This document discusses approaches for estimating the market size for food apps. It uses a top-down approach looking at the total app market and percentage of food apps. It estimates the 2012 food app market at $207 million. It also takes a bottom-up approach estimating the value of mobile ads in the lifestyle category, which food apps fall under, at $10 million. The summary is that the current food app market is relatively small but growing fast, so alternative revenue streams beyond conventional monetization should be explored.

1. eMealy
Market Size
Estimation

2. How much money in the food
app market?
Two approaches for the market size estimation
:
 Top-Down approach: Get an estimate of the
total market size and funnel down to the
food market. This will give us the available
market.
 Bottom-Up approach: Estimate how much a
food app can get from ads building
on assumptions for CPM and number of
views. This will give us an estimate of the
attainable market.

3. The total app market in 2012 will be
worth $22 billion
Top-Down : How do we make money from the app?
 The standard forms of monetizing a 70000
62600
mobile app are: app sale, premium
60000
services and ads
50000
 We sourced information in the market
40000
size for this three axes :
 App market revenues (app 30000
purchases): $7.1 bln in 2011 to $37 21900
20000
bln in 2015 [Canalys 2011]
11570
 In-app purchases: $0.97 bln in 10000
2011 to $5.6 bln in 2015 [IHS 2012]
0
 Mobile advertising: $3.3 bln in 2011 2012 2015
2011 to $20 bln in 2015 [Gartner paid app purchases [M$]
2011] in-app purchases [M$]
mobile advertisement [M$]

4. Food apps acount for $207 million of
revenues in 2012
Top-Down : How much of the total app market cake is taken by food apps?
 Of all the downloads, 3.1% are in 700
"healthcare & fitness" 597
600
category, 6% in the "lifestyle"
category [Chomp 2012] 500
 Food apps get classified in either 400
of these categories, and eMealy
explores both. 300
207
 So we spent some time sampling 200
AppAnnie.com to estimate the 100
110
percentage of food apps in each
of the categories. 0
2011 2012 2015
 Then we were ready to estimate paid app purchases [M$]
the food apps market size from the in-app purchases [M$]
total market size and the mobile advertisement [M$]

5. The market value of advertisement in
the lifestyle category is 10M
Bottom-up : Value of ads in the lifestyle category
 In 2012, it’s expected a level of 600+ M Smartphones, from which 60% will be active users
of apps
 The share of lifestyle category is 6% from total apps downloads
 The number of views vary with the retention rate and we estimate to be above 470 B
 Assuming an average mobile CPM of $25, total revenues from ads in the lifestyle market
values about 10 M

6. The market for food apps is
young and relatively small
Alternative revenue streams should be found
 With conventional web app monetization we
are approaching a market of $207 million
and can expect to attain revenues of at most
$10 million through advertisement
 This market potential is growing fast, but
still small
 We need explore alternative revenue
streams and use the app to capture users
 Conventional monetization can be used to
bootstrap the development