CEO Ray Anderson gives tips.
Ray Anderson from Bango appeared at tonight's Monetising Mobile conference in London, talking about how developers should be looking to make money from their apps.
He looked back at the growth of the mobile apps market, from $3.1 billion in 2006 to $9.7 billion in 2009. Key factors: the iPhone, the growth of mobile gaming, and most importantly the launch of new ways for people to pay for (or within) apps.
"The classic examples are chat apps," said Anderson, citing video chat and Flirtomatic. "They're using other methods like credit card payments to monetise."
Credit cards? "It's more mainstream than you might expect," he said, claiming that Verizon customers in the US with BlackBerrys have to pay for games with their credit cards.
"And the big daddy of them all, the iTunes App Store, is mostly credit cards, with a reasonable amount of prepay voucher business," said Anderson.
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He also talked about how the apps market has changed from being a 'browse'n'buy market' where users browsed through a list of apps, then clicked to buy and download the app.
"That is driving about 60-70% of the app money today outside advertising," he said. "But what we're seeing increasingly is there's another model coming out, which is the freemium model."
However, he said there's a third way: "The Android Market way, which is a strange way - browse, download, use, buy, use and get your money back."
Referring to the fact that users can get their money back on any app within 24 hours. "The freepaymium-back-to-free model maybe?" he joked. But for developers, it's a problem.
Anderson went on to talk about the forces driving freemium mobile apps. The first was the App Store download wars.
He talked about the way App Stores are catching onto Apple's milestone download numbers, and trying to find ways to boost their own - for example by packaging up e-books or RSS feeds as individual apps.
How can developers take advantage of these opportunities? "Surf that free app fad," he said.
"Get your apps out there, that's rule number one. And rule number two is in-app billing. Don't collect money before your app is delivered: try to collect money when the app has been delivered."
He also said developers should keep driving people back to their own mobile site, to offer more content. He also talked about the way developers can get people to blast out links to friends from a mobile site - or even Bluetooth messages.
