Reports: Freemium

Browse all of our reports, featuring our analysts' expert insights and analysis of audience segmentation, emerging trends and technologies, value chains, market shares, predictions and more – backed by our proprietary survey data and bespoke models & forecasts. Become a subscriber to get new ones every month, or just pick one to get started.

Digital Consumer Ad Profiles
Targeting Music and Video Streamers

Cover image for Digital Consumer Ad Profiles
Georgia Meyer
Spotify
Radio
YouTube
Digital music and video consumers navigate an increasingly nuanced landscape of content formats, from paywalled to ad-supported to social. Levels of engagement with new social formats vary considerably amongst weekly active users (WAUs) of three of the main music streaming services (Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Prime Music) and video streaming services (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube).
Read more …

Pandora
Mapping Its Place in the US Streaming Market

Cover image for Pandora
Mark Mulligan
Streaming
Streaming Music
Apple
Pandora is the granddaddy of streaming music, clocking 10 million active users before Spotify had even gone into public beta. It remains the most widely used audio streaming service in the US, but is no longer the golden child of the space. Despite having been long positioned as the long-term future of radio, investors have become increasingly concerned about its ability to compete against Spotify, Amazon and Apple—streaming services that originally had their eyes on replacing retail rather than radio.
Read more …

State Of Freemium Games Q1 2017
A Comprehensive Assessment Of Freemium Game Dynamics In The Top 100 Grossing Charts

Cover image for State Of Freemium Games Q1 2017
Karol Severin
Apple
Freemium
google play
The sheer importance and popularity of freemium games in the app economy is evident across the globe as they capture the lion’s share of both the top 100 grossing overall charts, as well as gaming charts globally. But behind the global popularity of freemium games are individual regions at various levels of market maturity, platform penetrations, publisher competitiveness and consumer preferences, which together drive regional nuances for freemium game economy dynamics.
Read more …

Paid Content Consumer Deep Dive
The Emergence Of A Sophisticated Audience

Cover image for Paid Content Consumer Deep Dive
Zach Fuller
Subscriptions
Streaming
Online video
In the old world, there were clear demarcations between media types, bordered with proprietary media and playback devices. However, different entertainment forms now exist in more interdependent ecosystems than they did in the analogue era, with all-in-one app stores blurring the boundaries and turning media consumption into an amorphous whole where content types compete directly with each another for both time and money.
Read more …

Spotify User Profile
An Increasingly Mainstream Yet Digitally Sophisticated Audience

Cover image for Spotify User Profile
Mark Mulligan
Subscriptions
Streaming
Spotify
Spotify is the poster child of streaming music, having done more than any other company to grow the segment and to prove the freemium business model at scale. It has built an active user base that outshines any other freemium music service, and through tactics such as telco bundles and pricing discounts continues to squeeze every last drop of opportunity out of the $9.
Read more …

The Death of the Monthly Active User
Redefining User Metrics For The App Era

Cover image for The Death of the Monthly Active User
Zach Fuller
Subscriptions
Paid Content
Freemium
The Monthly Active User (MAU) metric is the default measure of digital services but its usefulness is lessening. While it offered desktop-era services a better alternative to page views, its use for mobile apps is increasingly anachronistic. With the advent of smartphones, users are absorbing app-based services far more intimately into their lives, consequently leading to frequency of activity going far beyond monthly usage.
Read more …

Streaming Music Discovery
When The Journey Becomes The Destination

Cover image for Streaming Music Discovery
Mark Mulligan
Streaming
free
Discovery
When YouTube first starting rising to prominence streaming music was still in its infancy. Thus even though royalty payments were far from setting the world alight, there was a clear case for YouTube views driving discovery which then led to sales. Fast forward to 2015 and digital sales are rapidly losing ground to streaming which in turn throws into question the entire raison d'etre of on demand free streaming as a driver of sales.
Read more …

Mobile App Economy Forecast 2015-2020
The Emergence Of A Mature Market

Cover image for Mobile App Economy Forecast 2015-2020
Karol Severin
arpu
average revenue per user
mobile apps
The global app economy is maturing. This transformation will bring a multitude of headline-worthy power shifts in the next five years. At the top, the share of global revenue will shift significantly between regions, as well as between platforms. Furthermore, the revenue mix will become more even between spend segments, as whales approach their full potential and free users’ monetization will experience its largest boom yet.
Read more …

The Mobile App Funnel
Benchmarking The Mobile App Customer Lifecycle

Cover image for The Mobile App Funnel
Karol Severin
Freemium
subscription trials
user acquisition
App companies lose users and revenue right across the user acquisition and retention process. Thus as the global app market grows the amount of lost revenue accelerates also. MIDiA’s app funnel analysis reveals just where on the customer life cycle users are lost, why they go and provides industry averages to benchmark against for freemium apps and trial subscription apps.
Read more …

Themes

Verticals