According to a Gartner report, mobile apps will generate over $6 in revenues in 2010, rising to a massive 26 billion downloads worth $29.5 billion by 2013. That’s even accounting for the fact that 80% will be free downloads. Significantly mobile advertising will represent a good portion of that revenue. This year it will be $0.6 billion or 10% but in three years time it will represent 25% of the total revenues.

What this clearly suggests is that the way forward for mobile advertising is through apps. Given that 90% of mobile apps are opened once or never at all, the next thing is to get people to actually use them.

Apple have already sold 3 billion apps through their store, and according to estimates, they have made over $2 billion from those downloads. Nice work if you can get it.