Daily Archives: June 25, 2014

General

Report: Digital content market grows 30%, driven largely by mobile apps

The digital content market surged 30 percent between 2012 and 2013, with apps driving much of the growth, according to a report from IHS and App Annie. The joint research study also looked across digital games, music and movies.

  • Overall consumer spending on mobile apps jumped 2.3x year-over-year.
  • Consumer spending on gaming apps grew 2.9x from 2012 to 2013 and game apps are driving overall digital games growth.
  • Large gains in game app spend emerged in Japan and South Korea, with 4.4x and 5.8x growth year-over-year, respectively. Apps are now the leading content category in Japan and could overtake digital games, excluding apps in South Korea, in the coming years, the report said.
  • Music apps also saw significant growth, with consumer spend rising 77 percent from 2012 to 2013.

 

Mobile gaming spend more than doubled over 2013, with growth particularly strong in Asia, according to the IHS and App Annie study.

“Apps deliver, but do not charge for, content. Movie subscription and transactional services favor a direct billing relationship with consumers, and one that is outside the 30 percent share of spend taken by app store owners,” the report says. “With Apple and Google offering their own movie services, an app that wishes to use in-app purchases to charge for content would be at a significant price disadvantage in order to maintain a healthy margin.”

Though monetization is always a challenge for developers, the report shows that apps may stand a greater chance of finding revenue if they are less focused on replicating content services like Netflix or Spotify and offering complementary content instead. For example, the report notes the growing popularity of games that tie in to blockbuster movies, or discovery services, which have proven particularly successful in the digital music space. In many respects, the report said, the role of apps is not merely delivering content like music or movies but helping to build the audience for it.

Read more and download the report here.

This report is another proof of importance of supporting code education for the future digital content market growth.

Regards,

Milorad

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General

Mobile developers now number 8.7 M worldwide

If indie developers ever feel a little lonely working on mobile apps and games, they should know they’re part of a worldwide group that numbers 8.7 million people, according to Evans Data. The Santa Cruz, Calif.-based firm recently released its Worldwide Developer Population and Demographics Study, which culls data from the World Bank data center, CIA World Factbook, the U.S. Census and several other sources.
  • In total, there are 19 million software developers in the world, which means about 50 percent of them are now focused on creating apps for mobile devices.
  • The worldwide developer population has essentially doubled since 2010, with an increase of 700,000 in the last year.
  • Asia-Pacific region leads in mobile dev growth with about 46 percent more developers focused on mobile than the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region.
  • The number of female developers has boomed by 87 percent since 2001, totaling nearly 3.5 million developers today.
  • Evans Data estimates a worldwide developer population of 25 million by 2020.


The research firm projects the worldwide software developer population to grow from 19 million today to 25 million by 2020.

“People who think that mobile developers are only developers who sell apps through app stores are seeing just a small part of the overall picture,” said Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data Corp. “Mobile development is becoming ubiquitous thanks to the prominence of mobile devices as the preferred client in both enterprise and consumer environments. And cloud is the perfect enabler for mobility in these realms as well as in related Internet of Things implementations. We see no slowing of mobile development anywhere in the near future.”

It’s no surprise that many developers are focusing on business apps, particularly if they come from a more traditional software development background compared with the hobbyists or those who see creating consumer apps as a sideline. What might be more difficult to track–but what would be quite valuable–is what proportion of those who start out as consumer app and mobile game makers shift into the enterprise side.

Although Evans is offering the big picture around developer demographics, the details around those who are employed by big firms vs. those who are entrepreneurs–and those who see this as a profession versus those who are doing it for the love–is incredibly complex. Those providing the best developer tools, cloud-based or otherwise, are probably not targeting that 8.7 million as a whole, but looking at specific niches. As for consumers, they probably don’t care a lot about developer demographics. They just want their apps to work–and to be fun.

To read more and access the Evans Data report, click here

This report and article perfectly supports our W07-Opportunity forecast on importance of code education. 

Regards,

Milorad

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