Location Based Services Poised to Drive Rise in Free Apps

RobBrady

Already, an estimated 75% to 80% of all apps published in Apple's App Store are free - some rely on advertising and some on upselling their premium applications from within the app. It now looks like we're headed for an even bigger percentage of freebie apps if Apple have anything to do with it.

Online Media Daily have reported that Apple intend to launch a new advertising platform on April 7th, shortly after the launch of its much anticipated iPad on April 3rd. The large screen real-estate of the iPad is expected to attract a larger percentage of avertisers' budgets.

Following Google's AdMob acquisition for $750 million in November, Apple bought the mobile advertising developer Quattro for $300 million - both AdMob and Quattro deliver hypertargetted location-based advertising that promise great potential for advertisers interested in delivering messages based on where a mobile device user is, or what they are doing.

According to eMarketer, mobile advertising is predicted to quadruple last year's spend to $1.6 billion by 2013, though this is just a fraction of general website advertising spend which currently runs at $22 billion. Such a difference gives the mobile space huge scope for playing catch-up. As the world continues its journey from desktop to mobile, Apple and Google will have their eyes firmly fixed on this much bigger pie for the longer term.

All this, coupled with expected usual dose of hype, will provide an enormous incentive for developers to produce free applications that utilise such services, allowing them to reap the resulting advertising revenue - after Apple and Google take their cut of course.

It will be interesting to see Microsoft and Yahoo's plans to compete in this arena following their recently announced adserving partnership.
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Robert Brady

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