The social and mobile application business is exploding !! Small sized apps are something you are seeing everywhere today. From your Airtel Dish TV to Orkut, to your mobile phones. Consider this
- Zynga, a relatively obscure gaming startup has grown from zilch to $100M in revenue in about 2 years. They own four of the top 10 social games on Facebook. Farmville, their most famous social game where you can own virtual farms, grow crops, raise livestock and trade them for virtual money, is played by 11 million people daily across Facebook, Apple iPhone and a host of other websites.
- Till date, consumers have downloaded 2 billion programs from Apple AppStore, a online shop that lets you buy small useful applications or games for your iPhone.
- RIM (Research in Motion), the company that sells the popular BlackBerry's line of phones has set aside $150M in research funds for generating apps for its Blackberry phones.
- Termed the "App Economy" by BusinessWeek magazine, this market estimated to be $1B in size today is predicted to touch $4B in 2012
Phew!! You never thought this market so was big when you last downloaded a Google Gadget or added a small weather application to your Orkut homepage or downloaded some cool social game onto your mobile, did you?
Its huge considering that two years back it did not exist and now its eclipsing all growth trajectories. How does this market work? Simple, it caters to the long tail of the consumers.
3 ways to make money in the app economy
Its huge considering that two years back it did not exist and now its eclipsing all growth trajectories. How does this market work? Simple, it caters to the long tail of the consumers.
3 ways to make money in the app economy
- Making money by selling the app to consumers:Not every app interests ever consumer. However app development is fast, easy, rapidly customizable and hence allows the developers to develop lots of them to cater to varied customers
- Digital advertisements that accompany your apps: Ads that get served with the apps will reflect the customers behavior pattern, his/her tastes and thus ensure a higher probability of the advertisement being clicked on
- Make money by enabling exchange of virtual goods: Allow people to trade for whatever they want using virtual money. Give people virtual money in exchange for real world money. Generating virtual money costs you next to nothing.
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