JupiterResearch
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Report: In-app purchases to overtake download revenues by 2013
Here's an interesting report from Juniper Research. According to their work, mobile app revenues will reportedly grow from the current US $6 billion to a whopping $11 billion by 2015. And the majority of that revenue will come not from the standard download fee, but instead from in-app purchases, according to Juniper. The firm claims that in-app purchase revenue will top one-off download fees by 2013. That seems hard to believe, given my current anecdotal usage, but there's no question that in-app purchases are growing by leaps and bounds as a form of sizable revenue for app developers. Jupiter's report also says that the biggest problem facing mobile app growth is just plain discovery -- with so many apps out there, it's hard for users to find new apps that they like, so what you tend to see is clumps of apps getting popular rather than users going out and finding their own favorites. Services like OpenFeint and Game Center have certainly helped to share information about new apps, and of course sites like ours try to spotlight as many apps as we can. But with a store full of hundreds of thousands of apps in it, it's tough to let more than a few hundred really shine. Maybe as we move forward, developers and Apple will come up with better solutions to help do that.
JupiterResearch calls format war futile
JupiterResearch has added its opinion to the line of analysts weighing in on the format war. Its report titled "Next Generation DVD: Will the Winner Be HD DVD, Blu-ray, or None of the Above?" found both formats at risk, so it'll come as no surprise that they picked choice "C." Citing confusion between formats, larger catalogs for DVDs and competition from other distribution mechanisms, the report concludes that upscaling DVD players are the real competition faced by HDM. But rather than throwing in the towel for HDM, we think hardware manufacturers should take a hint form the study and tout the fact that every HDM player is a great upscaling DVD player, too!
Commercial skipping to cost $8 billion in TV ads this year?
We can't vouch for the number -- that's their job -- but JupiterResearch has a recently published report that gets a lot right when it comes to DVR use. They claim that 53 percent of DVR subscribers use their DVRs to skip commercials, and that if all of those households skip commercials 100 percent of the time (unlikely) cable and broadcast TV advertisers would be at risk of losing around $8 billion of the $74 billion they spend on ads in 2006. Sounds rather doom and gloom, and JupiterResearch also contradicts the idea that DVR users watch a whole lot more TV to make up for those missed ads. But luckily they manage to reach a much more reasonable solution than most: networks and advertisers should rethink programming and ad strategies to cope with the way consumers are using DVRs. Not rocket science, we know, but JupiterResearch sees some of the current efforts by the networks not only as ineffective, but as a penalty to users -- which doesn't really do anybody a lot of good.
