MADV 002 - Mobile.Ad.ventures is back and is going public...

... its URL https://madv.io at least. October 1-10

Oct 09, 2020

Welcome to MADV - This is an unregular newsletter curating recent trends in mobile (app) marketing. For more regular updates, follow me on twitter @thomascbn…

Previously, on MADV… S01E01 was good for feedback and last minute tweaks (emoji yay! typo nay!). This new episode covers October 1-9th. I tried to be shorter, but I failed again.

🤓 Must reads!

When I don’t find 10x content, I’ll just keep this blank.

Phiture often publishes very high quality posts, and @Nadir’s coverage on how to run Youtube influencer marketing for games is no exception

🤳 First party content

This newsletter features primarily other people’s content, on purpose. Once in a while, I do publish stuff myself:

Nothing new this week, but I’m preparing 2 fresh pieces of content, one of which is a prezo on subscription apps to be showcased live at MAMASaoPaolo on Wednesday 15/10 (free signup). As usual with public event, I’ll post the slides on my Slideshare, feel free to browse older ones in the meantime.

🔥 What’s hot, October 2020

Up & to the right: SensorTower was quick to release his Q3 figures to beat AppAnnie to the punch. Some interesting highlights:
- Store revenue keeps soaring with $19b for the Appstore alone (not factoring taxes & refunds): +10% from Q2 and +31% from last year
- The AppStore ARPD is over 6x higher than the PlayStore’s (and the gap is even bigger from non gaming, but that’s not disclosed)
- TikTok is killing it on IAP, not even mentioning its soaring ad revenue (also: now #3 non-porn web domain according to Cloudflare!)
- 9/10 of the top grossing are video/streaming. The outlier is Tinder.
iOS App Clips are killing it. My friend Leopold saw his Motivation App climb to the top #5 spot of the Appstore (Hat tip from the private subclub.app). Branch’s mobile growth newsletter also mentions other nice examples that you might check for inspiration: Emoji Sudoku, Scribble Together, Parcel app, CardPointers, SmartGym, ChibiStudio, SignEasy’s eSignature, Doc Scanner
The Antitrust Subcommittee has released its report on big tech, and it’s quite straight to the point. Two excellent sources covering the crunchy bits of the 449 pages report are the highly recommended Matthew Stoller’s newsletter BIG and Alisson Schiff’s piece on AdExchanger. No action is being taken yet (the EU is also all-fart no-poo on this, while both India and China launched new probes against Google), but the contrast with the patronizing tone of monopolists makes it extremely insightful.
What does this have to do with apps anyway? I published a thread on the app-world related quotes, once again highlighting how Google is abusing monopolies to create further moats and undermine any competition. I still have hopes that in the long term either Android, Youtube, Admob or all three will get splitted from Search and we can all forget the UAC nightmares.
Combining the Sensortower & #antitrust news into one:
Thomasbcn @Thomasbcn
"Competition is just one click away"
9:31 PM ∙ Oct 8, 2020
Eric’s MDM Syndicate announced its first investment in @maorsa’s INCRMNTL. I couldn’t put my hands on the beta, but this is very promising in the perspective of the death of deterministic attribution.
Talking attribution, I think I forget to mention last week that 28-days attribution is dead on FB
Sure, you can use the well-hidden exclusion lists, but how many advertisers have been buying their own cross-promo traffic for years?
Cuneyt Unar @cuneyt_unar
3- Basically your UAC campaign(s) might be serving impressions within your network of apps w/out you knowing it. I have seen it in the last 3 months in multiple different AdWords accounts at a large volume.
10:35 PM ∙ Oct 8, 2020
Lots of debate in France around adoption: Barcelona-based Pickaso digged into tracing apps download figures:
Thomasbcn @Thomasbcn
Tracing apps penetration EU (cumulative downloads vs smartphone population = not active usage) IE 38% DE 20% GB 18% IT 14% ES 10% (3.2 rating) FR 4% (2.3 rating) PT 4% Data @pick_aso
10:54 AM ∙ Oct 9, 2020
6Likes1Retweet

☑️ The subscription corner

Adjacent.vc’s Nico has a 2-tweets post on subscription pricing well worth a look:

Nico Wittenborn @ncsh

A little riff on consumer subs pricing Part 1/2: Monthly vs Annual

Not app-specific, but MemoHub’s Clement Vouillon also used the short video format to share his thoughts on subscriptions upselling tactics:
clement vouillon @clemnt
In today's video about consumer sub apps pricing strategy, we dig into the "upselling" topic 👇
2:42 PM ∙ Oct 8, 2020
12Likes3Retweets
Hidden in the comments of the above tweet, I’m bullish on upselling additional goods (both digital & physical) to existing subscribers, please send over to me examples you’re seeing around! One is the SWEAT shop, although I’m not sure about that naming…
If you read too fast above, sign up for MAMA SaoPaolo where I’ll share some tips & benchmarks on subs apps this Wednesday.
The latest unicorn subs app is killing it. You may remember Strava recently upped its subscription game (covered by MADV-network Fede Behrens & growth.design)? In 13% of the year, it made 39% of its revenue, according to Apptopia. Strava is rumored to be in unicorn-level fundraising at the moment.

💀 The IDFA corner

I haven’t heard many (new) news around IDFA this week for once… but Apple reviewers not being aware that the IDFA & ATT changes are postponed until January is biting some devs who can’t release… In this example, it happened for 2 releases in a row. FAIL.

Also a reminder: if you’re testing ATT implementation to measure consent rate, be very careful to do it on a small sample (or better, use a fake/soft prompt instead! Which.is against guidelines btw), as firing ATT will block you from accessing IDFA from the (majority?) of non-consenters.

💡 Worth following

aka: where I get my sources from

Shamanth Rao has some amazing guests in his regular UserAcquisition Show. I admit I’m several episodes late at the moment (since must-subscribe growthgems.co is temporarily on hold 😢) so I’ll let you pick your topic/episodes.
RevenueCat clone Qonversion.io has a fantastic collection of 78 app onboardings
“Ad Tech Could Be the Next Internet Bubble”: WIRED has a provocative piece from Xoogler Tim Hwang: "The scariest thing about microtargeted ads is that they just don’t work - Despite the extent of surveillance tech, a lot of the data that fuels ad targeting is garbage". Looking forward to checking his book (Simon Andrew’s FIX newsletter also has a strong quote on the efficiency of long tail programmatic)
The ConsumerAcquisition blog has half badly salesy, half high-quality content on FB Ads. Their latest blog talks about running the new UAC-like “AAA” campaigns alongside regular ones (remember those, where marketers can do more than upload videos?)
Dan Hockenmaier & Lenny Rachitsky’s content is more often than not high value and candidates for the must read section. As usual app-unrelated, but this FirstRound post provides good strategic framework thinking about growth channels.

Share the buzz & tell your friends

See you next week - or later, if I can’t make it.

Feedback: @thomasbcn / thomasbcna -at - gmail

MADV - Mobile. Ad.ventures