MOBILE TRENDS

#1 The Global Picture
– 1.7bn mobile phones (feature phones and smartphones) were sold in 2012 alone
– 3.2bn people use a mobile phone worldwide
– Smartphones gain quickly as phones are replaced every 18 to 24 months
– PCs are completely left in the dust as shown in this slide from Benedict Evans’ excellent Mobile is Eating the World presentation:

The yellow line has two main components:
– 1 billion Android smartphones are said to be in operation worldwide (source: Google)
– 700 million iOS devices have been sold over time, with 500 million still in use, which corresponds to the number of iTunes accounts (source: Asymco, one of the best references for the mobile market.)
– 450 million Symbian-based feature phones are in operation (Asymco.)

#2 The Social Picture 

Mobile phone usage for news consumption gets increasingly tied to social networks. Here are some key numbers :
– Facebook: about 1.19bn users; we don’t exactly know how many are active
– Twitter: 232 million users
– LinkedIn: 259 million users

When it comes to news consumption in a social environment, these three channels have different contributions. This chart, drawn from a Pew Research report, shows the penetration of different social networks and the proportion of the US population who get their news from it.

One of the most notable data points in the Pew Report is the concentration of sources for social news:
– 65% say to get their news from one social site
– 26% from two sites
– 9% from three sources or more (such as Google +, LinkedIn)

But, as the same time, these sources are completely intertwined. Again, based on the Pew survey, Twitter appears to be the best distributor of news.

Among those who get their news from Twitter:

– 71% also get their news on Facebook
– 27% on YouTube
– 14% on Google+
– 7% on LinkedIn

Put another way, Facebook collects more than half of the adult population’s news consumption on social networks.

But a closer looks at demographics slightly alters the picture because all social networks are not equal when it comes to education and income segmentation:

If you want to reach the Bachelor+ segment, you will get:
– 64% of them on LinkedIn
– 40% on Twitter
but…
– only 30% on Facebook
– 26% on G+
– 23% on YouTube

And if you target the highest income segment (more than $75K per year), you will again favor LinkedIn that collects 63% of news consumers in this slice, more than Facebook (41%)

Coming back to the mobile strategy issue, despite Facebook’s huge adoption, Twitter appears to be the best bet for news content. According to another Pew survey, the Twitter user is more mobile:

Mobile devices are a key point of access for these Twitter news consumers. The vast majority, 85%, get news (of any kind) at least sometimes on mobile devices. That outpaces Facebook news consumers by 20 percentage points; 64% of Facebook news consumers use mobile devices for news. The same is true of 40% of all U.S. adults overall. Twitter news consumers stand out for being younger and more educated than both the population overall and Facebook news consumers

 And, as we saw earlier, Twitter redistributes extremely well on other social platforms. It’s a no brainer: any mobile site or app should carry a set of hashtags, whether it’s a stream of information produced by the brand or prominent bylines known for their insights.

 #3 The Time Spent Picture

Here is why news is so complicated to handle in mobile environments. According to Flurry Analytics: On the 2 hours and 38 minutes spent each day on a smartphone and an a tablet by an American user, news accounts for 2% as measured in app consumption, which accounts for 80% of time spent. The remaining 20% is spent in a browser where we can assume the share of the news to be much higher. But even in the most optimistic hypothesis, news consumption on a mobile device amounts to around 5 to 6% of time spent (this is correlated by other sources such as Nielsen). Note that this proportion seems to decrease as, in May 2011, Flurry Analytics stated news in the apps ecosystems accounted for 9% of time spent.

This view is actually consistent with broader pictures of digital news consumption, such as these two provided by Nielsen, which show that while users spend 50 minutes per month on CNN (thanks to is broad appeal and to its video content), they only spend 18 minutes on the NYT and a mere 8 minutes on the Washington Post:

All of the above compares to 6hrs 42min spent on Facebook, 2hrs on YouTube or Yahoo sites.

In actionable terms, this shows the importance of having smartphones apps (or mobile web sites) sharply aimed at providing news in the most compact and digestible way. The “need to know” focus is therefore essential in mobile because catching eyeballs and attention has become increasingly challenging. That’s why The New York Times is expected to launch a compact version of its mobile app (currently dubbed N2K, Need to Know, precisely), aimed at the market’s youngest segment and most likely priced just below $10 a month. (The Times also does it because the growth of digital subscriptions aimed at the upper market is slowing down.) At the other end of the spectrum, the NYT is also said to work on digital magazine for iPad, featuring rich multimedia-narrative on (very) long form such the Pulitzer winning Snow Fall (on that matter, the Nieman analysis is worth a read).

This also explains why the most astute digital publishers go for newsletters designed for mobile that are carefully – and wittily – edited by humans. (One example is the Quartz Daily Brief; it’s anecdotal but everyone recommended this newsletter to now read it on a daily basis.) On smartphones, fairly sophisticated users (read: educated and affluent) sought by large media demand time-saving services, to the point content, neatly organized in an elegant visual, and — that’s a complicated subject — tailored to their needs way.

#4 The ARPU View

On mobile devices, the Average Revenue per User should be a critical component when shaping a mobile strategy. First, let’s settle the tablet market question. Even though the so-called “cheap Android” segment ($100-150 for a plastic device running an older version of Android) thrive in emerging markets, when it comes to extracting significant money from users, the iPad runs the show. It accounts for 80% of the tablet web trafficin the US, UK, Germany, France, Japan, and even China (source: Adobe.)

The smartphone is more complicated. A year ago, many studies made by AppAnnie or Flurry Analytics showed that the iPhone ecosystem brought four times more revenue than Android. More recently, Flurry Analytics ran a story stating that the average app price for Android was $0.06 vs. $0.19 for the iPhone and $0.50 for the iPad.

The gap is closing as Android terminals attract a growing number of affluent users. Still, compared to iOS, it is notoriously difficult to carry paid-for apps and services in the Android ecosystem, and Android ads remains cheaper. It’s likely to remain the case for quite a while as iOS devices are likely to remain much more expensive than Android ones, and therefore more able to attract high-end demographics and the ads that go to them.

How this impacts a Smartphone strategy: Publishers might consider different business models for the two main ecosystems. They could go for fairly sophisticated apps in the iOS world, served by a well-oiled payment system allowing many flavors of In-App add-ons. By contrast, the Android environment favors a more “go-for-volume” approach; but things could evolve quickly as the Android share of high-end audience grows and as the PlayStore gains in sophistication and gets as friction-free as the AppStore.

SOURCE : INTERNET , GOOGLE
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