Customers on The Toilet
The shocking possibilities of mobile marketing
Everyone has heard the old saying that is sometimes referred to as a ‘Chinese curse’, even though nobody is sure where it comes from, and even though it isn’t much of a curse —
May you live in interesting times
If you’re reading this article, be sure that you do live in interesting times (whether you feel cursed or not). And for proof of that, look no further than the colorful ways that millions of dollars in revenue are created every year throughout the modern world.
Take a recent statistic from Bigcommerce: 31% of Millennials and Gen Xers have made product purchases while using the bathroom.
…now take a moment to appreciate this fact.
If it doesn’t seem very interesting to you, consider that in the scope of human history, this was not a normal phenomenon. Until the advent of radio, TV ads, telemarketing calls and eventually computers within the last century, business was a sphere of social life mainly isolated from the home. Streets, storefronts, fairs, office buildings and catalogs were the domain of advertising and transactions.
To be sure, there have always been plenty of possibilities for marketers, and many opened up before most of us were born. The blurring of business and domestic life is not a recent phenomenon.
But until this past decade, one option remained strictly off limits: selling stuff to people on the loo. The fact that it is not only possible now but relatively common demonstrates that the business/personal barrier has been completely shattered.
By now, you get the point: selling things to people engaged in one of life’s essential but embarrassing necessities is a little weird. But it probably doesn’t make a very big difference, right?
Maybe so. But when I first encountered this statistic, I was so surprised that I wanted to crunch the numbers and find out exactly what kind of impact bathroom breaks have on e-commerce. So let’s have a little fun, and calculate how much money is generated by those who like to browse t-shirts while taking a leak.
Money generated by people on the toilet (boring math ahead!)
Because this experiment requires us to take the entire Internet market as a whole, we need an accurate gauge for how much money people spend in a single online purchase. Amazon, the most popular online retailer of all time, seems like a safe place to start.
We’ll use Amazon’s Average Order Value (AOV) which lies at around $47.25. We’ll stick with mobile users in the United States, where there are 75.4 million millenials, and 65.8 million generation Xers. Adding these numbers and taking 31% gives us 43.8 million mobile users who shop in the bathroom.
With a modest assumption that each of these users makes at least one purchase a year, the calculation for yearly revenue is straightforward: (43.8 million) * $47.25…
…but let’s not stop there. Let’s make this more interesting.
People do a lot of things with their smartphones on the toilet. According to a study conducted in 2014, 45% of smartphone users choose to play games. And games generate a lot of money.
In fact, according to Business Insider, “freemium” games account for 70–80% of revenue generated on the iOS platform, and 90% of revenue generated by the Google Play store according to Android Authority.
In the end, this comes to around $19.6 billion dollars for iOS, and $7.8 billion for Google, leading to $27.4 billion between them both in 2016.
We want to calculate how much of that was generated on the toilet. So first, let’s figure out how much the average smartphone user generates playing games. At the end of 2016, smartphone users made up 77% of the U.S population, giving us a total of 249 million smartphone users. On average, they collectively play games for 1.15 billion hours each month, or 13.8 billion hours per year.
Doing the math ($27.4 billion per year / 13.8 billion hours per year) gives us an average of $1.99 per person per hour playing games.
Let’s assume that people who play games on the toilet (45% of smartphone users, which is 112 million) play for 1/3 of their time on the toilet (1.7 hours per week) which comes to 0.57 hours.
Now for the magic. We’re ready to combine our calculations for toilet based e-commerce and game use:
(43.8 million people making a toilet purchase in a year) x ($47.25 AOV)
+
($1.99 per hour ) x (112 million people playing games on the toilet) x (0.57 hours per week) x 52 weeks in a year =
$8.68 billion from games and purchases in the bathroom
In 2016, and in the U.S.
Wow. For scale, the U.S eBook industry generated $2.84 billion in 2015. It’s even more than the total revenue generated by Spotify and Apple Music combined in 2016 ($7 billion).
This number doesn’t count the tremendous mobile industry outside the U.S. It doesn’t even count the considerable profits generated by
- YouTube videos
- Social media
- Non-game apps
- Mobile websites
- Digital downloads (movies, music, etc.)
All in all, it’s safe to say that boredom has never been a more lucrative industry.
At the end of the day, this isn’t about bathrooms or toilets. It’s not about looking at our culture under a microscope and laughing at the funny things we see.
It’s about the immense, transformative power of mobile devices, the new spaces they have built which transcend time and place, and the limitless opportunities for creativity which they have granted to business in the modern world.
Even online marketers have a hard time keeping up with trends. And sometimes, they’re tapping into trends without understanding how it works, or why. The age of the storefront is behind us — in the future that is only beginning to show its true potential, the market is everywhere.
A recent article by Kent Lewis spells out dozens of emerging technologies that promise tremendous revenue down the road. These include,
- Voice search with digital assistants such as Siri, Cortana, Amazon Alexa and Google Home. Not only are searches from these platforms growing exponentially, but they allow unprecedented opportunities for targeted advertising of online/traditional businesses, restaurants, and more.
- Location Based Marketing (LBM) in the form of beacon messaging, which combines near field communications (NFC), radio frequency identification (RFID), WiFi, geo-fencing, and local listings. In 2016, this technology generated $44 billion in retail sales.
- Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) devices are projected to become billion dollar industries by 2021. Enabling unique forms of brand messaging in immersive worlds, there may not be a more compelling way to reach prospects.
- Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to encompass over 8.4 billion devices by the end of this year — that’s more than the population of the world. The opportunity to market household products in an economic and efficient way convinced markets to pour $737 billion dollars into the industry in 2016.
- Mobile Wallets may very well become a replacement for credit cards within the next few decades, and provide businesses a unique way to partner with payment providers to offer promotions, discounts and coupons that will attract customers to businesses they never would have frequented before.
A single common denominator ties all of these emerging technologies together: mobile devices.
In A Comparative Chronology of Money, Roy and Glyn Davies date the emergence of human commerce from 9,000–6,000 B.C. Eons of history have conditioned us to the idea of money and business as physical things that have a place, volume and weight.
After 20 years of online commerce, there is still much time for marketers to contemplate what it means when business can happen anywhere, at any time — cars, living rooms, planes, streets, and yes. Even bathrooms.
OMI is dedicated to helping small businesses navigate new marketing technologies more effectively, with practical education from experts across digital marketing fields.
To learn more about tapping into the developing field of mobile marketing, consider viewing our brand new courses. For ten days, access to our catalog is completely free.
- Brandon Shutt, Editor at OMI
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