Making apps pay - bizjournals:

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Application development is a $7.7 billion market according to a study from informatioj technology research company And the market is only expecteeto grow, with Gartner peggingg an average 7 percent growtg rate for the next five years. Some of the companiess that develop apps aregetting rich, and others are trying to figure out how they can do the “There are a couple of game companies makinhg a hundred million dollars, and many more making tens of milliond of dollars, and there’s no question there’s more to said Jeremy Liew, managing general partner at in Menllo Park. “I would speculate that in the aggregate, they’re making more moneyu than .
” Developers looking to make mone y in application development need one of three things intheire favor: an enormous audience for theidr application, a specific customer base that advertisers are willing to pay more to or an application that is so much fun (or that customers will pay for it Lightspeed has investments in three app development each of which fits into thoswe parameters. Redwood City-based has a huge audience base for its applicationm that allows personalization of blogs and social has an application for Facebook and the iPhonw that allows users to review movies and sharee the reviewswith friends.
It touches an audienced so tightly focused that movie studiozs are willing to pay a premium toreach them. Then therde is and its Facebookapp “Friends For Sale.” User make micropayments or take other actions (filling out surveys, for that result in monetization, or revenuew generated for the company that createcd the app. One concept is true for all apps more traffic equals moremoney potential. “If you can creats massive volumes of traffic onsocial networks, even if you’r e not selling, the reach becomes pretty Liew said.
“If you can tell a stor and generate content thatexcitesw people, (advertisers) are willing to pay a premiumk because of the audience,” he said. Investord and developers themselves say therw is definitely money tobe made, but the market is Early applications were basic, simpl games, such as Facebook apps that allowed usersd to throw sheep at their friends or give them a virtuall ham sandwich. “Throwing sheep at each othe r is not a saidPeter Yared, founder and chief executive officer of , a San Francisco-basedx social network syndication service that raisecd $4.1 million in Seriex A funding in February.
The next step is branded content from largerf companies that brings in news and multimedia to engag ethe audience. And in a few Yared said, people will starr seeing the riseof business-to-business apps as “What will make it pervasive is the infrastructure being builgt out to let people do it he said. Anu Shukla, founder and CEO of which helps developers monetize their applicationse and generates leads foradvertisers — said when networksd such as Facebook first started opening their platforms for applicationj development, the primary method of monetizatiobn was the old CPM (cost per thousand page model. But it didn’yt work well then and it doesn’t work well today.
Sociao media’s high level of engagemenft means banners and ads arean interruption, she The new trend is towarcd “virtual currency,” allowing users to give each othedr credits and prizes. Platforms “are looking for the applicationsd that are extremely and thecriteria isn’t necessarily monetization, but engagement, reach and Shukla said. “We found that some of the ...
multiplayerf role playing games are the ones with the mostengagedr audiences, and they monetize the