APP took the user’s eye from the TV and pulled the money

In the past few years, mobile internet and APP have begun to enter Americans' living rooms, crowding out TVs and becoming a time-consuming product for Americans. Mobile APP took away the consumption time of other media. On this point, everyone generally has a consensus. So how many TV industry business values ​​have turned to mobile APP? Flurry's analysis of the data concluded that: not much

Compared with cable TV, mobile APP is still a bargain. By comparing the average US user’s pay per hour on cable box mobile games, Americans’ spending on cable TV per hour in 2014 was about 64 cents. Their spending on mobile games is only 11 cents. Compared with cinemas, both types of media are bargains. Americans contribute 5 US dollars per hour in the cinema (assuming a 120-minute movie ticket of 10 US dollars). This situation is not different from that in 2012 and 2013, when the U.S. users contributed 6.4 times and 5.8 times respectively to cable box mobile games.

From 2013 to 2014, the average spending per user on mobile games only increased by 0.5 points. It is really surprising that the entire market has grown from 3 billion U.S. dollars to 4.2 billion U.S. dollars. We can look at the following points: First, with the popularity of smartphones and tablets, mobile game users have increased from 94 million in 2013 to 108 million in 2014; second users have spent time in game apps from 2013. It increased from approximately 50 minutes in a year to approximately 56 minutes in 2014. So when the entire market grew by 1.2 billion U.S. dollars, per-capita spending per capita only increased by 4.7%, from 10.5 cents to 11 points, but more users pulled up the entire scale of growth.

Many analysts may argue that the production cost of TV content is much higher than the production cost of mobile games, leading to price differences. But this depends on the type of TV program, and it is also true for mobile games. In fact, the development and promotion costs of mobile games have also increased a lot in the past few years.

All of these data have provided a wake-up call for the cable industry, especially for those TV companies that are slowly and conservatively bundling content with the Internet. On the other hand, this is a good signal for APP developers. Although the price of the TV industry will not fall several times, the APP content (games, media, music and entertainment) will get better and better, and sell better prices. The good news for the APP industry is that, unlike the PC Internet, users are already paying for content, mainly through the APP's built-in purchase and subscription methods. Compared with TV, there is huge room for growth.