Onavo Insights :: Blog

Winning Big with UK Sports Betting Apps

Onavo Insights — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 16:12:18 +0000

If you’re planning a trip to Vegas to put some money on the next game, you may be shocked to learn that for UK citizens, sports betting is as easy as opening an app on their mobile device.

Sports betting on mobile devices is already popular in the UK—and the popularity is growing.

In this Onavo Insights study, we took a look at UK sports betting apps: the percentage of active UK iPhone users (how many people are using them), which ones are the most popular (market share), which are the most used (engagement), and which apps overlap to attract the same users.

Onavo Insights data shows that about 4.3% of all UK iPhone users use at least one sports betting app per month. If estimates are correct, there are currently roughly 31 million smartphone users in the UK, which means about 1.5 million UK citizens are betting from apps on their mobile device on a regular basis. And that’s just from mobile apps, which doesn’t account for betting through mobile browsers.

But which sports betting apps are the most used and which keep users gambling? Onto the results!

We can see that the most widely used apps are William Hill (38% of UK sports betters on iPhone), Paddy Power (32%), and Bet 365 (24%). Ladbrokes (9%), Betfair (7%), Betfred (6%), and SkyBet (6%) round out the rest.

Interestingly, it’s Bet 365 that keeps users the most engaged. Indeed, with users betting an average of 5.6 days per month, Bet 365 keep users coming back 36% more frequently than William Hill, which keeps users in-app 4.1 days per month.

We also discovered that many sports betters aren’t satisfied with using only one app—in fact, there’s quite a bit of crossover. Nearly one quarter of Betfred users also place bets with either William Hill, Paddy Power, or both. William Hill, the most popular app, is used in conjunction with other betting apps by at least 15.7% of all UK sports betters. The app with the least crossover is SkyBet; just 2.3%-5.6% of users of other bettings apps also actively use Skybet.

Digital diaspora: how immigrants are driving US adoption of foreign apps

Onavo Insights — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 07:55:13 +0000

Like generations of immigrants before them, 21st century immigrants to the United States struggle to adapt while always retaining and celebrating their foreign heritage. But unlike generations past, immigrants today are bringing more to the United States than simply their language, culture, and home-cooking—they’re bringing technology.

Indeed, with roughly 2.5 billion internet-connected users in the world (more than a third of the global population), today’s immigrants are adopting technologies that originate from their home country in such a way that it forms digital cultures in the US that accurately reflect real-world ethnic groups.

In this Onavo Insights study, we set out to understand digital diaspora: how messaging apps in the US are used most by immigrant or expatriate populations rather than US-born users. Based on Onavo Insights’ unique ability to report actual usage, we analyzed the usage overlap of several popular messaging apps with other unrelated mobile apps. As we performed our analysis we took a look at:

Market share of mobile messaging apps in the United States, which indicated how many mobile users are using the apps (expressed as a percentage of total US iPhone users)
Market share of mobile messaging apps in other countries where they are popular
Likelihood of users to use a given app in conjunction with a particular mobile messaging app, in comparison to the average
Onto the results!

As we can see, in many countries there is a clear leader in terms of preferred messaging application. In the US, however, there’s no clear leader—usage is divided by many messaging apps. This suggests that except for the US’s own homegrown Facebook Messenger (and Pinger), the adoption of other messaging apps seems to be not among the broad population, but driven by pockets of immigrants. It makes sense that immigrants might choose to continue to use the messaging app that is prevalent in their home country, since it’s likely the one that many of their friends and family back home are already using.

To further examine this, we looked at correlating apps to get a holistic view of all the applications ethnic groups might be bringing to the United States. For example, American users of foreign messaging apps are typically several times more likely than average to use international dialing apps, social networking, and dictionary/translation apps related to the messaging apps’ home country. Other correlating apps were related to TV viewing, news, music, and banking.

The correlation shows how much more likely (than the average) a given messaging app user is to use another app. For example, KakaoTalk users are much more likely to also use other apps that appeal to Korean users, like an entertainment app for watching Korean video. Given that the Korean population in the United States is relatively small, KakaoTalk has relatively low market share in the US (but high market share in Korea), and KakaoTalk has a positive correlation with other apps that are popular in Korea, we see that Koreans in the United States are creating a unique ecosystem of mobile apps. The study is limited to Korea, Japan, China, and India, however it’s possible that this holds true for immigrant and expatriate populations from around the world.

KakaoTalk (94% market share in Korea; 1% in US)

21 times more likely to also use Viki (which offers users the ability to view "the hottest Korean dramas")
4 times more likely to also use Crunchyroll (a popular anime viewer)

WeChat (79% market share in China; 1% in US)

61 times more likely to also use RenRen
56 times more likely to also use this Chinese-English dictionary
52 times more likely to also use QQ

LINE (69% market share in Japan; 12% in China; 11% in Korea; <1% in US)

11 times more likely to also use WeChat (which has 79% market share in China)
10 times more likely to also use 微博, (Chinese social networking)
8 times more likely to also use KakaoTalk (94% market share in Korea)

WhatsApp (78% market share in India; 9% in US)

7 times more likely to also use NDTV (Indian TV)
7 times more likely to also use Bollywood Music Radio
6 times more likely to also use Saavn (Bollywood music)

Viber (37% market share in India; <1% in US)

9 times more likely to also use Athan (which offers Islamic prayer tracking and timing)
8 times more likely to also use Raaga (Hindi radio)
7 times more likely than average to use Bollywood Music Radio

As we can see, messaging apps help paint a picture of the kinds of applications that immigrants are using in conjunction. And while American usage of a particularly messaging app is relatively low, its users are highly-engaged and tend to fall into the ethnic group of the apps’ home country. Messaging apps might be a central force in understanding digital diaspora and how mobile technologies follow immigrants groups and continue to engage them in the United States.

Measuring Up Mobile Gaming Genres

Onavo Insights — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:25:54 +0000

Sixteen years ago Snake was the killer mobile game and since then, mobile gaming has grown from an afterthought into one of the most popular uses for mobile devices. Mobile gaming has also become one of the most lucrative categories of mobile apps, monetized either by advertising or by in-app purchases. Some games, like Angry Birds, attain widespread appeal, attract millions of players, and leverage their brand in new and interesting ways (hello merchandise!); others keep relatively small and foster an extremely dedicated community.

In this Onavo Insights study, we set out to reveal how different categories of games perform in the marketplace. Based on Onavo Insights’ unique ability to report actual usage, we compared gaming genres across three key metrics:

Market Share, which indicates how many mobile users are playing games within the given genre (expressed as a percentage of the total mobile gaming audience)

Engagement, which measures the “addictive” quality of a game: how often, on average, an app in the given genre is played (expressed in average number of days per month)

Retention, which measures the “stickiness” quality of a game: how many players, on average, stick around to play month after month (expressed in percentage of players)

And now, to the results!

Examining market share surfaces the genres with the broadest appeal (many of which, such as Zynga’s blockbuster Words With Friends, lean heavily on an ad-supported model). Arcade games, which includes titles such as Kiloo’s Subway Surfers and Sega’s recently launched Sonic Dash, are played by an astonishing 66% of gamers. The action category, with popular titles including Temple Run and Supercell’s Clash of Clans, follows at 57%. Puzzles capture the hearts of 49% of gamers, and word games 42%.

The engagement metric highlights genres with a highly-engaged audience, indicating that players come back to the game time and time again. Amazingly, Dice games, the category that trailed the Market Share chart, leads in terms of Engagement. This category includes games such as GREE’s Jackpot Slots and Slots – Pharaoh’s Way. On average, Dice games are played more than 10 days out of the month. Simulation is next at 9.3 days per month on average, followed by Strategy games at 9 days, which includes titles such as Social Quantum’s Megapolis and EA/Popcap’s Plants vs. Zombies. The Arcade category, that topped the market share charts, proves to be the lowest in terms of engagement.

Retention proves to be somewhat similar to Engagement in terms of category performance. Once again, Dice games win with an average month-to-month retention rate of 59%. This is followed by the Kids category at 46%, and Role Playing Games, which covers games such as MinoMonsters and Underworld Empire, at 45%. The list ends with Puzzle, Card and Trivia games, where the average game retains less than half of its users month-to-month.

By exploring user data by genre, we can better identify the strengths and weaknesses of each type of game: some games are designed for extremely broad appeal but have a relatively short lifespan whiile others are able to tap effectively into a loyal and extremely active userbase. Many trends are also explained by understanding why certain games are succeeding and how they are acquiring their users. Is the growth organic or is it powered by big advertising budgets? These are the questions that Onavo Insights data seeks to help gaming companies answer so that they can determine the best method of building their business.

Yahoo! and Tumblr — $1.2 Billion well spent?

Onavo Insights — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:00:12 +0000

Last week Barb Darrow at GigaOm reported that “Yahoo’s mobile push is working better than you think” thanks to new Onavo Insights data that shows Yahoo’s new Weather app, which debuted in April, burst onto the scene with nearly 3% market share—or about 1.5 million iPhone users—and the continued success of Yahoo Messenger and the standalone Yahoo app (which today has more than 9% market share).

“In general, what we found is that although Yahoo has been quiet on mobile, when we look at the top apps, we see quite a few up there. They have a decent footprint.” — Guy Rosen, CEO of Onavo, in a GigaOm interview.

Over the weekend, news surfaced that Yahoo is acquiring the popular blogging site, Tumblr, for $1.1B in cash. Tumblr hosts about 108 million blogs and reaches millions more—it’s ranked as one of the most-trafficked websites. But it’s mobile app is a slightly different story; Tumblr is the 43rd most-popular mobile app for iPhone and its US market share has grown slowly but steadily from 4.75% in November 2012 to just below 6% today, a difference of less than half a million users. Still, it’s better than the WordPress app, which is not particularly popular on mobile, given that it hosts hundreds of millions of blogs.

“Tumblr in terms of users and traffic is an immediate growth story for us.” — Marissa Mayer, CEO, Yahoo!

We’ll keep an eye on Tumblr and its affect on Yahoo’s overall mobile performance. Stay tuned.

The Apps That Promote Other Apps

Onavo Insights — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 20:21:56 +0000

App Discovery apps, while sounding a bit recursive, are a major lead generation platform for individual app developers. The general way these apps operate is that they offer a paid app for free every day. Each of top-ranking App Discovery apps offer a unique selling points the others don’t have.

In the past few months, newcomer AppsGratis has take to the lead of the App Discovery apps with a massive and growing 4.6% marketshare, with their one free app simplicity coupled with the personalized human-written Groupon-inspired marketing blurb. AppAdvice.com’s Apps Gone Free follows with a stable 1.9% over the past three months, implying that people prefer expert opinions on what apps to download. Next is AppFire, with their unique personalized algorithms, has maintained a respectable more than 1% of the US iPhone marketshare, with a half-point bump in January, before returning to normal. AppTrailers, with their unique app trailer-watching angle has been tumbling from grace at 1% marketshare from 1.3%. FreeAppADay.com’s marketshare has almost doubled in three months from .4% to .75%, offering a slew of free apps every day, with not much else. Appoday, leads up the rear with a slight gain from .62% of marketshare to .69%.

The first obvious trend is people are like seeing something human, be it in the marketing message or in the choice of apps offered. Next, people like personalized, knowing that they will be able to find an app relevant to them and their particular lifestyle. People want free apps, with no gimmicks or strings attached, and are falling out of favor with apps that they have to do something to get points for free downloads somewhere else. But at the end of the day, there will always be millions of people who download free apps simply because they are free today, and paid tomorrow.

The VCs of Mobile

Onavo Insights — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:59:55 +0000

The mobile app space is rich with opportunities for startups to disrupt, grow and capture both mind share and market share. Our mobile phones are with us almost every minute of our waking day (and are usually not far off when we’re asleep), so it’s not surprising that investors have been pouring millions into the hottest mobile startups. But which investors have been successful in picking the winners? We set out to unearth some data.

The charts below weigh up the leading investors in the field based on the success of their mobile portfolios, using their apps’ market share (reach) as a proxy for success. One chart looks only at firms that invested in companies’ Series A financing, highlighting those that were able to pick the winners early on. The second chart examines investors that participated in any funding round, early or late.

Notes: (a) to be fair, only the active portfolio is included (exited companies such as Facebook, Instagram or YouTube – who would undoubtedly make a dent – are not included in the data); (b) data is based on January 2013 US iPhone market share numbers as listed on Onavo Insights (Android or international markets not included); (c) firms with just one relevant portfolio company were not included.

While we don’t purport that cumulative market share is the metric LPs should focus on, the analysis definitely serves to highlight the key investors in the space, and the difference between the early birds and the later stage investors.

You can click any icon on the charts to learn more about that app’s usage. If you’d like to embed a chart in your own site or blog, refer to the code at the bottom of each chart.

Battle of the Boggles

Onavo Insights — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 22:45:11 +0000

In 1972, Alan Turoff designed a word game called Boggle, in which players must find words in adjacent letters within a plastic grid of lettered dice. Little did Turoff know that 40 years later Boggle-inspired games would become one of the most contested battles in mobile gaming. We set out to compare two of the hottest contestants – Zynga’s longtime favorite Scramble With Friends and newcomer Ruzzle from Swedish gamemaker MAG Interactive, which has made a real splash in recent weeks.

Both apps are free (Scramble With Friends does have a paid version too) with some items available for in-app purchase, although as is typical for word games with broad appeal, the bulk of the monetization is based on advertising throughout the gameplay.

We compared the apps using two metrics – App Store ranking, usually a rough indicator of download volume, and daily market share (DAU) as measured by Onavo Insights, which reflects how many users are actually still playing the app, day in and day out. Both metrics were measured for iPhones in the US.

What did the data reveal?

Ruzzle, which was field tested across Scandinavia during 2012, came to the US by storm in December 2012. In terms of App Store ranking, it quickly overtook Scramble With Friends on December 10th and has stayed consistently high ever since.

The full story, however, is evident in the Daily Market Share analysis. Ever since January 12th there have been more daily players of Ruzzle than there are players of Scramble With Friends. Ruzzle’s explosive growth knocked out Zynga’s all-time favorite and by late January had almost twice the DAU of Scramble With Friends. Was Ruzzle destined to be another long-time blockbuster? Maybe not…

In the first week of February, Ruzzle peaked. Since then, its DAU has been dropping consistently. This is a cycle that is repeated frequently in casual gaming and more so in those games with a social element: traction amongst early adopters, followed by explosive growth (that phase when all your friends seem to be playing the same game), and at some point, attrition kicks in and players start moving on. The social element means that this attrition goes viral as players find their friends are no longer competing against them and lose interest.

We all remember Draw Something, a fad which swept millions and seemed unstoppable, but then peaked, incredibly right when Zynga acquired the developer, OMGPOP. So is Draw Something dead? It is certainly far from the popularity it enjoyed during its hey day, but it continues to be a reasonably strong performer (achieving an Onavo AppRank of 78 in January). Very few apps have been able to sustain massive growth for extended periods of time and once the novelty wears off they converge into a smaller, stable steady state. Interestingly, the strongest long term player is Scramble’s big brother Words With Friends, an almost unbeatable blockbuster that reigns as the game with the broadest audience (January being an exception where it was dethroned by the freshly launched Temple Run 2).

We’ll continue to keep an eye on Ruzzle, Zynga’s With Friends titles and any other surprising entrants. You can keep track as well by following Onavo Insights’ top games index, which will continue to be updated on a monthly basis.

Onavo Insights Is Now Live

Onavo Insights — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 14:45:39 +0000

Today we’re very proud to be unveiling Onavo Insights, the first mobile market intelligence service based on real user engagement data. With Onavo Insights, we’re bringing the type of independent market intelligence to the app landscape that has been unavailable until now. Mobile markers and publishers will finally be able to access the kind of metrics that have guided business decisions on web, TV and radio for generations.

We’ve been providing the Onavo Insights premium services to dozens of the top mobile companies, helping them navigate the competitive landscape – determining which apps are popular, how audiences interact with content inside and outside of apps and with mobile ads.

Now, with the public launch of Onavo Insights, we are bringing mobile market data to everyone.

With the newly unveiled free Onavo Insights portal, you can explore the mobile app landscape and access real data on usage, engagement and retention of apps. This is a new way of thinking about apps, not in terms of downloads, installs or any other vanity metric – Onavo Insights lists the apps that really matter – the apps consumers really use.

Onavo Insights currently indexes apps on the iPhone platform in the US, and additional platforms and countries are coming soon. Facebook achieves an Onavo AppRank of #1 as the most used app with almost 75% of users engaging with the app at least once monthly. YouTube is ranked second, followed by Instagram and Google Maps.

Get started, go explore the app ecosystem – http://insights.onavo.com/

To see the most used apps at http://insights.onavo.com/top-apps

The most widely played games for iPhone

Onavo Insights — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 19:49:44 +0000

Games are used by kids to entertain themselves during long car rides, by adults during their train commutes, or by people of all ages just because they’re fun, and possibly addictive, there is no question that playing games has become a significant part of what people do with their smartphones.

In our latest Onavo Insights report, we took a look at the top 25 games used by US iPhone users to see what games have the greatest reach in the US market. Some of the games with the highest percent market share were right off of our guess list. Apps like Words with Friends Free (with 10.4% market share), Angry Birds (with 5.2% market share) and Fruit Ninja (with 3.4% market share) fell into that category. Surprisingly popular games on iOS are Flow Free (with 5.9% market share), Solitaire (with 5.9% market share), and Unblock Me Free (with 1.5% market share).

We also identified the most popular game developers, based on US market share, finding the developer with games used by the largest percent of the US iOS market to be Zynga (with 17% market share), followed by Imangi Studios (10% market share), and FlipSide5, Inc (9% market share). Other developers that made it onto our list of most popular game developers, based on US market share, were: Electronic Arts, Big Duck Games, MobilityWare, Top Free Games, Kiloo, Supercell, Ludia, NaturalMotion, Kabam and Lima Sky.

Pin it: Content Sharing Continues to Gain Traction

Onavo Insights — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 21:02:28 +0000

In our latest report, we took a look at content sharing platforms to see whether or not the adoption of their apps is making content sharing a significant brand marketing tool on mobile. We found that, over the past few months, social link sharing apps, including Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Alien Blue – Reddit, iReddit, 9GAG and Digg, saw an increase in adoption. For this study, we tracked the percent market share of Pinterest, StumbleUpon!, Alien Blue, iReddit, 9GAG and Digg with iPhone users in the US.

Pinterest saw the most significant jump of all content sharing apps. In December, 2012, Pinterest became the first content sharing app to break the 10% mark. Pinterest jumped from a 7.5% market share in July to 10.1% at the end of December. Not only does the 33% jump reflect Pinterest’s growing popularity, but it also shows that content sharing platforms have become mainstream with adoption rates on par with Gmail (9.8% market share, US) and Groupon (9.75% market share, US) and IMDb (9.75% market share, US).

Alien Blue despite not being official, is the most popular iPhone app for browsing social link sharing giant Reddit, It grew in from 1.8% in July to a very healthy 2.4% of US iPhone users in December.

iReddit is the official Reddit app by Condé Nast Digital, it has almost doubled it’s marketshare to 1.14% of US iPhone users.

StumbleUpon is famous for being one of the largest drivers of traffic on the web, but its app doesn’t have quite the same kin of traction. 1.21% of US iPhone users were active on StumbleUpon in November, with slightly less in December.

9GAG the meme obsessed image sharing site is the new kid on the block in social content and its app is very much on the rise growing 136% in the last six months of 2012 from 0.28% in July to 0.66% in December.

Digg saw a significant 128% jump, from 0.2% to .4%, between the July 31 release of its new app and the end of 2012. Still, if we were doing this report in 2009 it’s likely that Digg would have a far higher marketshare.