Right after publishing my blog post about the high attrition rates of mobile app usage, I heard from one of my loyal readers about another interesting development on the app front.
Now that there are millions of mobile apps being offered to consumers, it’s becoming much more costly for developers to market new ones to their mobile audiences.
Fiksu, a mobile app marketing firm, reports that the cost to acquire a “loyal app user” – that is, a person who opens an app three or more times – increased by nearly a third in 2012.
According to Fiksu, the average acquisition cost for a loyal user is now $1.62, compared to $1.30 in 2011.
This isn’t to say that app downloads have declined as a result. Quite the contrary: They achieved record-breaking volume in 2012. But the growth rate has been slowing, in part due the larger download basis.
As for the implications raising costs and higher competition for the consumer’s attention, Sarah Perez of TechCrunch warns that “… in 2014, we might see more of the newer, younger companies trying darker shades of ‘growth hacking’ as a way to find initial traction.
Nones Notes 
This is very interesting . . . and very insane. Not you, my friend, but “it.”
Everything in this brief gem of a blog spells out insanity:
To “acquire” a person for $1.30 or a few cents more.
To call it loyalty if someone clicks somewhere three times.
The frame of reference for ubiquitous inflation … and “everything and everyone” becomes somewhere between “replaceable and worthless.”