Karol Severin

Karol is a co-founder and Research Director at MIDiA. With over a decade of experience in consumer research, industry analysis, and consulting, Karol oversees the direction, coverage and quality of all MIDiA’s research output. Prior to co-founding MIDiA, Karol gained experience in TMT market research and consulting, as well as an entertainment industry startup founder. He holds a business management degree from Queen Mary, University of London, with specialisation in strategy, quantitative methods, and entrepreneurship.

It’s Time to Re-Evaluate How We Size The App Economy

Karol Severin

29 Jul 2016

app economy market size

app game dominance

Games have been dominating the app economy revenue since its inception. App Annie reports that games accounted for 85% of app market revenues in 2015. Our recent Appstore Economics Report highlights that games capture 76% of the top 50 grossing chart rankings, but the free app charts (which reflect popularity rather than commercial success) are much more evenly distributed with games capturing only 24% of the top 50 chart positions.

min read

Mobile Messaging Platforms
The Mobile Experience Revolution

Cover image for Mobile Messaging Platforms

Karol Severin

July 2016

arpu

mobile app economy

messaging platforms

The world of mobile consumer experiences is undergoing a seismic shift with messaging apps a driving force. With 6.4 billion cumulative monthly active messaging app users (compared to the 1.5 billion Android and 1 billion iOS devices) messaging apps are the smartphone killer app.

Cutting Through The Hype Around Pokemon Go’s Success

Karol Severin

26 Jul 2016

The success of Pokemon Go has been impressive so far. However, its achievements are currently over-hyped. Media outlets have been reporting the game’s every new ‘record breaking’ accolade. While true, the majority are taken out of context.

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Quick Take: Why Pokemon Go Will Bring AR To The Mainstream

Karol Severin

12 Jul 2016

Media and Marketing

AR has so far struggled to produce a compelling proposition for the mainstream to engage with (except possibly Snapchat). Pokemon Go has executed this masterfully because it: Is free and does not require buying additional hardware (subject to smartphone ownership)Leverages a popular franchise and a sense of nostalgia driving adoption across age segmentsUses the World as a free roaming map providing endless encouragement to stick around and explore further Global Content In A Local Context Though the Pokemon Go uses globally standardized characters, users explore them within their physical geographies.

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Why Organ Donors And The Pursuit Of Health On Mobile Matters To Apple

Karol Severin

7 Jul 2016

apple organ donor

A couple of months ago, I wrote about how the health sector will be very important for Apple to keep it’s users loyal and stand out from other handset manufacturers amidst the maturing smartphone market as well as the mobile ecosystem competitors like Facebook or Google.

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Why The New Facebook News Feed Change Favours Users Over Publishers

Karol Severin

1 Jul 2016

content publishers

The media (and users) have been on Facebook’s case regarding the way it ranks posts in users’ News Feeds. Claims were made about non-transparency, promoting content that makes more money for Facebook, even claims about favouring certain ideologies.

min read

App Store Economics
Games Still Dominate But Charts Now Only Tell Part Of The Story

Cover image for App Store Economics

Karol Severin

June 2016

app store

app economy

app charts

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Brexit Implications
How the UK's EU Exit Could Impact Media and Tech

Cover image for Brexit Implications

Karol Severin, Mark Mulligan, Tim Mulligan and Zach Fuller

June 2016

Streaming Music

UK

Streaming video

The UK’s vote to leave the European Union sent shockwaves that will continue to reverberate across the globe for years to come. While the potential geopolitical permutations may prove to be era defining, the implications for media and tech companies could also be dramatic.

What Tencent’s Supercell Takeover Tells Us About The Future Of The App Economy

Karol Severin

22 Jun 2016

game app business

Supercell, the company behind Clash of Clans and Clash Royale, agreed to sell 86% of their equity to the Chinese giant Tencent for $8.6 billion. The acquisition catapults the Tencent into being the number one mobile game publisher in the world.

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Watch Out Facebook Messenger: Apple’s iMessage Just Got Serious

Karol Severin

17 Jun 2016

Apple’s WWDC this week confirmed that company is getting serious about messaging. At its developer conference it announced a major overhaul for iMessage with the upcoming release of iOS10. While iMessage has been typically perceived as a rather ‘basic’ text messaging tool that amassed users thanks to being pre-installed on the iPhone, these changes send the app right up to direct competition with the likes of Facebook Messenger or WeChat.

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What's Really Behind Apple's App Store Revamp

Karol Severin

10 Jun 2016

app advertising

This week Apple announced that major changes are coming to the App Store. Firstly, it will allow all app categories to deploy subscription offerings as a part of their revenue models. Furthermore, if publishers can keep subscription customers engaged for more than one year (with less than 60 day lapse breaks), then the traditional 30% app revenue commission Apple currently takes will drop to 15%.

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Facebook’s DeepText Sees And Learns From Everything You Write

Karol Severin

3 Jun 2016

Facebook introduced its DeepText AI this week . It is a deep learning-based text understanding engine, which allows Facebook to sieve through and understand several thousand posts per second across 20 languages.

min read

Profiling The Mobile Messaging App User
Where Mainstream Mobile Users Are Heading

Cover image for Profiling The Mobile Messaging App User

Karol Severin

May 2016

Consumer behaviour

messaging platforms

Mobile messaging

With mobile messaging platforms playing an ever more crucial role in the distribution of mobile experiences, it is imperative that marketers, brands, and strategy teams develop deep familiarity with the characteristics and behaviours of messaging app users.

Why Twitter Really Made The Changes Around Its Character Limit

Karol Severin

27 May 2016

140 characters limit

content distribution

Twitter announced a number of changes this week, which are geared to extend the expression capabilities of the strict 140-character limit. The platform will no longer count media attachments nor ‘@names’ replies as a part of the character count.

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YouTube’s New Instant Messaging Feature

Karol Severin

16 May 2016

consumer behavior

Last week Wired reported that YouTube introduced a messaging feature to a small group of users, allowing them to send instant messages and share videos within YouTube’s mobile app. Though YouTube is the number one video consumption ecosystem, its users have been missing a chance to seamlessly chat about and share videos within the platform.

min read

Profiling The Mobile Messaging User Segment

Cover image for Profiling The Mobile Messaging User Segment

Karol Severin

6 May 2016

consumer segmentation

Mobile messaging

54% of iOS consumers and 52% of Android consumers now use messaging apps monthly, according to the multinational consumer survey from March 2016 conducted by MIDiA research. Though its proof of popularity in the digital era is as old as the SMS, it was the OTT platforms, that realized and truly doubled down on the potential of mobile messaging.

min read

Publishers Are Finally Uniting Against Adblocking Users, But It Won’t Solve The Adblocking Problem

Cover image for Publishers Are Finally Uniting Against Adblocking Users, But It Won’t Solve The Adblocking Problem

Karol Severin

29 Apr 2016

adblocker user attitude

adblocker user behavior

As I highlighted in a blogpost in October 2015 – uniting fragmented defence tactics against the already united adblocking consumers is a critical move to mitigate publishers revenue losses. Now half a year later we are seeing first signs of such initiatives in Sweden and France .

min read

Decoding The Adblocking Consumer
Digital Advertising’s P2P Moment

Cover image for Decoding The Adblocking Consumer

Karol Severin

April 2016

ad block

adblocking

adblockers

This is the second report in the MIDiA Adblocking report series. Adblocking is gaining consumer momentum in terms of both awareness and adoption, which is in turn testing the effectiveness of publishers’ responses. Many of the tactics deployed help slow some of the short-term revenue loss, but do little to address the longer-term situation.

Facebook Just Claimed A Spot In The Mobile ‘App’ Distribution Of The Future

Karol Severin

13 Apr 2016

It’s official. Facebook released the highly anticipated Messenger Platform (Beta) inviting developers to build bots for the messaging platform at the F8 event yesterday. The traditional approach to building technology (e.

min read

The Chat Bot Boom Is About To Catch Fire

Karol Severin

7 Apr 2016

Media and Marketing

The mobile community eagerly awaits the F8 event next week to see whether rumours come true about Facebook launching a Messenger Bot Store and potentially roll out a Chat SDK which would allow developers to build their own bots for Messenger.

min read

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