. It’s all up for grabs. Web monopolies are not as sticky as the monopolies of old.

So I won’t be buying in the Facebook IPO: the digital world order could be in for an overhaul sooner than we think

The Decade of Mobile

At least once every year for the last three years I’ve heard someone at a digital conference proclaim that “this will be the year of mobile”.  Their tone has always hinted that this will be an event in media planning that none of us will be able to ignore, akin to the moon landing or Sir Ed knocking the bastard off.  But then it’s never seemed to happen.  Instead it’s been more like Kanye West - a steady accumulation of content, audience and commercial opportunities. 

Nevertheless, and arguably unlike Kanye, there is no doubt that it has slowly but surely become an increasingly important media space for planners and clients to consider.  The challenge that remains is that there isn’t a great deal of market data around of the NZ market.  Sorry Roy Morgan, I usually love your data, but it seems hopelessly out of step for mobile when the answer to ‘how many people say they need a mobile phone to access the internet?’ is 7%. 

But last week InMobi, in partnership with Decision Fuel rode into town with a piece of research that delivered some quite interesting insights (albeit from a sample size of 500 users… coincidently, about the same sample that dictate TV ratings). 

So, a few numbers that no one has delivered before;

• Of 6.2hrs media consumption, 114mins are via a mobile
• 53% of market are using their phone while watching TV
• 65% using phone while lying in bed
• 23% using to access social Media
• 21% using to access entertainment
• 7% are using to shop

This OurMobilePlanet tool has also recently come to my attention (thanks Mitch Campbell and nzh).  About as accurate as any other tool on NZ market about penetration (ie, take with grain of salt), but least it’s fun to play with.