A couple of days ago we looked at the Pocket Option affiliate site and their list of countries, with LTV and RTDs.
Pocket Option has been exceptionally good at app marketing. If you go on most app ranking sites, they will nearly always be among the most downloaded financial apps in non-EU / UK / US countries.
This got me thinking about the prop space because, in theory, it should be easier to do app marketing for a prop product.
If you are running a broker, you have to model the likelihood someone will deposit and then try to figure out how much of that deposit you can earn in revenue. I have a sneaking suspicion that for Pocket Option that figure may be close to 100%, which makes their lives easier.
Anyway, props are more like an ecommerce transaction. The revenue of the company comes up front because a customer is buying the challenge straight away. This should make them a product that is easier to do app marketing for.
“The launch of a branded app is a highly viable option for prop firms at the moment,” Sergey Borisov, Product Manager at Spotware told me.
“There is strong demand for customized trading applications, and [Spotware] have the capability to develop a fully branded solution for any proprietary trading firm. You can see this in the App Store by just searching cTrader and the prop firm’s name.”
So I tried that and a couple of examples came up – FTMO and Funding Pips. Signing up for either firm is straightforward. You download the app, get redirected to the firm’s website for challenge purchases, and then back to the app.
But if you actually look at the ad spend of those two firms, they are not marketing their apps at all.
For example, FTMO currently has more than 3,000 active ads(!) on Meta. But none of them appear to connect to the company’s app. They are, incidentally, spamming Vietnam with a lot of ads at the moment.
The same is true of Funding Pips, who do not have quite as many ads but are still all linking back to their main website.
There are not many firms, that I can see, who have built their own app. SabioTrade is using its own technology. However, their app is kind of weird and may be indicative of a hurdle props could face in the app marketing world.
You sign up to SabioTrade on the app but there is then no push back or link to the main website.
Although you can register on the app, you can’t buy a challenge within it and, because there is no redirection back to the main site, it feels kind of odd. You basically just have an app that lets you register for demo trading.
SabioTrade is part of a wider group that is also top tier at app marketing so we’ll see what happens. Maybe they’ll change the current set up to allow in-app purchases.
But there may also be a simple reason why they don’t currently allow this and, as noted, this may be a problem for props as a whole.
Because props are technically only education providers who evaluate your trading in exchange for a fee, an in-app purchase would be an e-commerce transaction. This would presumably trigger the US mafioso’s monopoly power (Apple, Google) revenue share agreements. That means they would clip off 30% of every in-app purchase.
SabioTrade has a WhatsApp chat and I realised that it’s all just AI auto-generated responses. So I tried asking them…
There you go? Anyway, 30% is obviously a huge amount to pay and something firms won’t want to do.
Could you bump up pricing to reflect those costs?
Alternatively, perhaps the best option is to redirect clients as already happens when you use something like the FTMO cTrader app.
You guys have more insight on this than I do, so I don’t know why you should expect me to know. You should know already.
Whatever the case, this seems like a problem worth solving. Almost 90% of Plus500 revenue, for example, comes from app trading. Other firms, like Trading 212 and Capital.com, have seen huge growth in large part because they have become extremely good at app marketing.
In many ways props are at an advantage when it comes to not being regulated. This may be one area where the model is a downside.
