The answer: It depends (on your perspective). I have had some fascinating conversations with folks in both advertising and games about the iPhone. There is an obvious chasm between incumbents who have existing businesses on other phones and folks starting up to target the iPhone. Those with existing businesses usually make an argument along the following lines – by the end of the year there will be 10 million iPhones which is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall mobile market (billion+ handsets) and is as little as 5% of the total smartphone units out there (200 million+). The argument then goes on that they have plans for the iPhone but are not rushing to get there.
Not surprisingly, those starting up specifically to build for/on the iPhone, take quite a different view. They see the iPhone as a device with unique capabilities approaching or exceeding those of handheld machines for games and unique requirements for advertising. They also point to the fact that iPhone users clearly show entirely different usage patterns from other phone users. For instance, as was much reported earlier this year, the iPhone accounts for 50x as much traffic to google as the next closest competitor. A vendor who has existing mobile games told me that their iPhone users spend 2x the time playing than the second most active device for games that have not even been optimized for the iPhone. By that logic the iPhone could account for well over 10% of the relevant market segments for gaming and advertising by the end of this year.
Buy then those vendors that have had an early start on the iPhone will have learned a lot about what works (and doesn’t) on the platform and may well have gained some mindshare. In fact, some of the lessons learned by incumbents on other platforms may have to be “unlearned” to be successful on the iPhone.
