More Ad-Supported iPhone Apps Coming Soon

The allure of the iPhone has unsurprisingly garnered the rapt attention of the advertising industry.  With 100 million App Store downloads since it launched and 90% of those downloads being free applications, ad support is a clear way for developers to balance profitability and popularity.  Currently, one of the iPhone’s most popular applications is Loopt, a location-based social networking program, but on different platforms and in early development it was sold to consumers for a few bucks.  Now, thanks to venture capital backing and further ad-revenue support, Loopt is hoping to be completely free.  A similar story can be told of iBeer, which is a simplistic fun application that turns the iPhone into a virtual beer, and more importantly, costs $2.99.  Carling caught onto this idea and released their own application, iPint, with the identical formula, but thanks to the corporate backing, provided it for free.  CNN reports on this growing trend:

“Consumers are drunk on free from the Internet,” says Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry, a startup that has developed an analytics tool that lets mobile developers track how people use their applications. Farago believes that paid-for mobile services will initially give way to ad-subsidized applications.

[via CNN]