If I knew how many calls I would have had about our iPhone app, I would have pushed to launch it even earlier than this past June. The interest on mobile apps is almost as high as in streaming and in-banner video. It doesn’t surprise me considering the most recent “Media Advertising Forecast” from MAGNA shows mobile and online video advertising each growing at 30% or higher. Mobile is expected to surpass $400 million by 2011, with online video hitting the $1 billion mark by 2011.
I wanted to give advertisers a peek into what kind of metrics we are looking at for local mobile apps. Local being the key word here. Our iPhone app is barely a month old, and is already closing in at 10,000 downloads and hundreds of thousands “opens”. If you haven’t heard the term “open” when referring to mobile apps, it is basically the same a visit on a website. Most of our iPhone advertising opportunities will be based on a person’s physical location. Below is a map that plots where people are “opening” our iPhone app everyday(orange and red nodes are clusters of 50,000 or more opens). You can see that the map is so populated, that you can’t even see the names of the MSP metro cities below.
Our app is growing like a wildfire and it is very encouraging and exciting to see people using it with such frequency. I have a video of our iPhone in action that I will post in the next few days so that those with other types of smart phones can see what it looks like. Our app should be compatible with Android and other platforms very soon.
