A few days ago Fred Wilson wrote a superb post about mobile growth which managed to be obvious yet brilliantly insightful at the same time. Mobile growth is clearly going to be massive for years to come. Although the under-13 market will eventually follow the same trend, there are a few subtleties which are worth talking about.
Firstly, the under-13 consumer hardware market operates with a large degree of lag. Kids are not early adopters, they typically use hand-me-down equipment. Yes, there’s certainly an iPad in many homes but it’s most likely a shared device. Right now, the average 10-12yr old has their own separate device and it’s almost always a laptop.
Here’s some internal Fight My Monster data: about 90% of our players (86% boys, 8-12yrs) are playing from a Windows environment. And despite not (yet) having a mobile offering (we’re Flash), it hasn’t slowed us down in the slightest-we’re growing at approximately 10-12% month-on-month in both US and UK.
The graph below shows iOS device requests to FMM for the last six months. Despite the growth amongst the adult population, total mobile device requests are less than half of one percent of our inbound traffic. However, it’s clear that there’s a significant increase in iPad penetration amongst our target audience. Equally clearly, iPod Touch seems to be a dying platform (it’s certainly had a hard time in Europe where it’s at about half the rate of US penetration). The future is clearly tablet or smartphone but not in between (which makes me wonder about rumours of the mid-size Apple tablet doing the rounds).
Is there going to be a transition from laptops to tablets for kids? Unquestionably. Over what period of time? Hard to say. Right now in our target demographic, the shift is beginning to happen but it’s at a much slower rate than adults.
This post originally appeared on the Fight My Monster blog.