Author: Julie Campbell

Some of eMarketer’s latest stats are now showing that this year will already reach $15.5 billion in SMM ad revenue.

It is no great surprise that social media marketing is increasing in its use, but according to research from eMarketer, this form of advertising is also consistently breaking spending records and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Advertising over SMM is expected to reach a tremendous $36 billion by the year 2017.

This represents a tremendous amount of growth from what is predicted for this year. The research from eMarketer also indicates that the social network that will be experiencing the greatest benefit from this advertising trend will be Facebook. As the popularity of these networks continues its increases among consumers, advertisers are catching on to the potential at a growing rate. This is causing them to spent more in order to be able to make contact with their target market in a more meaningful and effective way.

This year, advertisers around the globe wills spend nearly $24 billion on social media marketing.

The eMarketer research has predicted that this will represent an increase of 33.5 percent over the spending for social media advertising, last year. In only two years from now, the use of social media for ads and marketing will make up 16 percent of the worldwide digital ad spend.

The top spenders on SMM will be located in the United States and Canada, where it is anticipated that marketers will be boosting their payments to the various social networks by a whopping 31 percent in 2015, alone. This will bring the amount of spending on that medium up and beyond the $10 billion mark for the first time in history.

When looking at it from the perspective of the breakdown for individual users, this actually represents a spend of over $50 per user throughout the social networking universe. That amount has been predicted to rise to reach $71.37 per user within the span of the next couple of years, said the data and forecasts in the eMarketer report.

The market that will come in second for social media marketing spending in that time will be the Asia-Pacific region, where there will be a predicted spend of $7.4 billion. Third place will belong to Europe, where they will spend $4.74 billion.

The results of a recent data analysis from Swrve showed that 60 percent of income is generated by 0.23 percent of users.

A new report has now been released by Swrve, a mobile marketing automation company, and it has revealed that a very large portion of the total revenues brought in by mobile games are actually generated from a tiny sliver of the total number of players.

This suggest that the majority of gamers are either cheap or they know that they can enjoy a game without paying.

What the Swrve report indicated was that 60 percent of the total in-app revenues from mobile games were being generated by a tiny 0.23 percent of all of the players. This clearly represents a very small number of the total players and it suggests that these paying players – known by the industry as “whales” – should be treated in the same way that high rollers are treated in Vegas. The report from Swrve was based on data that was collected based on 20 million players of smartphone and tablet based games that are free-to-play.

While this may make it seem that mobile games have a rather dim looking future, that is not necessarily true.

At the same time that it seems that only a very tiny number of players are providing most of the revenue for these mobile apps, the average amount that is being spent on these video games has risen to $29.17 from having been $22 at the same time last year. So there may not be a large percentage of people paying to play, but those who are have an average spending amount that is 33 percent higher within the span of only one year.

Other key findings from this research include:

• Among customers who pay to pay on mobile apps, 44 percent made a single purchase, while 20 percent made 5 or more.
• The average paying player makes an average of 3.5 monthly purchases at an average of $8.27 per purchase.
• 21.9 percent of purchases are of mid-tier virtual items (priced between $10 and $20), and they made up 38.6 percent of the total revenue, which is a figure that had been 22 percent at the same time in 2014.
• The average amount of time spent playing mobile games before the first purchase is made is 15 hours, which has dropped from being just over 23 hours, last year.