More than a quarter of US adults now use a mobile or social location-based service such as maps or GPS, according to new stats from Pew Research Center, but just 4% use location check-in services such as Foursquare and Gowalla, as the services eemingly st
More than a quarter of US adults now use a mobile or social location-based service such as maps or GPS, according to new stats from Pew Research Center, but just 4% use location check-in services such as Foursquare and Gowalla, as the services seemingly struggle to gain traction. While services such as maps are becoming an important tool for consumers and driving the usage of location products, social check-in platforms are still niche, though the figure does rise to one in 10 among US smartphone owners, which Pew claims comprises 35% of all US adults. Perhaps worryingly for such services, 7% of US adults set their social network profiles, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, to automatically tag their location, presenting a larger opportunity for them to control the location check-in market.
The location check-in figure shows no change from the 4% that Pew claimed in its research in November last year, where the research firm added that only 1% of online Americans logged in to such services on a given day. The stats do not make good reading for social location services such as Foursquare and Gowalla, which have battled to defy critics’ claims in recent months that they are merely fad products. Foursquare in particular has made significant moves to drive revenues by converting its 10m users into dollars, notably linking with a raft of daily deals providers to aggregate their offers to Foursquare members.
However, while the social check-in concept is struggling, location services overall are going from strength to strength. A report by Pyramid Research in June asserts that the global location-based services market will be worth USD10.3bn in 2015, driven by advertising which will pull in USD6.2bn of the total, while Strategy Analytics is slightly more conservative, forecasting global revenues to top the USD10bn barrier a year later.
“Americans are not currently all that eager to share explicitly their location on social media sites, but they are taking advantage of their phones’ geolocation capabilities in other ways”, says Pew analyst, Kathryn Zickuhr.
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