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It has been a busy few weeks in the world of app. Market estimates of app scale and revenue have been escalating of late. The rapid expansion of magazine branded apps we see just in this six-page chart (now over 300 items) suggests the enthusiasm for the platform among traditional publishers. And Berg Insights confirms the blue-sky forecasts with a new projection that we will see 98 billion annual app downloads with revenues of $10.9 billion by 2015.
But getting discovered in that mess of iOS apps especially is getting costlier. Executives from app marketing firm Fiksu tell me that they have seen the cost of acquiring a loyal app customer (one who opens an app at least three times) in iOS has gone from under $1 in March to more than $1.50 in July. (Fiksu works with brands of all sorts to promote apps across many channels, from ad networks to e-mail.)
Last summer, as the next iPhone and a new version of the iOS loomed, there appeared to be a lull in the inventory supply that helped prices rise. But many marketers and publishers are missing a golden opportunity in the much more Spartan and cost-efficient Android store, ceo Micah Adler tells me. The cost of getting a new app customer is lower in the Android's ecosystem than in iOS. Better still, a publisher may well find a more loyal user among Android mobilistas. In a survey of 10 of his publishers whose apps ran across both OSes, Adler found that the Android downloaders are twice as likely to stick with an app and open it at least is times than is an iOS downloader.
In other words, as the clutter in the Apple Store rises, there is opportunity to mine fresher veins.
Surely we are seeing some evidence of this in the rush of magazines to get beyond the iOS mania. Here are three current examples:
1. Time Inc.'s Real Simple brought its first digital magazine edition to Nook Color a month before it planned to drop its first iPad magazine app.
2. Publishers were quick to embrace the $199 Android-based Kindle Fire tablet/reader that will launch on November 15.
3. Amazon has already partnered with Conde Nast, Hearst Magazines, and...