This blog is a gist of the seminar that I attended on May 30th 2011, at the Peninsula Corporate Park, Lower Parel, Mumbai. Organised by MoMo Mumbai and the speaker was Mr. Bill Scott, MBA from Harvard University.
Their funda of operation is to get a company to sponsor for the event (venue, food & miscellaneous expenses) and then hold a conference where a representative from that company addresses the attendees with a particular topic along with a presentation about his company and its products/services. This is followed by a QnA round, and ends with a dinner.
This Monday the sponsor was U.S.A. based online app store for mobile phones, GETJAR, which provides applications for both feature phones and smart phones across all major platforms such as Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, iPhone and Symbian among others.
The speaker for the evening was Mr. Bill Scott, SVP Sales & Business Development and he addressed the crowd about GETJAR and shared the industry’s best practices for app monetization and some more creative ways to make a living off of your app.
There were over 50 participants from Ad agencies, Ad Networks, Media companies, App Development companies, Telcos, Telecom and VAS companies.
Presentation:
Some Facts – Bill started his presentation with some facts about the Mobile Apps market which were quite an eye opener. Some of these fats were - The market size is expected to be worth $30 billion by 2015, largest age demographic is 25-34 year old, while 87% of people who download apps do it with ads in it.
Introduction (about GETJAR) – Bill then introduced his company and how it came into being (year 2000) and it became a profit making organisation only by 2007. Presently, it is the world’s largest open app store with over 1.5 billion downloads to date. The company provides more than 75,000 mobile applications to 25 million unique users in more than 200 countries. GetJar has been selected by the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer for 2011 for its innovative approach to technology and its deep impact on business and society on a global scale.
Some of its top clients are – Zynga, CBS, Amazon, EA, Shazam, Fox Mobile Group, Yellow Pages, Google, Tango and more.
One of GETJAR’s statistics showed an interesting fact where India ranked right on top among countries that download mobile apps. It was followed by Indonesia, USA and then UK. Most downloaded app was FaceBook with 112 million downloads followed by eBuddy and Opera Mini.
GETJAR Operational Model – GETJAR does not take any revenue share from the apps downloaded from their website. Also, anyone can upload an app for free.
Distribution & Definition of Monetisation – He gave tips on how to maximise distribution. Some of them were - by working with many partners, using own traffic resources, covering all phones and regions etc. He also explained different ways to monetize mobile apps. Some of them were – Selling the app, selling virtual goods within the app, extending web transactions into the app etc.
Then he explained GETJAR’s distribution and monetization tools which had points like free organic downloads, social integrations, analytics etc.
More Features of GETJAR: He then explained about their mobile site shortcut where in the user can get an MMS which opens a browser with the particular company’s mobile site.
App It! – A free and effective way for publishers and developers to convert web visits into app downloads where the user’s phone gets detected and he can directly download the app suited for his phone so that he can skip the steps of selecting appropriate app. The accuracy of detecting phones and computer browsers is 98% and it eliminates the cost of hosting your own global download network.
GETJAR uses Google Adwords’ funda – Just like google has Adwords, GETJAR also has a similar feature on their mobile app where apps can be advertised by paying an amount. These ads appear on the top and at the botto of the search screen along with the organic search results in between.
Success Stories – Then Bill spoke about some of the success stories of different companies with GETJAR. This included names like Google, Mig33, Yahoo and Rocketalk. Some of the common features that they all used were the Mobile Site Shortcut, App It! and the Pay Per Download.
Social Integration with FaceBook – A feature, where in a user can share all his downloads from GETJAR into his FaceBook account (News Feed). Here the friends (of the user) can download and Like that app shared.
GETJAR Analytics – Finally, he spoke about the Analytics which was also on the same lines of Google Analytics which makes app up loaders track the success of their apps. One can also view how others are faring on GETJAR.
This was about the entire presentation that Bill gave. This was followed by a Question & Answer session.
Q&A session -
- There were few interesting questions asked by the audience, like, how is the distribution of revenue resources of the total mobile app market (selling apps, selling within the apps, big brands, etc) in which the big money was coming from the Brands.
- Does the Analytics feature include comparison feature (it does).
- Which are the major places where Mobile app developers are, to which the answer was, Silicon Valley, Texas, in USA, then Germany, Italy, UK in Europe, and then small contributions from countries like France, India and Indonesia
- Why isn’t China in their list of Top countries that download such apps, to which Bill gave an explanation it is mainly because their content is mainly in English and not Chinese or Japanese, and these countries prefer content in their own language.
- Then an interesting question that whether GETJAR was planning to set up their database centre in India since it was the top country in their list when it came to downloading apps. Bill said, he recognizes the potential in India and they might set it up in the near future. He also mentioned that their mobile site will be revamped in the coming few weeks.
This was followed by dinner. Overall, the session was a good learning experience and also a good place to interact with people from the different fields, especially digital and mobile industry. Look forward to attend more such seminars & events. Below links have the information about GETJAR, Mobile Monday Mumbai and also a presentation that was shared at the seminar.
Links:
