IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-02373822.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Personal data and monetization of free applications

Author

Listed:
  • Grazia Cecere

    (IMT-BS - DEFI - Département Droit, Economie et Finances - TEM - Télécom Ecole de Management - IMT - Institut Mines-Télécom [Paris] - IMT-BS - Institut Mines-Télécom Business School - IMT - Institut Mines-Télécom [Paris], RITM - Réseaux Innovation Territoires et Mondialisation - UP11 - Université Paris-Sud - Paris 11, LITEM - Laboratoire en Innovation, Technologies, Economie et Management (EA 7363) - UEVE - Université d'Évry-Val-d'Essonne - TEM - Télécom Ecole de Management)

  • Fabrice Le Guel

    (RITM - Réseaux Innovation Territoires et Mondialisation - UP11 - Université Paris-Sud - Paris 11)

  • Vincent Lefrere

    (RITM - Réseaux Innovation Territoires et Mondialisation - UP11 - Université Paris-Sud - Paris 11)

Abstract

In the market for smartphone applications, the majority of apps are zero priced. In order to generate revenue, developers have to monetize theirs apps, however little is known about their monetization strategies. The theoretical literature underlines the importance of personal data for Internet companies' strategies, but the implications of personal data in the smartphone applications market remains rather unexplored. We provide empirical evidence of the monetization strategies related to free apps by studying how personal data collection is combined with more traditional sources of revenue such as advertising and in-app purchases. We have unique data measuring how apps are monetized. In our dataset, 9\% of apps use exclusively personal data as monetization strategy, and 22,5\% use only advertising and in-app purchase is used exclusively by 4\% of apps. We combine data on 475,867 free applications available on the Google Play platform, with data on applications' privacy-related behaviors provided by PrivacyGrade. Empirically, we find that apps collecting personal data are 15,6\% more likely to do advertising suggesting complementarity between collection of personal data. Personal data are used by established apps with large number of downloads. Successful appsare more likely to collect personal data rather than doing advertising.

Suggested Citation

  • Grazia Cecere & Fabrice Le Guel & Vincent Lefrere, 2017. "Personal data and monetization of free applications," Post-Print hal-02373822, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02373822
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ciro Troise & Elia Ferrara & Mario Tani & Ornella Papaluca, 2020. "Perspectives of the App Economy: Tenets of the Innovative Phenomenon," International Business Research, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 13(3), pages 1-1, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-02373822. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.