App Annie Intelligence, which tracks more than 700,000 apps, found that global revenues for freemium apps on iOS have quadrupled over the last 24 months. And for Google Play, worldwide freemium revenues have grown 3.5x in 2012. Now, freemium apps generate 69 percent of the worldwide iOS app revenue and 75 percent of global Android app revenues. Meanwhile, premium app revenue from paid download apps have remained relatively flat over the same periods.

The numbers confirm the trend we’ve been noticing but the fact that there’s been no let up shows just how app developers continue to embrace the freemium model and how those apps continue to bring in more money. We reported two years ago that the 1/3 of the top grossing apps on iOS in the US had moved to the freemium model. By the end of 2011, Distimo reported that about half of the revenue from the 200 top grossing iPhone apps came from freemium app while 65 percent of the revenue from top apps in the Android Market came from freemium apps. Here’s a look at some of the charts worked up by App Annie Intelligence: 

In January, IHS said that in-app purchase in freemium apps brought in $970 million in worldwide sale last year, or 39 percent compared to paid downloads. And freemium app revenue was expected to grow to $5.6 billion by 2015, representing 64 percent of the total market. The App Annie data, which is limited to iOS and Android, suggests we may be on a faster pace than IHS predicted.

It’s not just in the US, where the figures generally mirror the world stats. App Annie said countries like China and Japan have rapidly adopted the freemium model in the last year. Japanese freemium revenues grew by 24x in the last year on Google Play and Chinese freemium revenue grew by nearly 25x on iOS since January 2011.

Not every app needs to go freemium. As Flurry recently pointed out, some apps are better suited to that model. For example, apps with high intensity of usage in a short window creates an opportunity for developers to make money though in-app purchases that users can binge on. And for users who come back repeatedly over a long period of time, there’s also a chance to keep selling them on more content and add-on functions. Apps that don’t necessarily hold on to users over a long period of time might monetize better through one-time paid downloads, said Flurry.

I suspect we’ll see paid downloads remain as a viable option for some developers. Instapaper’s success, for example, has shown that consumers will pay up front for a good product. But increasingly, the bigger money seems to be found in letting people in for free and then monetizing a smaller group of users over time through in-app purchases, subscriptions and other added features.

Image courtesy for Flickr user 401 (K) 2012

MediaEverywhere provides publishers with an SDK based on HTML5 that allows them to create custom mobile websites in a short period of time but also re-use the work for native apps for smartphones and tablets. The SDK  allows publishers to control the look of their content while easily distributing it to multiple devices in a cost-effective way.

HTML5 has been hyped as a tool to help developers build once and reach mobile browsers and apps. But the technology hasn’t developed as fast as proponents would have liked, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who admitted that the company’s reliance on HTML5 was its biggest mistake. So why does it make sense for MediaEverywhere?

CEO Kunal Gupta told me Polar Mobile did a lot of optimization to its SDK to improve performance including a lot of caching on the device and a single-page architecture. And he said he created the tool specifically for publishers to help them present articles, blogs, photo galleries and multimedia content. Polar Mobile has also integrated support for third-party ads and also handles Google Analytics and Adobe Omniture for analytics.

He said publishers are finding that the revenue they’re currently making on mobile doesn’t justify the heavy price tag of dedicated native apps, which also take a long time to develop. And he said mobile consumption is increasingly moving to the web browser. Pew reported earlier this month that 60 perecnt of tablet news users rely on their browser to get news on their tablet, compared to 23 percent that mostly use apps. With a tool like MediaEverywhere that’s optimized for media publishers, Gupta believes brands have a way to be on all devices quickly without paying a heavy price.

“The mobile economy isn’t working today. Publishers are spending too much to pay for audiences and advertisers haven’t kept up with the audience,” said Gupta.

Gupta said more publishers will be coming on board soon including some of Polar Mobile’s more than 400 existing media clients. If that happens, that should validate Polar Media’s bet on MediaEverywhere. The company raised $6 million in January to build out the product.

In its Measuring Cup online poll, the cooking site found that 35 percent of online cooks used smartphones to look up recipes. While recipe research was by far the most common smartphone activity, cooks are using the handheld gadgets to do a lot more inside and outside the kitchen: 29 percent said they have used their phones to photograph finished dishes, 18 percent created digital shopping lists with apps like Grocery IQ and Ziplist, 16 percent redeemed digital coupons at the grocery store and 12 percent used the phone to share a recipe on a social media site.

The number of people using smartphones to watch cooking videos is still small at just 15 percent, but on the PC and tablet, streamed video has exploded among women (Many of the poll results only include women since not enough men responded to form a suitable statistical sample).  Allrecipe’s first Measuring Cup report in 1999 found that 45 percent of women watched cooking videos online. In 2012, that number increased to 74 percent. Furthermore, nearly half of respondent believed that in 15 years how-to videos would become the primary media for conveying culinary knowledge – replacing Mom.

Here are some other interesting tidbits from the report:

• The most popular digital culinary resources weren’t cooking portals like Allrecipes or Food Network, but search engines, according to 43 percent of online cooks. Recipe sites were a close second, though, at 42 percent. The number one search term, you guessed it, was “chicken”.
• Digital cuisine is a big business: citing eMarketer, Allrecipes said consumer packaged good advertising spend online is increasing from $134 million in 200 to a projected $3.6 billion in 2012.
• Allrecipes found that mindshare in online cooking is drifting to more general social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and Twitter. One third of female cooks polled said it was important that cooking portals keep up by integrating with those big social networks.
• Expectations are high that more of the shopping and meal planning process will become digital: a majority of respondents stated that in 15 years the paper coupon will become extinct, the digital wallet will replace the leather billfold and that groceries will be ordered online and delivered to the home.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the report, however, is its more subtle findings on how the digital media have changed our views of the hallowed recipe and cookbook. Paradoxically the internet has made finding recipes far easier but it’s also destroyed our faith in the recipe itself.

Forty-four percent of men and women polled named Cooking websites as their preferred cooking resource, compared to 19 percent who said cookbooks and 9 percent who said their parents. However, confidence in the recipe has degraded. In 1999, Allrecipe’s poll found that 73 percent of online cooks said recipes made cooking easier. In 2012, only 35 percent returned the same response.

The Internet may be democratizing cooking – anyone can circulate a recipe widely and anyone can publish a cookbook. But let’s face it, there are a lot of bad recipes out there, and there’s growing trend to emphasize the aesthetics of food over the quality of the recipes behind them (The study found that the top reason for sharing recipes online was “attractive photos”). Sites like Pinterest have made cooking an artfully presented aspirational pursuit, but in many ways it’s turned the internet into a gigantic coffee table cookbook – a collection of pretty pictures and lush descriptions backed up by unvetted, incomplete and often awful recipes.

As always, though, the internet will adapt. Not only have sophisticated online review engines helped distinguish good recipes from bad, many sites such as Food52 have emerged that take crowdsourced approaches to testing and refining recipes. Allrecipes itself has long allowed its community to customize any recipe submitted to the site, and in many cases those customized recipes have become more popular than the originals, according to an Allrecipes spokesperson. Maybe we can have our democracy, but also a little bit of quality control as well.

Allrecipes, which was recently acquired by Meredith, polled roughly 2,200 people, about half of which were Allrecipes members and the other half online panelists taken from other, often non-cooking, sites. Very few men participated in the poll, so on questions where more than 200 men participated, their results were included, the spokesperson said.

All graphics courtesy of Allrecipes.com

This is noteworthy because it’s the first time that mobile users will see ads in their feed that are not triggered by their actions or those of their friends. It opens up the news feed as an advertising space that any developer can target, whether or not they have a relationship to a user or not. That may encourage investors who have been worried about Facebook’s revenue plans, especially as more traffic moves to mobile where ad space is limited. And it will likely cheer developers, who continue to look for ways to distribute and market their apps. Developers can sign up here.

Facebook has a huge audience and its mobile users are growing rapidly with more than 543 million users accessing the service from a mobile device each month. With some basic targeting by interests, demographics and platform, Facebook can serve up a pretty good mobile audience to developers willing to pay. This builds upon the work Facebook has done with App Center, which helps recommend apps to users.

But it also raises the question of how much advertising users will accept. Facebook has shunned display ads and instead pushed for sponsored stories that appear in a mobile user’s news feed. But the initial idea was to let advertisers better reach their existing fans through these sponsored stories that were engaging and interesting for users. Now, users will get hit up by developers who they don’t have any relationship with.

The new ads come on the heels of Facebook’s first quarterly earnings report, in which it generally met expectations but didn’t impress. On the earnings call, company leaders stressed the importance of a mobile and said the sponsored stories were generating $1 million a day, half of which was coming from mobile. Now, Facebook has a better shot at improving its revenue picture but the challenge will be to ensure that it can generate more money without turning off its millions of mobile users.

This marks the second time in as many months that Amazon has expanded digital content support to iOS. In June, the company launched an iOS version of its Amazon Cloud Player, bringing local and streaming support for Amazon music libraries. It’s an interesting play because Amazon has typically kept certain apps for media playback either on Android devices or on its own device, the Kindle Fire.

In fact, although the Kindle Fire is based on Android, it’s surprising that Amazon’s Instant Video is coming first to the iPad and not Android phones or tablets, such as the Nexus 7. Instant Video is the sole part of Amazon’s digital ecosystem that the Fire has while other Android tablets must rely on Google Play, Netflix or other video services. Unless you hack the device, that is.

I suspect Android support for Instant Video is next but for now, many iPad owners are sure to be happy with the new app. Content in Amazon Instant Video for iPad can be paused or stopped and then picked up again later in the same place on the iPad or any other device that supports Amazon Instant video: Kindle Fire, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Sony’s PlayStation 3, PCs, Macs, and any television or Blu-Ray player that supports it.

The approach is similar to that of Pandora, which has long offered ad-supported online music tracks and subscription plans. And like Pandora, the updated Spotify for Android allows the creation of stations based on artist, album or playlist. You can skip a song if it’s one you’d rather not hear and Spotify will learn not to play it again. Give a “thumbs up” to a favorite song and Spotify will save it to a “Liked from Radio” playlist on the desktop.

Surely, Spotify hopes that a taste of the free version will entice subscriptions. But the company’s conversion rate isn’t too shabby; even before this move. Ken Parks, Spotify’s Chief Content Officer and Managing Director of Spotify N. America recently noted that Spotify has 15 million active users and over 4 million paid subscribers.

Aside from the ads, there’s no real limit to the free Spotify radio service, so it should appeal. Users have access to the millions of tracks in Spotify’s catalog on their Android smartphone or tablet. The updated app is available in the Google Play store and supports devices running Android 2.1 and up, which is nearly all active devices on Google’s platform.

Starting today, skobbler’s ForeverMap 2 app is available in the Nook app store. A basic version is free and a premium version, with downloadable maps for offline use, is $4.99. Barnes & Noble is also opening the Nook platform up to location-based app developers later this year.

Barnes & Noble tablets don’t have GPS or 3G, so ForeverMap relies on WiFi positioning.

Despite Amazon’s acquisition of UpNext, Kindle Fire users don’t have their own map app yet. They can download third-party Android apps or access services like Google Maps through the browser.

B&N’s partnership with skobbler “signals a brand new opportunity for Nook app developers to create location-aware apps, products and services that help our millions of Nook Tablet and Nook Color customers experience and navigate their physical surroundings in unique and innovative ways,” Claudia Romanini, B&N’s director of developer relations, said in a statement. “We’re excited about the potential here.”

Microsoft invested $300 million in Nook and B&N’s college business earlier this year.

955 Dreams’ goal is to allow content owners to create polished publishing experiences, in hopes of helping them stay relevant in this age of mobile apps. A number of content publishers have already approached 955 Dreams about using its platforms to power their apps. But the company believes that it needs to provide one seamless product and that means taking care of not only the publishing but the advertising component as well.

Kiran Bellubbi, founder and CEO of 955 Dreams told me he was looking to create mobile ads that are complementary to the mobile experience and feel at home on a high-quality app. He said he looked at other ad platforms but found they didn’t work with what he was looking to create.

“Monetization is key for mobile apps but how do you introduce ads into high end products without diluting experience? We didn’t say we wanted to build an ad engine but other solutions didn’t make sense. How many ad networks actually build apps? They’re not invested in the same way as we are,” said Bellubbi.

For now, advertisers can place ads in the Band of the Day app, which has racked up more than 2 million downloads on the iPad and iPhone. Red Bull and Burberry are among the first advertisers to market through the app. The ads are basic full-screen interstitial ads for now, but will soon include more dynamic and interactive ads that also offer video. Over time, 955 Dreams hopes to build out an ad network, with high-end brands, who will be able to advertise in other apps that use 955 Dreams ad engine.

I’ve really admired 955 Dreams’ products, which are really well designed and show what next generation publishing can look like on mobile devices. I think it’s great that other content owners can now use 955 Dreams to bring their publications to life. There’s a lot of questions about how newspapers and magazines can evolve and I’d like to think tools like 955 Dreams can be part of the answer. This is why 955 Dreams raised $3.25 million in January, to really re-imagine mobile publishing.

The ad play is in keeping with 955 Dreams’ focus on quality, though I’m not sure if publishers will be as eager to use that. It will depend on some of the brands that are in the network and how well the ads monetize. But it doesn’t hurt to give publishers more tools to make money.

To get in on the action, you can hit the sign up page and enter your email address. You don’t need to enter additional information, such as what Android phone you use; just an email address. Once registered, you’ll receive an email to confirm your address and that’s it. Depending on the level of interest, you could get a link to the beta version of Flipboard within 24 hours according to the email I received.

Of course, you could always cheat a little and do what I did to get Flipboard, but that’s not going to help the Flipboard team as it works to support various devices, screen sizes and such. In fact, I’m feeling a bit guilty now, so I may uninstall Flipboard from my Galaxy Nexus and wait for the beta link. Oh, who am I kidding: I waited so long for Android support and the app works so well on Android 4.0 that I can’t bring myself to do it!

“Operators treat partners like vendors.” That quote comes form Google director of global Android partnerships John Lagerling, who said it during a panel discussion this week at Management World in Dublin, where it was captured by Light Reading. It’s a telling statement, especially coming from one of the most important players in the mobile industry.

Several years ago, operators could have gotten away with treating everyone else in the mobile ecosystem as a mere supplier. After all, they ran the whole show. If your service, device or technology was ever going to make it onto an operator’s network, you had to kiss the ring. A lot has changed in a few years.

These days, Google and Apple have far more clout in the global wireless industry than any individual carrier. Apple’s decisions on which radio technologies to support can cause seismic shifts in the industry. And any new iteration of the Android OS can spur new waves of new service innovation and app development. That’s power that no single operator has ever held.

The mobile industry has evolved, but if Lagerling is speaking the truth, then the carriers haven’t evolved with it. That Bellhead, old-school telco mindset was in evidence at the U.S. mobile industry’s biggest show, CTIA Wireless. The show has been suffering for several years and I believe the main cause for its slow demise is its stubborn focus on carriers. The show simply hasn’t embraced the new reality.

To be fair, the disdain runs both ways. Most over-the-top (OTT) app developers view the operators as mere dumb pipes, which isn’t going to ingratiate with them Verizon and AT&T anytime soon. I’ve heard developers lament the loss of unlimited data plans like old hippies pining for the Summer of Love. Mobile carriers may be treating developers and platform providers like mere vendors supplying the nuts and bolts of their services, but the developers are treating operators like mere utilities into which they plug their apps.

The thing is carriers need developers a lot more than developers need the carriers. And the carriers know it. Wireless analyst Chetan Sharma sums up their conundrum quite eloquently in his latest U.S. market update:

We are at a critical juncture of the industry evolution. The OTT phenomenon is shifting the tectonic plates at a rapid pace. What seemed like a minor irritant only a few quarters back is become a nuisance virus that is eating away the core. Some operators have gone into panic mode while others have stepped back, assessed the situation, embraced it, and will try to exploit the opportunity. The truth of the matter is that the two biggest apps – voice and messaging didn’t really evolve a period of two decades. When the last big invention was interoperability and that too a decade ago, you know things are ripe for disruption. Thanks to the availability of always-on IP networks, new and nimble players are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

Operators are now floating the idea of OTT providers fronting the costs of delivering their traffic over mobile broadband networks. (We may even see the first instance of it in the coming weeks from Verizon.) The operators are talking about revenue sharing, and “sharing” implies a partnership of equals.