Who would have thought that applications were not even 'born' 18 months ago. Since their arrival in May 07 when Facebook opened up their platform, applications are now serving 35 billion ads each month worldwide. To put that into context 56% of Facebook visitors visit a Facebook application, 1 in 5 minutes on Facebook is on an application, and 1 in every 3 page views on Facebook is on an Application (Nielsen Oct 08).There are 40,000 developers fueling this growth by attracting users with fun and engaging applications and keeping them on the site for longer periods. This relationship works very well as the developers get to keep the revenue and Facebook get more users attracted to their site with increased dwell time that they intern monitise. It was a very bold and genious move. This has meant that applications have grown faster, increase in user time and ad's shown, than any other sector within online advertising during 2008.
Brett Brewer, (President of Adknowledge and co-founder of Myspace) mentioned to me that Myspace wanted to do something similar a few years back but couldn't get a business model to work and in the mean time Facebok beat them to the punch.
On the right is the top 20 fastest growing mid-sized (100K - 1 M monthly user range) applications on Facebook from AppData for January 2009. The top app is Appear offline, an app that allows users to who are not logged on to facebook chat to see their friends online. The number 2 app of the moment is Social Chatrooms. This app connects users from other social netoworks outside Facebook.
At number 4 is an app after my own heart...'Team Great Britian Fans'. Users showing their love for GB. Though for all the brits now living in Sydney ( half the media industry) the app should read ' I love Great Britain but not as much as Bondi Beach' :-)
Lets not forget we are not just talking about Facebok and Myspace. Applications are now across all major social networks, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster and Orkut. At the end of 2008 Yahoo! opened up it's mail platform to host applications and the evidence is clear to see: apps increase users to a site, keep them there for longer, increase site functionality and enhance user experience. What does this all mean? - increased revenue! it also means that applications are here to stay!
To keep up to date with the latest apps and the monthly gainers and loosers check out these two sites Appdata and Adonomics (recently aquired by Adknowledge).
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ReplyDeleteWakingNews Alarm Clock app
ReplyDeleteWakingNews Alarm Clock is yet another beta app release with some potential. It functions primarily as an alarm clock. You set an alarm as usual and it goes off on time as usual. However, this one reads you the news from a variety of sources when it goes off. So it functions a little bit like old school radio alarm clocks. It has several good news sources, including Yahoo Finances, Yahoo Sports, Engadget, etc. However, there are some lesser sources of words there as well. Thankfully, you can choose the sources that play when the alarm goes off. It's in beta so there are definitely bugs. It is also free and has potential.