At the beginning of April Flurry has released its annual report about mobile usage, and the bottom line of it is that 80 percent of the users’ usage in smartphones and tablets is done via apps and not in the mobile web through browsers. This, in turn, leads to the need of figuring out new models of advertising that suit these closed environments.

Flurry, a user analytics platform for mobile applications, has reached its conclusions based on a billion smart devices it collects data from. The company has access to this data thanks to developers using their tools to track their own users, which accumulates to a big pile of measurements that can tell a lot about the way users behave in general terms.

A major idea that arises from the massive usage of apps since its beginning (and is also mentioned in Flurry’s blog post) is that the apps are isolated from one another, and provide an encapsulated experience in each one. This goes in contrast to the internet at its core principle and as we experience it when we browse it in a traditional way, where the pages and sites are all interconnected. This fact was also brought up as a concern by the inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee. In a recent interview for CNET he referred to apps and their current distribution channel- “It does concern me. I think of those as legacy applications… There are fundamental philosophical reasons it’s less powerful.”. Beyond the lack of connection between the apps themselves, there’s also no relation to the mobile web, and so references cannot be made towards the pages and information within the apps, as is possible in the web through URLs. Berners-Lee mentioned that as a connection that should be made, adding that “The idea is to work toward the best of both worlds — all the advantages of a native app and all the advantages of the Web.”, Explaining that “With my fitness tracker, I want it to run all the time, even offline like a native app. But every day of my workout history will have a URL and I can link my friends to it.”

The motivation for developers to create apps is quite clear. Global revenue from app stores is expected to rise by 62% this year to $25 billion, according to Gartner. And since this market is only a few years old and the spread of smartphones is getting larger worldwide (1.75 billion by the end of 2014, according to eMarketer), there’s a real reason to put effort in the field. However, actually growing the revenue in this field by monetizing the users’ activity is tied to how well would ads be used in the apps. This incentive is supported by eMarketer estimating that worldwide mobile internet ad spending will grow by 62.1% this year, to just above $29 billion.

Looking closer at the data, we can see that in 2013 the Clickthrough rate in mobile ads stood at 0.38% (eMarketer) varying based on the advertiser category, while display ads (0.21%, Doubleclick), Facebook (0.12%, Wordstream) fell back on those numbers in the same year with only Twitter (1-3%, Wordstream) remaining the strongest traffic driver. So the users are actually pressing the ads more rapidly, but seeing as they have the phone used for very long during the day (more than 2.5 hours a day in the US, according to Flurry) and for more uses than any other device, we can expect CTR to rise.

Today, mobile ads are rather limited in size and are mostly banner ads that provide no interaction and are considered rather irritating to consumers . This fact, as the Wall Street Journal points out, is keeping marketers away from choosing the mobile platforms for their campaigns. The challenge now is to find alternative ways of placing the messages within the apps so that the customers and advertisers would both be happy. The same WSJ article mentions “native” ads as an option, meaning that the ad appears as a natural part of the app (i.e. as a post in a twitter feed), and so they are less irritating for the consumer and provide a more `trusted` feeling that generates more clicks. Another format that is gaining traction is video ads, also led by Twitter and Facebook, which are bound to be costly though very effective as these companies have the option of targeting the largest audience out there. As always, other apps will follow suit if these trailblazers would experience success.