Data.ai and the mobile spend with Karl Knights from App Annie

[Music] [Music] we're now joined by carl knight the managing director over there at app annie the data people that's how i refer to you in my head how are you doing i'm very well thank you it's good to uh great to be here yes likewise back at a physical event again so given that you are the mobile data people imagine during the last two years you've all been sitting there watching lines go up lines go down pie charts dividing into weird places what's it been like from a data perspective over the pandemic what do you see well it's um i think the the frame of reference uh obviously is we really look at kind of march 2020 as being the real kind of point in time when i guess we'll collectively realize something was significant was happening um what we saw at that point uh from a from a downloads perspective was obviously an enormous enormous spike particularly in in mobile game uh it actually surpassed one

billion downloads a week at that point in time in march 2020. it's a threshold that in fact it's not dropped below that ever since march 2020. um what we see even more perhaps more interestingly than that that what followed was uh was consumer spend within those those mobile games so um as i said the kind of one billion threshold was reached and then not long after in the round kind of 2021 weekly consumer spending mobile games reached 1.7 billion and uh and again you know we have not dropped below that threshold since uh kind of mid part of 2021 so i mean they're kind of the big outcomes of um you know uh that we saw during that time and obviously what's driving that is you know people's time with uh with mobile as well so uh not just mobile gaming but the perspective across you know all um all activity on mobile it's now a third of our waking hours each day it's around 4.8 hours each day so

clearly none of those two previous trends are possible without the significant time that people are spending so yeah that's really what we've seen it's interesting that they've it pushed them towards mobile efficient general population but they've stayed there that's interesting that they haven't immediately you know gone back to normal exactly that exactly yeah that really is the story that you know um with the with the lockdown people were kind of pushed uh pushed us back to the wrong way but encouraged and just about found the opportunity and found the need to yeah um do more on their mobile and what we see now is just a greater comfort with spending in apps with potentially subscribing to other services any obstacles that exist before or unease that they might have had has completely completely disappeared but certainly eased and also i think the sophistication of mobile games publishers to understand the dynamics and motivations as to why you would be there in the first place and the same would be for kind of entertainment services as well um yeah we're really seeing

even more adoption usage and spending within within those types of days well you guys release the state of mobile report every year which we always take a look at this year you focused on germany and a specific explosion of growth in that country putting it right to the top of europe in terms of its mobile usage like what did you notice there and why do you think that's happening specifically germany so um it's actually the kind of culmination of a trend that we've seen over the last last couple years a very uh it's a very strong market i wouldn't say that it's um it's kind of pattern of growth is is vastly different to other countries in europe it's just um a slightly faster rate than we than we've seen previously um but again i think what you'll see there is a is a consistent story that whilst download growth in 2021 or 2020 was not as dramatic as it has been in maybe 2020 on 2019 the growth in spend has been and that's really what is kind of propelling you know countries like germany to have such a bigger opportunity is because um

again it's that comfort of consumers with spending in apps so um yeah that's that's really what's driving that driving everything has obviously affected different companies developers and the pandemic has affected basically everyone on the planet in some way or another what about you guys at apani has it changed the way you guys have had to do business or is it you know steering the ship as ever uh yeah it's it's yeah like like every business um you know we went through an initial uh phase of um uh of just figuring out how we would how we would continue to do business um thankfully you know we work uh with some tremendous customers that you know we're adapting in that space as well uh so um i think we've we've adapted very well at the um what's very important to us is you know enabling our team our employees to um live and work where they want so um you know we've we've had a very flexible kind of working policy if you want to call it that uh for quite some time now and we've

recently brought in what we call the kind of 90 day uh kind of work from anywhere passport so anybody that works from honey can work literally from any location they wish for kind of 90 days as well as flexible working as well so yeah you'll see um people in our team have always wanted to live in italy for a period of time or you know go and live and work in barcelona or anywhere else that um yeah we want to encourage that because you know we uh we ask a lot of our employees but you know we want to give as much back to them as well and yeah that's that's working out really well well you guys cover not just games you're not just looking at people playing pubg or fortnite you cover the entire app economy so you're looking at people using tick tock and amazon and all the apps are available which mobile sector which whether it's games or whether it's i mean meta versus a word that's appearing whether it's shopping whatever it might be which area do you think the mobile center has the most untapped potential yeah um well i think there's i think there's a

few i think the ones that kind of spring to spring to mind i mean social will continue to scale tremendously right we forecast that tick tock this year will reach 1.5 billion users by the end of 2022. we expect that um spend within social apps to reach around kind of nine billion dollars uh by the end of by the end of this year um i think entertainment is still you know very viable to grow again that collection that uh of apps expected to reach probably around 12 billion dollars by the end of this year in terms of kind of in-app spend so you know that if you look at the behaviors um you know across a standard 10 minutes each day around kind of five or six of those minutes will be in kind of social and communication around four will be in photo and video at least a minute in gaming at least a minute in entertainment so i think they're still set to continue to uh continue to scale throughout this year but always interested to see some of the new trends in e-commerce as well

uh you know re-commerce and e-commerce and peer-to-peer commerce and you know um my own personal feeling is that that's you know that's set to set to you know evolve and um and uh and grow even further as well so yeah i think entertainment and and data privacy is something that's coming up more and more these days and it's something i think the general public are a bit more aware of that maybe they were like two three years ago with all their permissions popping up on websites and some high profile companies getting into like hot water we're thinking of facebook and things like that how is it that you guys are able to try and stay ahead of the ever changing regulations because what once was quite black and white now seems to be a little bit gray and i imagine it's quite tricky to make sure that you're doing the right thing and always checking to make sure that next week and the week after the month after yeah you're still kind of ahead of the game in terms of the regulations yeah sure well i think when we think about you know privacy and and doing the right thing at uh

um and you know in the generation of our estimates the most critical thing is that we uh we do not ingest any material non-public information that's really the critical thing for our industry so um yeah we hold ourselves you know very accountable to never ingesting any uh mnpi and therefore you know not using those as any signals that could be used for other means so that's really how it affects our world and uh that's a very high standard we hold ourselves to every day and for you guys this year 2022 is looming so what are the plans for app annie i mean you obviously have been in this sector quite a long time we've been doing this thing but i imagine beyond just the standard i imagine you're looking to grow and the normal things is there any particular like new angle that you're looking at this year or something that you're excited about going forward um well i mean certainly today it's great to be here and meeting with you know you know customers and friends uh in terms of what we do for the gaming sector which has you know been you know the really one of the most important sectors

if not the most important sector for for rappani throughout its you know 10-year 10-year life cycle so what we do in terms of you know um solving for the taxonomy and gaming providing deeper insights in terms of exactly what features work within games you know that's a really important thing which are always always evolving thinking about how that can expand to the broader you know app economy so understanding exactly what the first time user experience is for entertainment apps or retail apps and really we're continuing to kind of be invested in going as deep as possible to provide you know the most effective and accurate um intelligence for our for our for our partners and for our uh for our customers so yeah it's it's it's it's kind of business as usual as in terms of that um and yeah becoming you know even even more granular in in the value that we provide [Music]