Report: One In Six Mobile App Buyers Spent More Than $100 In 2008
A survey of 235 smartphone users who installed applications on their handset in 2008 by ABI Research last November found that 16.5 percent of them spent between $100 and $499. Obviously that’s a significant amount of money, but there are a few caveats: The first is the relatively small size of the survey, the second is that smartphone users who didn’t install an application weren’t included in the survey, and the final one is that it’s self-reported and people are notoriously bad at estimating how much they’ve spent over a period of time. Still, the fact that about 1 in 6 people who installed applications reckoned they’d spent more than $100 is a good sign for the industry.
ABI notes that applications tend to be more expensive on other platforms than on the iPhone (although it could be argued there’s just a lot less cheap stuff) and that developers have a “margin vs volume” quandary, sell many applications at a low price or sell fewer applications at a higher price — just like almost every other product in existence. Apple’s ‘halo’ effect is spreading out past its own products according to ABI, with senior analyst Jeff Orr saying: “Other device manufacturers and content developers working on non-Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) platforms all saw a bump in sales and downloads because there
James wrote:
"…smartphone users who didn’t install an application weren’t included in the survey, …"
On the contrary, one of the survey response choices was "$0 or None" for estimating how much was spent in the last 12 months. The largest group of respondents said they spent less than $100, followed by those who spent $0 or None, followed by the $100~$499 cluster.
What's surprising about the $100~$499 cluster is that is the same range one should expect to spend on a new smartphone (discounting carrier subsidies), meaning that 17% of US smartphone consumers spent the same or more for applications than they did for the device itself.
Non-smartphone users were excluded from answering the smartphone parts of the survey, so their contribution to mobile application revenues were not counted.
Thanks for clarifying that Jeff. I went by the wording in the article which defined it as a survey of people who had download applications.