Models developed by industry analysts frequently predict astronomically large growth for Augmented Reality. A good report has to have a lot of illustrative examples, describing the richness that AR is capable of delivering and forecasting how this will evolve over the years in the forecast period.
I don't intend to publish a full market research report about AR because, at the speed the business is evolving, it will be out-of-date before it is completed. This is primarily because market and trend forecasting aren't the only services I provide and my projects don't all need the quantitative proof to be successful. That said, regularly and reliably measuring the growth of AR and sharing those metrics with the world are very much on my list of goals for the near future.
In May 2012 I began the process of getting quantitative about mobile AR by inviting a half-dozen of my friends in AR companies to share a little of what they are doing. In a survey I asked questions about:
- What AR metrics are available?
- When did you begin capturing mobile AR metrics?
- How are these metrics captured?
- Who uses (what is the purpose of gathering) these metrics?
- Who has access to them?
- How long are they stored?
- What are the conditions or agreements with the users or content publishers?
I learned that there is no consistency in how metrics are collected or used in 2012. Maybe that's good news because it permits us to develop new methods and avoid having to re-engineer systems.
In preparation for a new campaign on mobile AR metrics, their importance and methods for acquiring and comparing them, I've been gathering my own examples of how metrics are gathered and communicated.
I like the infographics approach. The one I provide here was issued by Blippar about the campaign they did with Shortlist magazine but I learned about it when it was published in this post by Onno Hansen the author of the IDentifEYE blog about AR and Education.
The fact that nearly 10% of the audited circulation (over 51K out of 529K) actually used the application/features, is not all that surprising when you understand that the target audience of this publication, "high class city-dwelling men," is highly technology-centric. They also like a good deal. The weekly print media publication is distributed free at newsstands in UK.
One more indicator that these guys like a good deal is click through rate of 13.4%. This is phenomenal for a magazine, I think. If you have other examples of high CTR for print media, I'd love to hear about them.