The Winner Takes it All

No, watching Eurovision isn’t making me nostalgic for ABBA (but by the way how great was the Twitter conversation on the night!).

No. The title for this blog is inspired by some data we have from our mobile passive measurement panel.

This is a slide taken from some analysis of our Mobile App Tracker data; it shows the reach of the top 100 apps used in the past month.

It illustrates how behaviour in the mobile space, currently focuses around some key apps – where the top 10 apps dominate, being used by at least by 9% or more of our Passive Mobile Panellists.  But the next 90 apps only have reach of around 8%-1%.

These top 10 apps tend to be well known brands in the mobile / social networking / retail sector.  They tend to have been first to market with great apps that offer good usability and are different to what else is being offered. And also importantly these apps are free.

So if you are a business whose customers are using a website to do business with you, and you haven’t already developed an app, given the increase in smartphone usage it would seem timely to do so.  It will need to gain high visibility, be free and offer a really good, sticky user experience.

And probably the best example of just how successful a single app franchise can be is Angry Birds – an app which arguably now has a bigger reach in the UK than Coronation Street.  And it has now passed the one billion download mark.

So maybe I should re-phrase my title, less winner takes it all, maybe it’s that early (angry) bird that truly does get the worm.

For more information about the Ipsos Passive Mobile App Panel, please contact my colleague Gavin Sugden.

Louise Brice is a Research Director at Ipsos ASI. Follow her on Twitter: @LouiseEBrice.