Mary Meeker, famed Internet analyst-turned-Kleiner Perkins partner, has released her latest data dump. Here you go:
Quick thoughts first:
Interesting slides are #16, which shows an estimate of $12 billion in revenue for mobile apps and advertising. She must be including feature phone revenue too, since Apple paid out about $2 billion with in-app purchases and paid app revenue last year on the platform. Google is obviously a fraction of that, but it has much, much higher mobile display ad revenue than Apple does.
Slide #20 shows how terrible average revenue per user is for mobile users compared to desktop ones. It’s just ugly. Mobile ARPU for Zynga is about one-fifth of what it is on the desktop. Zynga’s case is skewed however, because their mobile titles are more advertising dependent than their Facebook games. Pandora is more hopeful. That company saved itself through its mobile apps which generate $3.87 per user. Pandora sells monthly subscriptions for about $3.99 through its app on iOS.
#21 and #22 show the elephant in the room: how poor mobile monetization is affecting key metrics from Facebook and Google. Google’s cost-per-click is down in part because its mobile ads generate lower revenue than comparable desktop search ads do. Facebook has only just begun monetizing its mobile app, so clearly increased mobile usage is dragging down its overall revenue per user.
In #23, Meeker says there is hope, pointing to the revenue path that Japanese mobile-gaming company GREE has followed over the last several years. GREE is actually not a great example because its growth potential was recently KO’ed by regulatory efforts. The company was heavily reliant on a gambling-like game mechanic called “gacha,” which the Japanese consumer affairs agency recently started investigating. GREE and its counterparts pulled back on this mechanic, which may damage its earnings for the next several quarters.