Money in Mobile- Key Insights from the BLN conference

The world becomes a bit more mobile each day. Brands need to catch up and show creativity in using mobile for business. The Business Leader Network, BLN, called for ideas and inspiration in a one-day conference in London, June 14th dubbed “Money in Mobile”. Renowned experts and entrepreneurs from the mobile business were invited to share their knowledge and insights with leading consumer brands, seeking innovative strategies for how to mobilize their brand.
I attended the seminar together with speakers from Google, Tesco and Snaptu (recently acquired by Facebook) and had a great discussion at the panel. Here are the most interesting insights:

Jeremy Coop from market research company Comscore shared his key insights:

Browser and Apps are head to head in general usage or traffic but there are enormous differences depending on the brand:
- Sky has 83% of traffic through apps
- BBC has 89% of traffic through mobile web

Operator are still among the top mobile websites
- Vodafone group was the 4th most visited mobile website in the uk (6th in time spent online)
- Telefonica/ O2 was the 5th (11th in time spent online)

Here is the graph for minute spent on mobile sites

Most used apps by reach and not traffic
1. Google maps
2. Yahoo weather (pre-embedded on all iPhones)
3. Facebook
4. Google (other)
5. Youtube
6. Ebay
7. Yahoo stocks
8. BBC
9. Sky
10. Whatsapp
11. Shazam

Social networking stats
- Social networking spearheads mobile usage, in Europe most and foremost the UK : 40% of mobile traffic in minutes is generated by Facebook, according to Comscore
- Apps drive social networking: 160% increase in apps vs 25% increase for browser the last year
- 96.6% of checkins are through Facebook. Checkins through foursquare feature second place with 2.5%
The minutes spend on Facebook from a mobile phone surpass thosem the page is being accessed from a Desktop Computer.

Other UK stats
- Every month mobile counts 13 billion page views
90% of iPhone users use apps vs 39% of Symbian users
- 70% of mobile users in Europe don't use apps (but 30% do)

Comscore and GSMA get mobile usage data from operators in the UK to track
top mobile sites.

Ilja from Getjar presented insights on how to make money from mobile apps. Here are some of the key things we picked up:

- Revenue from paid app is increasing but proportionally going down. Ads and virtual goods grow significantly from 2009 (4.1bn USD) to 2012 (17.5 Bn USD). The biggest growth is in advertising followed by virtual goods.

- The entire music industry generate 25bn USD per year in comparison

Brief guide on what monetization model should you use
- High Utility and low stickiness = paid
- Low utility, high stickiness and moderate user value = ad based
- High utility and high stickiness and high user value = Freemium incl. virtual goods, in-app payments and subscription

Other payment insights
- Billing conversion is a key component of deciding business model (paid vs ads)
- 7x higher payment conversion for one button purchase vs premium SMS
- Revenue share from advertising vs. paid model (e.g. India has very low pay-out)
- Marketability - potential reach should decided monetization method (free, freemium or paid)

Other key insights
- Angry Bird was the 57th game of a 10 year old gaming company and very carefully planned
- Symbian ad spend dropped to almost zero when Nokia announced the drop of Symbian even if it is in 2016.