Our goal in re-architecting the existing Medialytics data infrastructure was three-fold and symbiotic:

• Design for aggressive scalability
• Offer precise user-metrics
• Serve timely, near-real-time data

The stability of the new Medialytics technology stack, in conjunction with improved sub-systems, now allows us to collect an unprecedented amount of user data and offer it in aggregated, multi-tiered analytical reports. For example, future reports may display which apps were run on a unique Nexus One device in Kansas during the NCAA Basketball Tournament.

In addition, a new underlying event-processing system now allows for autonomous server activity which helps drive data delivery and processing when performance and response times are at their most critical.

So what does all this mean to the speed in which your data is collected and shared? Where user-metrics were available within the same day, they can now be available multiple times within an hour.

Visit Medialytics.com to sign up for your own Medialytics account.

These SDKs extend Medialets analytics offerings beyond the iPhone, reflecting the strong growth in Blackberry and Android development.

Our analytics SDKs provide developers with a single dashboard that allows for the measurement and tracking of basic metrics as well as complex custom events within all of their Blackberry and Android apps (and iPhone of course). Now you can view deep, customized analytics for your apps across multiple platforms, to make the most informed improvements to your apps. The SDKs can be downloaded simply by signing up for Medialytics at http://www.Medialytics.com.

Here’s a screenshot preview of the dashboard…

The strength of Blackberry’s install base and high value users along with Android’s solid relationships with OEMs, carriers, and users, made it a priority for us to make our unique analytics capabilities available to developers working on these platforms.

And while we’ve spent a significant amount of time developing these SDKs, they are as always, available for free simply by signing up at Medialytics.com. We’re also hosting an Android Developer meet-up at or offices on March 3rd. All are welcome. More info and RSVP here — http://www.meetup.com/androidnyc/

More exciting announcements and product releases across our analytics and rich media ad platforms to come! Stay tuned.

New York, NY: March 1, 2010 – Medialets, the most widely deployed rich media ad and analytics platform for mobile, today extended its Medialytics offering by releasing a new Analytics Software Developers Kit (SDK) for Android and Blackberry applications. The new SDKs allow developers to track standard application metrics (unique users, sessions, average run-time, run-time frequency, etc) as well as define and measure complex custom user events within Blackberry and Android applications.

These custom events provide a great deal of insight and flexibility to the application publisher. Developers can instrument their application to capture the metrics that are most meaningful to their application and unique to the Medialets platform, developers can store a practically limitless amount of data with their custom events. For example, a game application developer can not only track what level a user has achieved in a game, but also all of the pieces and associated objects the user collected in that level. A content app developer can look beyond simply what article a user is reading and learn how they got to the page, how long the user spent on it, and if they scrolled to the bottom.

Integration of the new Analytics SDKs is a simple and rapid process – taking just a few hours to complete. Data captured through these events is then available in a comprehensive dashboard that also provides standard reporting metrics. Developers and publishers can make educated improvements to their Blackberry and Android apps based on these measurable insights into user behavior.

“Medialets offers analytics that support the high level of innovation that’s going into to Blackberry and Android apps, and go well beyond the basic metrics of simply counting downloads.” said Medialets CEO Eric Litman. “These insights help developers to deeply understand what users do and don’t do with their applications and empower them to make critical decisions about where to focus their valuable development resources.”

Developers can download Medialets’ BlackBerry and Android Analytics SDKs, along with our iPhone Analytics SDK, by signing up at www.Medialytics.com.

About Medialets:

Medialets is the most widely deployed rich media ad platform for mobile. Our clients include The Washington Post, NPR, Variety, MenuPages.com and more than 17,000 others who use Medialets to measure their audience and serve award-winning, high impact ads that outperform online rich media by an average of 2.5 times. Medialytics, our mobile app analytics platform supporting the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices, delivers in-depth views into both application and ad performance while providing the industry’s only solution for guaranteed post-click ad reporting. We are a privately held, New York-based company with marquee investors and a world-class team. Visit us on the Web at www.medialets.com, email us at connect@medialets.com, or follow us on Twitter @medialets.

http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/advertising/5470.html

And here’s a video of the MenuPages app with the Capital One ads in action….

These publishers are now giving brands access to advertising that taps into the full creative capabilities of smartphones while delivering the highest returns for their media spend.  Below is a press release with more info.

LEADING PUBLISHERS LOOK TO MEDIALETS FOR MOBILE RICH MEDIA ADVERTISING SOLUTION

The Associated Press, NPR, CNN, Variety and others integrate Medialets into their mobile apps

New York, NY: February 18, 2010 — Medialets, the most widely deployed rich media ad and analytics platform for mobile, today announced that The Associated Press, NPR, The Washington Post, MenuPages.com, CNN, CNN Money and Variety have integrated Medialets’ into their mobile applications. These publishers can now reliably deliver engaging rich media ads into their mobile apps while measuring usage and driving real mobile ad revenue.

“Publishers are turning to Medialets for our ability to provide them with the most engaging rich media ad units in mobile,” said Eric Litman, Medialets CEO. “Through their relationship with Medialets, these publishers can now give brands access to advertising that taps into the full creative capabilities of smartphones and delivers the highest return for their media spend.”

Medialets’ ad technology enables publishers to serve rich media ads into mobile applications, whether those ads are sold in-house or come from an integrated advertising sales partner. The unique ad formats offered by Medialets let brands and agencies create engaging ads that utilize the power of a mobile app with the intimacy and exceptional measurability smartphones provide. The advertisements can include video, animation, sound and other advanced functionality.

Examples of the rich media ads created, served and tracked by Medialets for these publishers can be found at the Medialets blog.

About Medialets:

Medialets is the most widely deployed rich media ad platform for mobile. Our clients include The Washington Post, NPR, Variety, MenuPages.com and more than 17,000 others who use Medialets to measure their audience and serve award-winning, high impact ads that outperform online rich media by an average of 2.5 times. Medialytics, our mobile app analytics platform supporting the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices, delivers in-depth views into both application and ad performance while providing the industry’s only solution for guaranteed post-click ad reporting. We are a privately held, New York-based company with marquee investors and a world-class team. Visit us on the Web at www.medialets.com, email us at connect@medialets.com, or follow us on Twitter @medialets.

The Associated Press, NPR, CNN, Variety and others integrate Medialets into their mobile apps

New York, NY: February 18, 2010 — Medialets, the most widely deployed rich media ad and analytics platform for mobile, today announced that The Associated Press, NPR, The Washington Post, MenuPages.com, CNN, CNN Money and Variety have integrated Medialets’ into their mobile applications. These publishers can now reliably deliver engaging rich media ads into their mobile apps while measuring usage and driving real mobile ad revenue.

“Publishers are turning to Medialets for our ability to provide them with the most engaging rich media ad units in mobile,” said Eric Litman, Medialets CEO. “Through their relationship with Medialets, these publishers can now give brands access to advertising that taps into the full creative capabilities of smartphones and delivers the highest return for their media spend.”

Medialets’ ad technology enables publishers to serve rich media ads into mobile applications, whether those ads are sold in-house or come from an integrated advertising sales partner. The unique ad formats offered by Medialets let brands and agencies create engaging ads that utilize the power of a mobile app with the intimacy and exceptional measurability smartphones provide. The advertisements can include video, animation, sound and other advanced functionality.

Examples of the rich media ads created, served and tracked by Medialets for these publishers can be found at the Medialets blog.

About Medialets:

Medialets is the most widely deployed rich media ad platform for mobile. Our clients include The Washington Post, NPR, Variety, MenuPages.com and more than 17,000 others who use Medialets to measure their audience and serve award-winning, high impact ads that outperform online rich media by an average of 2.5 times. Medialytics, our mobile app analytics platform supporting the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices, delivers in-depth views into both application and ad performance while providing the industry’s only solution for guaranteed post-click ad reporting. We are a privately held, New York-based company with marquee investors and a world-class team. Visit us on the Web at www.medialets.com, email us at connect@medialets.com, or follow us on Twitter @medialets.

We also saw a drop of 13% in installs v3.1.2, meaning 87% of the upgrades to v3.1.3 came from users that already had v3.1.2.

The other interesting data point is that roughly 13% of these users are slow to upgrade their iPhone OS and are using a version prior to 3.1.2.

]]> http://www.medialets.com/blog/2010/02/08/14-of-iphone-users-installed-v313-last-week/feed/ 4 http://www.medialets.com/blog/2010/02/08/14-of-iphone-users-installed-v313-last-week/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/medialets/~3/S-9KvurkGG8/ http://www.medialets.com/blog/2010/02/03/medialets-to-bring-interactivity-to-wizzard-medias-podcast-advertising/#comments Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:30:05 +0000 David Barkoe http://www.medialets.com/blog/?p=95 More exciting news today…. Wizzard Media, the world’s largest podcasting network, has integrated our  advertising and medialytics platform into their iPhone App framework through which they will be posting  podcast related apps.

As Wizzard CEO Chris Spencer talks about in the release, Medialets is helping Wizzard overcome the biggest obstacle for podcast advertising which is “the lack of interactivity (the ability to click on an ad and be taken to an advertiser’s web site) and the accurate measurement of the delivered advertisement…”

More big news from Medialets in the coming days….stay tuned.

The ad is currently running within the NPR News iPhone app and raising awareness of the album while also driving direct downloads via the iTunes Music Store.

Check out the video of the ad in action and let us know what you think in the comments!

Let’s walk through the ad…

When a viewer opens the NPR News iPhone app, a 320×50 banner is presented that, when clicked, expands to reveal the band’s CONTRA album cover. The track “Cousins” begins to play over the iPhone’s speakers. (We also recommend headphones!)

The viewer is immediately  prompted via an animated icon to tilt their phone to the right. When they do, the album cover image slides off the screen revealing a fullscreen video of Vampire Weekend performing their song “Cousins.”

A message appears instructing the viewer to shake their phone to edit the video. Each time the viewer shakes their phone, the video clip instantly switches out as the band’s song continuously plays in the background. The user can tap anywhere on the ad to “View Album Info.” When tapped, the entire video slides to the left, once again revealing the CONTRA album cover. The viewer is prompted to tap the album cover to launch the iTunes store.

Rich media ads tend to drive higher and more intricate user engagement.  We’ve enhanced our “Engagement” reporting where you now can see engagement rate alongside impressions.  An engagement is defined as the user taking the call to action — loosely, “the user did something in the ad” — such as expand a banner to full screen, play the game in the ad, shake, etc.  Having a user take the call to action within the ad unit (as opposed to just a click through) demonstrates greater interaction with your creative and, ultimately, your brand.

The “Engagement” page also show a breakdown of total and average screen time for each creative across your selected campaigns and apps.  This allows for some side-by-side comparison to see how creatives are performing.  The data can also be downloaded in CSV format for your own analysis.

A new tab entitled “Engagement Detail” shows more fine grained impressions, clicks, and CTR by hour of day and day of week.  Now you can see how a given ad or campaign performs through the course of a day or week.  Do users tend to interact more during typical commute times?  Can you better grab their attention on lazy Friday afternoons?

An enhancement to “Impressions & Clicks” now has impressions vs. CTR and clicks vs. CTR separated into individual charts so you can see greater granularity on ad performance.  They’re side by side on the same user-defined scale for trend analysis.

Similar to the engagement data, creatives can be compared and data downloaded for each campaign.

Reporting is always an evolving product and we hope to continue to enhance based on your feedback.  Contact your Medialets representative or send comments to support@medialets.com.

Headed to iPhoneDevCamp 3 on July 31st? Then we have a special treat for you!

Medialets is proud to bring you BT as the special guest performer for the opening night events. This outdoor performance will be held at Yahoo! and is only available to registered attendees of the conference.

BT has a long standing history with Apple, from using their equipment to performing at WWDC 2006, and now releasing his first iPhone app called Sonifi . If you haven’t had a chance to hear BT before, you can check him out here.

There’s still time to register for iPhoneDevCamp 3 where VP of Marketing Rana Sobhany will be discussing iPhone Marketing 101, a session you don’t want to miss. Click here to register.

We look forward to seeing you there!

“Objavectaweb-C” OS?

One of the key challenges in conducting an objective evaluation of software performance across devices that utilize different operating systems lies in accounting for the fundamental differences in the various OSs. While the iPhone 3G and 3GS could potentially run the same app on the same Objective-C-based operating system (making direct comparisons relatively straightforward), Android apps are Java-based, and the Palm Pre runs the entirely new Web OS. Given these divergent OS implementations, is there anything that come close to a standard unit of measure for judging performance of this growing breed of “superphones?”

Finding Common Ground

The common thread between these three OS’s is JavaScript execution in WebKit—the open source project that, in varying degrees, powers web browsing technology for these three disparate operating systems. With the exception of certain browser plugins (e.g., Flash), web rendering technology installed on today’s premiere mobile devices makes almost all—and in some cases even more—features of their ubiquitous desktop web browser counterparts available. Therefore, given the global commonality of JavaScript and WebKit-based web browsers, it becomes possible to compare the performance of these “pocket computers that make phone calls” to the performance of desktop machines.

The Yardstick

The WebKit Open Source Project provides a JavaScript test Suite dubbed SunSpider. According to the description on the SunSpider home page, “this benchmark tests the core JavaScript language only, not the DOM or other browser APIs. It is designed to compare different versions of the same browser, and different browsers to each other.” We at Medialets have found it to be one of the best attempts to measure real world JavaScript performance in a balanced and statistically sound way.

Medialets ran the SunSpider test suite in the following environments:

1. Safari 4.0.1 on a 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo White MacBook.
   The MacBook results were used as a baseline for relative comparisons.
2. Mobile Safari on the iPhone 3G with iPhone OS v2.2.1
3. Mobile Safari on the iPhone 3G with iPhone OS v3.0
4. Mobile Safari on the iPhone 3GS with iPhone OS v3.0
5. The “Browser” app on the T-Mobile G1 with Android OS v1.5 (Cupcake)
6. The “Web” app on the Palm Pre with Web OS v1.0.2

Each device was fully restored and rebooted immediately before running the test suite. Every attempt was made to assure that no atypical background tasks were executing while the tests were running. The SunSpider tests automatically run five times sequentially and the mean average from all five tests are reported. Network speed and latency have no effect on the results of the test.

Results

The results of the iPhone-based tests alone are rather astonishing and seem to indicate that many of Apple’s claims about the performance gains of their 3.0 OS and the iPhone 3GS may hold some water. Using OS 3.0 on the same iPhone 3G yields nearly 3X the JavaScript performance in Mobile Safari vs. using iPhone OS 2.2.1. The iPhone 3GS ups the ante by another factor of 3, bringing JavaScript performance on the iPhone 3GS to just 12X that of a full-powered desktop machine that has well over four times the raw processing muscle alone. The T-Mobile G1 running the “Cupcake” version of the Android OS completed the test suite in about 91 seconds. This makes it about a third faster than the iPhone 3G running Apple’s previous OS (2.2.1). The Palm Pre came storming out of the gate with speeds that closely rival the iPhone 3G running Apple’s latest iPhone OS.

Do any of these numbers really indicate which phone might be the best choice for a given individual? Absolutely not. At Medialets we use all of these devices, and love each one for many reasons. The fact that these tests can even be performed across this many device/OS combinations is a testament to how far mobile technology has come in such a relatively short time. We are looking forward to seeing an even greater variety of advanced mobile devices and OS revisions enter the market and we’ll keep you posted as we test more devices in our lab. Subscribe to our feed, leave a comment below, or reach out to us directly if you have any questions.

A Perspective: Apples To Palms

The iTunes App Store is the most successful app store in the mobile market today, so it makes perfect sense that analysts and critics immediately compare the two. Unfortunately, there really is no common ground for the two app stores based on the numerous factors involved. So instead of a comparison of the two, we’ll just use the precedent the App Store has set to put things in perspective.

The App Store hit the 1 million download point about 17 days earlier than the App Catalog, housing more than 16x the amount of apps and was accessible by more than 26x the number of devices than the App Catalog. Looks pretty bad for the Pre, right? Well, that’s until you take a look at the downloads themselves.

Still comparing at the 1 million mark, the average Palm Pre user had downloaded 26x the number of apps that iPhone users had, and the average app in the App Catalog experienced 16x the number of downloads that apps in the App Store had experienced. Funny how those numbers look so familiar.

So congratulations Palm! The Pre is an amazing device with lots of potential and we’re looking forward to what a public SDK will offer both consumers and developers alike. And just like my father told me on my millionth download “Learn from the mistakes of those who came before you.”

On May 29th, 2009, 9 days before the device officially launched nationwide, the Palm Pre App Catalog went live with 4 apps (Classic, Sudoku, Today Show, and WHERE). By launch day (6/6/09), this number grew to 18 apps total and then jumped to 30 at the end of the first week (6/12/09), and has remained unchanged since. Compared to the other app stores we’ve seen so far, this number is a mere fraction on what we’ve experienced at launch, but there are a few factors that paint a picture as to why this isn’t an issue.

Palm has been very selective about who they have offered their development SDK to prior to it’s expected public release later this summer. This decision stems from the fact that originally, Palm had no plans to launch their App Catalog on day one. Somewhere along the line, they changed their mind and went forward with a beta version of the App Catalog, which many would agree is much better than launching without one. Those previously developing for PalmOS were approached directly by Palm with the WebOS SDK. This offered Palm more of a launch filter than any other app store has witnessed.  Also noteworthy is that aside from Palm’s App Catalog, the only other app store to have a simultaneous launch alongside the first device running its operating system is the Android Market, which launched with just over 60 apps in late October, 2008.

Digging deeper into Palm’s App Catalog actually provides quite a bit of information. The first thing to note is that the entire store and all of the apps in the store are in beta except for one app (Classic by MotionApps). The App Catalog clearly lists this with a banner over the top right corner of the screen and so far, only the app Classic has had a version number of 1 and higher, the rest have been variations of 0.9 or lower.

The most distinctive piece of information we see is that the App Catalog lists actual downloads, which no other market currently does (see the Chart below).  Apple’s App Store listed downloads only for a couple of hours post-launch before they were made unavailable.  Android Market provides “buckets” of download ranges which, at the low end are helpful, but at the upper end vary widely (e.g. 50K -  250K, >250K).

For developers, the greatest appeal of working with WebOS has been the promise of a platform that is simple and easy to develop for. With the limited time the select developers have had access to the SDK, the fact that the App Catalog houses two developers (out of 28 total) that each currently offer two apps definitely gives that impression. What appears to be the issue at this point, and one of the major hold ups behind releasing a public SDK, is the App Catalog itself.

Currently in the App Catalog, when a developer updates an app, their release date changes to the date they released the update along with removing all traces of the original date. This allows for any developer to release an update and reposition themselves at the top of the Most Recent category and the top of whatever other categories they belong to when sorting by date. After all the gaming we’ve seen take place in the App Store, this issue, coupled with a lack of payment system in the store itself, are two of the major reasons why the App Catalog isn’t ready to handle the volume of submissions that a public SDK would bring. While releasing the SDK to the public and barring submissions/approval to the store may sound like a smart alternative to some, Palm has clearly thought things through and decided to go with their current selective approach.

The excitement for the Palm Pre has only grown since we first heard word of it. Now, nearly two weeks after launch with the hype winding down, you have to wonder, did Palm miss their window of opportunity with their App Catalog, or do they have something up their sleeve?

NEW YORK–Medialets, the leading analytics and ad technology platform for next-generation mobile applications, has today announced that they have closed a $4 million Series A financing round led by investor Foundry Group, with participation from DFJ Gotham and Bobby Yazdani, early investor in Google.

Founded in June 2008, Medialets is the most widely deployed rich media advertising and analytics platform for mobile applications built for iPhone and Android, with support for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Palm Pre devices coming this year. The company develops technologies that enable publishers to measure their audience and monetize their applications through advertising and allow brands to leverage all of the capabilities unique to these devices into advertisements in a completely measurable environment, whether a user is on- or offline.

“Medialets entered the market at the inception of the new generation of the mobile application space, and we are proud to have been able to help foster and grow the market by providing tools and support to the developer community. Over the past year, Medialets has become the trusted partner to over 1,000 leading developers. Through this investment, we’ll focus on significantly enhancing the platform they use to gain a competitive edge and continue to win market share,” said Eric Litman, Chairman and CEO of Medialets. “We’ve accomplished a great deal in a short period of time, and are thrilled to now bring in partners who are just as passionate about the business as we are.”

Medialets launched on July 11th, 2008, the same day as Apple’s App Store, has been installed over 60 million times across over 15 million unique devices to date, and measures usage in many of the top 20 highest downloaded applications on the iPhone platform based upon data released by Apple in April 2009. On the measurement side, Medialets primarily works with large developers and media publishers who look to the company’s analytics product, Medialytics, as a business intelligence tool to help them make informed decisions around improving app strategy and performance. Medialets does not collect any personally identifiable information from users. The data gathered from the analytics product is anonymized and applied to improve the advertising experience and targeting capabilities for advertisers.

The Medialets ad platform solves a core set of challenges successful publishers and developers face when deploying a mobile application. Medialets’ ad technology makes it possible to target and serve rich media ads to millions of smartphone users worldwide immediately, whether those ads are sold in-house or come from a third party. The company’s unique ad formats let brands and agencies create engaging ads that deliver the power of a branded application with the immediate distribution of an ad. Publishers add Medialets’ analytics code to their application and Medialets provides the infrastructure on the server side for aggregating and reporting on usage, as well as for reliably delivering ads into enabled applications. The rich media ads can include video, animation, sound and other advanced functionality.

“Although this is a very young sector, we believe that Medialets has the management team, experience and traction in the market to be the clear leader in the space,” said Seth Levine, partner at Foundry Group. “We look forward to working closely with Eric and his team to solidify Medialets’ lead in the market and continue to innovate and push the boundaries around what is possible in mobile advertising.”

For more information about Medialets, please visit www.medialets.com.

About Medialets

Medialets is a New York City-based rich media advertising and analytics platform for native applications on devices such as iPhone and Android. Medialets works with agencies and brands to define and deploy innovative ad campaigns that tap into all of the capabilities of the iPhone. Medialytics, Medialets’ free analytics and reporting solution, is the leading analytics and advertising solution for the world’s most downloaded iPhone applications. Medialets is a privately-held company with offices in New York, NY and San Francisco, CA. Email us at connect@medialets.com and follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/medialets.

About Foundry Group

Foundry Group is a venture capital firm focused on investing in early-stage information technology, Internet, and software startups. In addition to providing the necessary venture capital to get a company up and running, Foundry Group is committed to leveraging their experience in starting and growing companies, expertise in the technology industry, and network of relationships to help great entrepreneurs turn great ideas into great companies. Foundry Group is based in Boulder, Colorado, and invests in companies located across the United States. For more information, visit www.foundrygroup.com.

About DFJ Gotham

DFJ Gotham Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm based in New York City focused primarily on early-stage information technology companies on the East Coast. DFJ Gotham Ventures partners with extraordinary teams of entrepreneurs to build strong and successful businesses that make a huge impact in their industries. DFJ Gotham Ventures takes pride in being an active partner, leveraging its experience, knowledge and relationships to provide substantial value to its portfolio companies. DFJ Gotham Ventures is proud to have backed such category leaders as Massive (acquired by MSFT), XOsoft (acquired by CA), Q-Link (acquired by Adobe), Mimeo.com, ContextWeb, Worktopia and Drop.io, among many others. For more information, please visit www.dfjgotham.com.

About Bobby Yazdani

Bobby Yazdani is the founder and CEO of Saba. He founded Saba in 1997. Today, Saba, with over $100M in profitable revenue is headquartered in Redwood Shores, Calif., is the premier global provider of strategic human capital management. Saba’s people platform are used by more than 17 million people worldwide. Prior to founding Saba, Bobby held various senior R&D management positions at Oracle Corporation. He has successfully mentored and invested in many early stage start-ups including Clearspring, Dropbox, Google, HotPrints, Salesforce.com, Social Gaming Network, Webs.com and Masimo. Bobby has a BA in Applied Mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley.

Contact

Medialets
Rana Sobhany, 703-203-2508
VP Marketing
rana.sobhany@medialets.com

This is just the beginning for us. Today we’re announcing that we’ve raised $4m from the stellar teams at Foundry Group and DFJ Gotham with participation from Bobby Yazdani, an early investor in Google and Salesforce.com. Together with a series of advisors and new team members we’ll announce soon, we’ll collectively work to solidify Medialets’ position in the market and establish us as the standard for highly measurable, rich media ads in mobile.

If you’re a publisher, application developer, advertiser, agency, or anyone else interested in learning more about the measurable impact Medialets’ platform can have on your business, drop us an email at connect@medialets.com and we’ll get right back to you. Or send a message to careers@medialets.com if you have the passion, talent and drive to help us to lead an industry.

This ad was built by the Medialets team and served via our ad server into several top iPhone apps including iBowl, i.TV, SGN Golf and iBasketball. It is currently running – as of the date of this post – as a full screen interstitial, and includes stop motion video (a very cool effect done by our creative director Theo Skye), sound, and the ability to shake the ad to move between dance sequences.

Forbes, Mobile Marketer, Silicon Alley Insider, Advertising Age and a host of others have given their praise for this campaign. Special thanks to John Haber and Jamie Wells at OMD for their creative vision and support.

If you would like Medialets to help you with rich media ads on iPhone, Android or BlackBerry, drop us an email at connect@medialets.com and we’ll create a plan to shake up the market together.

NEW YORK, New York. – April 15th, 2009 – Medialets, the leading analytics and ad technology platform for next-generation mobile applications, has today announced reaching the milestone of processing one billion events through the company’s free analytics product, Medialytics.

Medialytics, launched on July 11th, 2008 – the same day as Apple’s App Store – has been installed over 60 million times across more than 13 million unique devices to date. Medialytics measures behaviors in many of the top 20 highest downloaded applications on the iPhone platform based upon data released by Apple last week. Medialets works with developers and media publishers who look to Medialytics as a business intelligence tool to help them make informed decisions around improving app strategy and performance.

“Knowing and tracking key metrics are an important part of any successful business’ operations. With Apple nearing a billion downloads, there’s now meaningful scale from which every developer on the platform can draw insights to drive their product and marketing decisions,” says Eric Litman, CEO of Medialets. “We give our customers the tools they need to collect the data and metrics that are important to advancing their business.”

The most powerful insights to come from 10 months of data relate to engagement time with content and functionality-rich applications.  Engagement time across all Medialets applications falls between 3.5 minutes and 7 minutes on average per session.  The company sees ad click-through rates range from 1% on the low end to 8% on the high end for both advertiser content as well as cross-application promotion.

“It is still a young market, but developers and publishers alike on the platform are quickly learning what to track and how to adapt to the data they see.” remarks Litman. “Analytics are a competitive tool. Knowing more about your audience than your competitors do in this exceptionally competitive space is an important part of staying ahead.”

About Medialets

Medialets is a New York City-based rich media advertising and analytics platform for native applications on devices such as iPhone and Android.  Medialets works with agencies and brands to define and deploy innovative ad campaigns that tap into all of the capabilities of the iPhone. Medialytics, Medialets’ free analytics and reporting solution, is the leading analytics and advertising solution for the world’s most downloaded iPhone applications. Medialets is a privately-held company with offices in New York, NY and San Francisco, CA. Email us at connect@medialets.com, visit us on the Web at www.medialets.com and follow us on Twitter www.twitter.com/medialets.

Press Contact:
Rana Sobhany
VP Marketing, Medialets
rana.sobhany@medialets.com
Phone: 703.203.2508

Thanks to Red Herring, our customers and partners for a great start, and look to us to continue to drive the pace in mobile advertising in 2009.

One of the most interesting and forward-thinking musical artists of the past few years is Gregg Gillis aka Girl Talk, a former biomedical engineer turned DJ, who has established a cult following due to his masterful mashups of disparate artists, resulting in music that bridges the gap between genres and brings people together. He has recently devoted himself to making music full-time, and is one of the most in-demand artists of the year.

It is our pleasure to extend an invitation to two winners to join the Medialets team at Girl Talk’s show in NYC on Sunday, November 16th.  Instructions for entering the contest are on the image below, and the two winners will be picked at random at 4:00pm EST on 11/16/08.  You must be in NYC to be eligible to win.

To those who are cutting-edge and forward-thinking, we salute you, and here’s hoping that you will join us tomorrow at Terminal 5 to see Girl Talk work the crowd.

Good Luck!
Rana and the Medialets team

Highlights

(1) 167 Apps have been downloaded between between 667,000 and 2.9 Million times.

(2) Downloads are being driven by 41 apps, which account for between 73% and 83% of all possible downloads.

(3) Two applications, Pac-Man by Namco and The Weather channel generated the most downloads (50,000 – 250,000).

(4) Although download ranges can be very large, growth on the low-end was still nearly 80% during the first week.

(5) 5 Categories account for 61% of all apps.

(6) The number of apps has nearly tripled since launch, led by the Games, Tools and Productivity categories.

Applications By Category

Android Market applications totaled 167 as of 10/29.  The top 5 Categories with the most apps accounted for 61% of all titles: Tools, Games, Lifestyle, Multimedia, and Productivity.

Title growth has nearly tripled since launch, as the chart below shows.  Three categories – Tools, Games and Productivity led the growth, representing just over 50% of the 105 apps added since last week.

Downloads

Android Market provides download data in ranges or “bins.”  While it’s better than having no information at all (e.g. Apple’s App Store) it gets a bit unwieldy within the top 2 bins, 10,000 – 50,000, and 50,000 – 250,000, where the top end is 5x larger than the bottom end, and the variance can be up to 200,000.  In the chart above, we’ve looked at the trend of total downloads from both ends of the ranges given, and growth seems pretty healthy on both ends.  Apps downloaded from the end of the Market’s first day until 10/29 grew at a rate anywhere between 80% on the low end to potentially 97% on the upside.

The table below gives detail on the distribution of downloads, which are driven by 41 apps in the two highest bins. Taking the low/high ranges into consideration, these 41 apps comprise anywhere between 73% and 83% of all possible downloads

Within these 41 apps, two of them, Pac-Man by Namco and The Weather Channel generated the highest number of downloads (50,000 – 250,000).  The remaining 39 are in the 10,000 – 50,000 range – we displayed the “Top 5″ in the table below, which were determined by  the most recent average of user ratings.  

We’ll keep you posted as data continues to roll in.  In the meantime, we’d love to hear your comments and ideas as our ecosystem continues to evolve.  Reach out to us at connect at medialets dot com and add us on Twitter at @medialets.

Google’s Android Market has been officially live for 24 hours. Here are some early observations and comparisons with the iPhone App Store’s first 24 hours.

There are myriad similarities between iPhone and Android users:

• They like to play games, shop, and know what music they are listening to,
• They are curious about the weather, and
• They generally share the same interests as iPhone users 

During the first 24 hours of Android Market, 62 apps were available to consumers, all free.  This is less than 10% of the number of apps we saw at the launch of Apple’s App Store. Although Apple allowed both free and paid applications to be distributed when the App Store launched, paid downloads for Android will not be available until Q1 2009.

Observation #1 – The average application has 7,800+ downloads.

Android Market is providing some detail on downloads per application –  in contrast to Apple’s embargo of this information after the first 15 hours of launching their App Store.  Rather than displaying exact figures, Android phones show download ranges for a given application, with the smallest range we observed being 100-500 and the largest 10,000-50,000. Given those ranges, roughly 206,000 to 770,000 downloads occurred within the first 24 hours of launch. The weighted average of midpoints is 7,850 downloads/app, just north of the middle of the 5,000 – 10,000 range.

Observation #2  - Nine apps made it to the 10,000 – 50,000 downloads range.

If we use ratings and number of reviews to differentiate, unlike the iPhone platform, games are not in the top three.  Of the nine apps in this range, only three are games.  ShopSavvy is at the top of the list factoring in ratings and number of reviews, followed by The Weather Channel, and Shazam, an app that helps people identify a song they are listening to.  During the early hours of the iPhone App Store, while Apple was still publishing download data, only two apps broke the 10,000 download mark – Remote and AIM.  Remote, the leading app, was downloaded ~16,000 times. Although the ranges for the top Android apps are similar, it is still too early  to assert with confidence that a trajectory similar to Apple’s App Store is occurring.  Other factors over time need to be considered, including the total number of apps in the market.

Observation #3 – 24 hours into the launch, it appears that either Android users are generally interested in the same types of application functionality as iPhone users, or possibly, that Android developers are generally interested in creating the same types of apps as iPhone developers.

We compared our observations of the iPhone App Store 24 hours after launch with Android Market, and found that once we normalized the names of categories between the two platforms, the categories have similar distributions of applications. We had to make some assumptions and groupings to make our best apples-to-androids comparison and noted those in the table below the chart.

As always, we love hearing from anyone who is interested in learning more about, or sharing their experiences about this new platform. Feel free to contact us at connect at www.medialets.com or follow us on twitter at @medialets.

We would love to see you there! We’ve heard from our friends Matt Drance and Michael Jurewitz at Apple that the event in our hometown of New York is already at capacity, but you can sign up to be on the waitlist.  Here’s the complete list of their destinations: 

Be sure to sign up ASAP, and leave us a comment if you’re planning on attending!

Prior to today, the NDA, which must be agreed to before the SDK can be downloaded, had prevented programmers from discussing the finer points of their code and had forbidden developers from discussing the SDK and the applications that are built upon it.

Apple’s Nondisclosure Agreement, which has caused plenty of heartache for iPhone developers, also has prevented many experts from sharing their experiences, asking questions, and providing guidance.  

Here at Medialets, we pride ourselves on being a hub for innovation and insights into this new platform, but have not been allowed to share much of the data and learnings we have accumulated over the past 81 days.

Over the next few days, we will be compiling some of our best practices and code examples onto developer.medialets.com/forum.  We are also organizing some workshops for developers in NYC and SF who are looking to create great apps and successful businesses around the platform.

Please feel free to reach out to us at any time with your ideas, comments, suggestions and questions. Reach us at  connect at medialets dot com or follow us on Twitter at @medialets.  Happy coding!

As the leading analytics provider for the iPhone, we, more than anyone else deeply understand how to help developers make the most of their audience. We’re passionate about user experience, understand both the needs of developers and the needs of advertisers, and bridge the gap between the market and marketers in a way that allows developers stay focused on writing great applications. The market has clearly shown that to consumers free is better (http://metrics.medialets.com/charts/apps-by-price) and through the insights our analytics provide to our ad platform, we make it easy and sustainable for developers to continue to innovate and give their apps away.

The world of mobile changed when Apple introduced the App Store. Historically, developers have had to contend with lengthy, often expensive negotiations and certification procedures with carriers to bring their applications to market, and more often than not, the challenges of working in that environment have limited the number and quality of developers willing to undertake the effort.  With the App Store, the process has been reduced to a simple submission and review cycle. Combining that with centralized discovery, distribution and payments for applications has led to a new model for mobile app developers that significantly opens up the possibility of building sustainable – even venture scale – businesses around mobile applications.  But the App Store is just the beginning. Google was quick to recognize the power of this distribution model and earlier this year announced their own App Marketplace, which like Apple’s App Store, bypasses carriers and lets developers market directly to consumers through the Marketplace.

We’ve built the leading solution for analytics on the iPhone and now we’re bringing it to Android because we believe in Android as a platform and our customers have asked us to support it. The opportunity for mobile developers just grew significantly today as the addressable base of users expanded to include the entire future Android subscriber base.

Why does this matter to the market?:

We believe that the emerging opportunity for mobile developers today is nothing less than the early opportunity for developers of desktop software. The key differences today are that users are more demanding, the platforms are more sophisticated and the market is significantly more competitive. Developers who factor our analytics into their applications have a dramatic, competitive advantage over other developers working without the deep insights our platform can provide. Nobody launches a significant Web property today without a solid analytics package, and neither should mobile application developers.

Our mission is to provide the best possible experience for three major groups: developers, their customers, and advertisers. The more that developers and advertisers know about the types of things users want out of mobile applications, the more effective an ad can be.

We work every day to help developers make the right decisions about where and how to spend their time and money. The better a developer understands their audience, the better an app they will write. Better applications mean stronger connections with customers and stronger connections lead to more opportunities to create maximum revenue potential for their application .

We’ve presented a single view for developers to monitor their applications across both the iPhone and Android platforms. This allows them to track relative performance in either and both markets, gives insights on where and how to spend marketing dollars and significantly simplifies the process of managing their release cycles. Combining our analytics with the update notifications provided by the App Store and App Marketplace gives our developers a key advantage over others in the market and enables them to get onto tighter, more focused release cycles to specifically meet the needs of their current and future users.

Android is the second platform in the new world of carrier-free mobile application distribution, and it also happens to support the development of highly engaging and useful applications. It’s not only valuable to consumers as a standalone offering, it also continues to raise the bar for every other mobile platform vendor to deliver more compelling offerings. Consumers, whether or not they buy an Android phone, will benefit from this competition.

Mobile operators not selling the iPhone today need strong, competitive offerings to convince consumers to buy something other than the iPhone. Much like we’ve seen historically on game consoles, many future mobile phone purchases will likely be influenced by the applications available for the platform. Android and the App Marketplace give carriers a potentially viable alternative to the explosive application market for the iPhone, and with the might of Google behind the platform, we may see development activity that equals or even surpasses that of iPhone developers.

We invite you to sign up for the beta at www.medialets.com/android and always, please reach out to us at any time at connect @ medialets dot com.  We look forward to hearing about the apps you’re building!

As a company, we believe that the advertisers and developers who work with us have a significant strategic advantage over their competitors because we offer an integrated and comprehensive solution, spanning analytics, monetization and distribution across the Medialets ad network.  Medialets and Medialytics empowers our customers to have a deep understanding of user behavior and activity, what is popular in their apps, what campaigns have the most traction with end users in order to make informed decisions and take action accordingly based on this information.  The Medialytics dashboard is the central point for customization of event tracking, reporting and campaign configuration, so we wanted to unify the look and feel across our entire range of web products including Medialytics and App Store Metrics to reflect the experience of working with Medialytics.

More importantly, it was very clear to us based on our discussions with you that many of our customers and fans were not aware of the full extent of our product range and offerings.  We are thrilled about the response to our App Store Metrics application, and every day, we hear from top developers, brand marketers, and iPhone users alike that they visit our site many times a day to observe the changes in ranking and check out the newest applications added to the App Store.  These users, however, may not have known about our industry leading native app advertising capabilities.  Similarly, many of our current customers were not aware of the rich features of our App Store Metrics, such as searching by app developer/company, and our RSS feeds providing real time updates of the top free apps, top paid apps, new apps and updated apps.

We’ve added a few sections to Medialets.com to help you find the information you’re looking for.  We’ve broken down the For App Developers and For Advertisers/Agencies into discreet sections encompassing our offerings for each based on your feedback, and created a section called Ecosystem to provide a holistic overview of the industry at large.  We’ve also added an easy-to-navigate Media Relations section displaying our latest media coverage and press releases and providing a snapshot of the current state of Medialets in general.

We’re anxiously awaiting your thoughts on our new site!  You know how to reach us – connect [at] medialets [dot] com and on Twitter (@medialets).  Thanks so much for your ongoing support and kind words.  We can’t wait to start working with you.

Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research last week published some interesting statistics on the sale of the first 1 Million 3G iPhones.  We took a quick look and made some observations.

It’s a typical power curve, with 4 of the 22 countries capturing 81% of unit sales. The US leads with 600,000 units sold followed by Japan, Germany and France each with about 70,000 units.  

If you look at the percentage of each carrier’s contract subscriber base in each country, with the exception of the US, it looks as if all countries have a very consistent penetration rate of ~ 0.4% except Canada, whose anemic penetration rate and units sold are most likely a result of the systems issues that Apple and many carriers were having during registration of the handsets.

From a global carrier perspective, removing AT&T from the pack, it looks like T-Mobile is the leader for overseas unit sales, reporting 89,000 units sold in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. Orange is next with combined unit sales of 77,000 from France, Belgium and Switzerland. Japan’s Softbank is third with 70,000 units sold.

Of course this data only spans the very frothy first three days.  We are looking forward to learning more about results over the last 2+ weeks and will keep you posted as more data comes in.  Let us know if you hear anything else, and a big thanks to our developer community for continuing to keep the quest for transparency a top commercial priority.

Right now the Top Paid app is Units Convertor – available for $0.99 as a Paid download.  However at some point after July 28th, the app made the jump from being a free app to paid-for, and apparently took its App Store calculated popularity with it.  On July 28th, Unit Converter was the 48th most popular free app, yet today, as a paid app is #1.

While it’s possible that Units Convertor built up a huge fan base as a free app, then garnered enough support to become the Top Paid app, but it’s more likely that in changing the price, Units Converter changed the peers it was being compared to, and the number of times Units Converter was downloaded for free dwarfed the competition of competing paid apps.  Of course, this is all conjecture, seeing as download data is not made publicly available, and Units Convertor may have risen to the top of the paid downloads list legitimately due to its rapid emergence and growing number of supporters.

So what’s the aftermath of this going to be?  Some opportunistic developers are likely to try exploiting this, using their relatively overwhelming volume of downloads as free apps to boost a paid rating, at least until Apple changes its policy for converting free to paid apps.  And for Units Convertor, this switch has garnered a decline in reviews.

On the other hand it also highlights the unique window of opportunity developers can take to profit from their code.  By offering two versions – one free and ad-supported, and one paid and ad free – it offers developers the opportunity to profit from the mass distribution advantages of a free app, while offering a way to reward the most loyal users with a paid app that gives users the benefit of an ad-free app and the knowledge that they are directly supporting the developer.

Idea:  If you’re going to provide a free and paid version of your application, consider how your users will migrate their data from free to paid.  You might want to offer a WebDav sever to migrate data between versions (though you’ll want to tell your users before they upgrade that you’ll be moving the data off the device, only to put it back on a few moments later).

• RSS feeds of new apps, top free apps, top paid apps, and updated apps
• Enhanced graphics on the main metrics page, making it easier to spot trends in total ratings and average ratings
• Chart counting iPhone applications at each price point
• Display of more company data about the developer of each app on the individual app view
• Screenshots now included for each app
• Developer pages, showing what apps each developer has built, and a URL to the developer’s website

Let us know what you think in the comments and tell us what else you would like to see.

There’s a lot more to come so stay tuned!

So, let’s get the basic stats out of the way first.  As of Sunday night at 11PM, there are 977 apps available at the store. Of those, 254, or just over one quarter, are free.  The two categories with more than one half of their apps in the free bucket are Social Networking (93.9% free) and News (73.3% free).  The $0.99 category is the second most popular, accounting for 226 apps, or 23.1%.  The fact that almost half of the apps at the store can be had for less than a buck certainly could help account for the staggering download statistics that Apple is quoting!  The 99 cent-ers are dominated by a wealth of books by AppEngines, LLC, which accounts for 111 of the 226, or about 50%.  Entertainment, Games and Utilities make up the lion’s share of the remaining portion of this $0.99 group.

The $1.99, $4.99 and $9.99 price points are each holding about 10% of the market.  Games dominates all three of these, making up 48.5%, 42.9% and 27.5%, respectively. The other big category for the $9.99 apps is Travel, with the iLingo & Lonely Planet foreign language phrase books being the big offerings there.  However, given that most of the Lonely Planet printed guides are available at their website for the reduced price of $6.29, we may be seeing their prices coming down in the near future.  The joy is that since Apple has left pricing completely at the discretion of the developers, they can each determine what level of downloads justify what price point.    

The average price across all apps is $4.96 and the average price of a paid app is $6.70.  However, we have recently seen some higher priced apps enter the market, such as the two MyAccountsToGo apps coming in at $449.99 a pop, released on the 15th, and iChart EMR at $139.99, released last week.  However, as one would expect, these six apps in the over $50 range are all have very specialized target users.  If we ignore these six apps, the average price for a paid app drops back to $4.96.    

The largest single category by far is still Games, with 256 apps and an average user rating of 3.90, compared with a store-wide average user rating of 3.60, and a store-wide average user rating of 3.46 when Games are ignored in this calculation.  This single category, of the 19 categories currently available, is accounting for just over 25% of the total store offering!  This particular segment is breaking from some other overall trends to boot.  Only 11.7% of the Games are free; way below the total app store average.  The average price in this category is $3.75, which is also well below the overall average for the store.  The average price for a paid game is $4.18, again below the store average as a whole.  To further this point, if we exclude Games from our store average app price calculations entirely, we find out that the average price for all apps climbs 47 cents to $5.43, the average price for a paid app is up $1.89 to $7.85 and the average price for a paid app excluding the six big dollar apps is up $0.36 to $5.32.  Obviously, Games is skewing the overall picture on pricing in the store.  They are more plentiful than anything else, and on the whole, cheaper, and better received based on the ratings.

The real kicker is that Games are dominating the leader board, with 53 of the top 100 paid apps coming from this category – that’s 23.5% of the available paid Games apps out there.  The average rating for these 53 is 3.84, compared with the overall paid Game rating average of 3.75.  Ignoring Games, the average rating for the remaining 47 apps drops to 3.21.  In terms of pricing, the average price for Games in the top 100 is $5.52 versus $4.61 for the other 47 apps.  If we narrow that list down to the top 25 paid apps, Games make up 16 of those, with an average rating of 3.88.  Granted, Music and Navigation have a greater percentage of their paid apps in the top 100, but combined they only represent 12 apps.  And no other category in the top 25 paid list has average user ratings anywhere near as high!  In fact, if we ignore games from the top 25 paid apps, the average rating for the remaining 9 apps drops all the way down to 2.79.  The average price for these 16 apps is $6.30 versus $1.99 for other 9.  The average rating for all paid apps store-wide is 3.37, for the top 100 paid apps, it is 3.63, and for the top 25 paid apps, its 3.67.  So, it looks like Games are doing pretty well compared to the other categories in both the paid download rankings and paid apps ratings.

On the free side, there are 24 in the top 100, which is 80.0% of the total free Games available.  They hold spots number one, two and three here.  By comparison, the second highest on the free leader board in terms of percentages is Entertainment, with 18, or 62.1% of its 29 free apps, ranking in the top 100.  The average rating for the 21 free apps is 4.18.  For top 100 free Entertainment apps, the average rating is 4.12.  Looking at the top free 25 only, Games have 7 of these, with an impressive average rating of 4.47.  For Entertainment’s 6 in the top 25, the average rating is 4.37.  The overall average user rating for free Games is 4.15, for all free apps store-wide is 3.76, for the top 100 free apps, it is 3.85 and for the top 25 free apps, its 4.06.  So, it looks like Games is doing better than average here but its a little tighter than on the paid side.

So, the free apps, be they fewer, are contributing to the overall higher ratings of this category.  One could ask, how much does pricing seem to really matter?  Let’s take a look at the pricing breakdown in detail and see if we can learn anything:

Within Games, there have been 22 price changes from July 15 to July 25 and 35 new apps hitting the store.  Twelve days ago we had 31 Games apps at a price of $9.99.  Today there are only 25.  Where did they go and does it seem to have paid off?  

Looking at the details, I see there are 7 games that have dropped their price from $9.99, in all cases going to $4.99, which accounts for the majority of the increases we see there.  None of these apps are in the top 100 paid apps list and it doesn’t appear to have greatly affected their ratings, dropping from 3.48 to 3.35, over a total of 73 and 122 ratings.  So maybe these games need to either rethink their pricing strategy further, or possibly they need to retool their apps a bit.  

There is one new app at $9.99 that was released on 7/18, and its getting an average rating of 4.50 from 68 reviewers so far.  The weighted average rating for the 25 $9.99 apps is only 3.65, so this one seems to be doing okay.  Of these 25 apps, 13 of them hit the top 100 download board.  Only 5 other apps priced at $9.99 hit the top 100 (3 Productivity & 2 Music).  

For the other 10 apps that have dropped their prices, 5 dropped a dollar and five others dropped anywhere from 2 to 4 bucks.  For the one dollar drop, we see an increase in average rating from 3.56 to 3.66.  For the greater than one dollar drop, the ratings actually drop from 3.89 to 3.74.

Four games have actually raised their prices in the past 10 days, in all cases by $1.00.  Three were increased from $1.99 to $2.99 with apparently little effect in their ratings.  Of these, only the app now at $7.99 has enough reviews to see if this change has had an impact.  The ratings here have gone up from 4.1 to 4.2.

Okay, now that your head and mine are swimming with numbers (which in the absence of actual download numbers only mean so much), lets see if we can come up with some take-aways.  The relative mix of apps by category hasn’t changed much and we can probably expect to see this continue in this fashion.  The percentage of free vs. paid is staying relatively stable across the store, although the average price seems to be increasing slightly.   The overall ratings for free apps seems to be higher than paid apps, whether we look at the store as a whole, the top 100 or just the top 25.  People love their Games!  The user ratings are higher here and people are willing to pay for good Games and seem to be sampling far and wide.  Further, a drop in a Game’s price doesn’t equate into an increase in user satisfaction, so it appears that at least for Games, our user community is looking for quality at whatever price (13 of those 54 on the top 100 paid download’s board are priced at $9.99, and 5 are at $7.99, while only 12 are at $1.99 & $0.99 price points combined).

Okay, maybe that isn’t clearly indicated in the chart, but a few points do jump out, and most of it turns out to be what we all expected.  First, the majority of the apps in the store right now are in the Games and Entertainment categories.  Combined, they account for 393 apps or 49% of the total current store offering. Second, the biggest single item on the chart is Entertainment apps at the 99 cent price point.  A whopping 122 apps fall into this bucket, representing 15.2% of the total apps.  The competition in this area is going to be fierce.  The second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth longest colored bars in this chart are all in the Games category, representing the $1.99, $4.99, $9.99, $2.99 and $0.99 price points, respectively.  

Other things that jump out at us on the chart…  Travel apps seem to be most concentrated around the $9.99 mark, over half the Utilities apps are under a buck and just under half of the Productivity apps are free.  Social Networking apps are almost all free.  That little yellow at the end of their line is the $9.99 versions of Twitterific Premium and Exposure Premium.  Both of those apps are available for free in scaled down version.

Personally, I like to look at my data in tables.  Ahh… raw numbers.  Makes my heart feel warm and fuzzy.  

As we see a trend away from free in the app store, it will be interesting to see how the price points trend within the individual categories.

It’s been on my mind all day (which people have told me says something…I guess) so I went ahead and did it.  But there is a “health warning” regarding the consumption of this information.  Its not revenue – its really a price * volume proxy – lots of assumptions, but again, done in the spirit of transparency.

We start with our earlier premise that in the absence of download volume, we would use the number of reviews written for an app as a proxy for relative volume comparisons.  As of 7/13, written reviews for paid-for apps outnumbered those for free apps by about 25% (that’s about a 55/45 ratio). So:

If there were 10 Million downloads, then using the ratio above, we’re left with about  4,450,000 for paid-for apps.

Next, we know that there were 2,623 reviews written for paid-for apps. Dividing this into the number of reviews that an app received gives us the “share” of reviews for an app – which translates to our proxy for share of volume.  Multiply this by 4,450,000, and again by the price to get an estimate of relative financial position vs. other apps (I don’t feel it’s qualified enough to be called revenue yet).

So, if Super Monkey Ball has 290 reviews, the following happens:

290 = 11.1% of paid-for reviews.  11.1% * 4,450,000 * $9.99 = $4.9M.

There, I did it.

But remember, this is not revenue!  It’s a way to gain more insight into how pricing and demand affect the relative financial performance of an app.  Here is a table of a few I’ve done for you.

We’d love to hear your feedback on this.

Did I make any money?

That’s the question on everyone’s mind. How did my app perform? How has it done vs. others overall? In my category? How about with others of the same price or vs. free apps? What’s the big picture?
We’ve been gathering and crunching away at data all weekend long, and here are some of our observations and analysis.

Yes. It’s behaving like a market.

Prices are falling as more apps are added. We learn in Econ 101 that as more competitors enter a market, the more likely we are to see price compression for an unlimited resource. We’ve been reviewing the App Store more or less hourly since it became available on-line, and (barring some ‘mechanicals’ from Apple), the trend over time seems to indicate that this may already be happening (Chart 1). I say “may” only because these are app owners’ initial bids into the market – we have not seen much activity in terms of price changes yet, but are less than 100 hours into it.

Is a proliferation of free apps driving this pattern? Chart 2 indicates that it isn’t. In fact it is a very similar pattern.

Competition can be “ugly.”

If you’re not the lead dog, the scenery never changes. People are taking advantage of weak points in the App Store process to get noticed. You will see the same behaviors if you look in the Yellow Pages. Here are the top 10 app names in alphabetical order as of around 7pm last night:

• !! Solitaire City !!
• !FLOverload!
• “CubicMan Deluxe”
• “Whack The Groundhog”
• “Jam’
• “Jirbo Break’
• “Jirbo Jive’
• “Jive’
• “Marble Mash’
• “Paper Football’

Strong desire for transparency.

How much money did I make yesterday/to date, etc.? For a while, the App store was publishing number of downloads, so you could directly see the performance of your application. If you were scrappy enough, you could benchmark vs. other apps. Which we did. Until Apple shut the counter down after about 15 hours. I can’t blame them. Where I come from, publishing real-time revenue for a publicly traded company leads to unemployment. However, now that Im on the other side, like many others, I’m pushing for price transparency – I want to see where the market is going.

The next best thing, we think, is to measure download activity by proxy using number of reviews posted. It does not give us insight to revenue, but it may be able to give us relative perspective on volume as a benchmark. The thinking is that the more an app gets downloaded, the more likely people will post reviews. I’ll let you figure out the math to interpret this vs. the 10 Million downloads Apple reported this morning. In the meantime, here’s a snapshot of one of our leaderboard tables that we have started publishing and updating 4 times a day (and boy are our fingers tired!).

Free is “Better”

At least that’s what the stats coming out of the first 3 full days of operations are saying. Using our volume proxy of reviews submitted, Chart 4 shows that free apps generate anywhere from 24% – 29% more reviews than paid-for apps do.

The obvious follow-up question is “OK, but are they of similar quality as paid-for apps?” We tested this, and were actually surprised to see that the average rating (on a 5 point scale) was higher for free apps (Chart 5).

It’s Your Market, Too

To carry on the racing analogy, we haven’t even reached the first turn, and there already are some smoke patches to drive through. At Medialets, besides providing specific metrics for our application development partners, we are trying to help the market become more efficient in general. We’d love to get your thoughts on some of the data we are publishing. Let us know how we can make this better or other ways you might like to understand the changes in this market and we’ll get our pit crew right on it!

We passed out over 200 Medialets s’more kits, each containing bamboo-skewered jet puffed marshmallows, rich dark chocolate bars, graham crackers, a tealight candle and matches.  The response was fabulous!  iPhone fans all around were roasting jumbo marshmellows while they waited.  Special thanks to our friends at CNET/CBS Justin Yu and Wilson Tang for making the day so memorable and making us laugh.  
Also, to Chrissie Brodigan, Tony Bacigalupo, Brett Petersel, Michael Gruen, David Riordan and DeeDee Stanbury, we cannot thank you enough for your support in making this event possible.  Thank you so much!

Photos courtesy of Tony Bacigalupo’s Flickr. 

Eric being interviewed on CNET

Eric’s business card

Greg Gregarious Narain from Blue Whale Labs and Adam Hirsch from Mashable