The market for mobile social gaming is ever increasing and showing no sign of slowing in 2011. Today, 11 of the 20 Top Grossing Games on Apple's UK App Store are freemium social games.

Tap Zoo is making more money than Angry Birds, and Smurfs' Village is out-earning Fifa 11, for example.

As in-app payments come to Android and BlackBerry, these kinds of games will quickly spread to those platforms too. This growth will be fuelled by new research from mobile analytics firm Flurry, which delves into the demographics of mobile social gamers.

The company's tools are used by developers to track usage of their apps across various smartphones. Flurry says it identifies 26 million unique daily users spending 25 minutes a day playing social mobile games. It has used a sample of 60,000 iOS and Android social gamers to draw up its report.

According to the research,64% of mobile social gamers are in the US, with 30% in Europe, 4% in Asia and 2% in the rest of the world – remember, this data is drawn only from iOS and Android games using Flurry's analytics: in countries like Japan, there are millions of people playing mobile social games on other kinds of phones, who would not be covered by this research.

Flurry says the average age of a mobile social gamer is 28, and that the male-female split is 47:53. It compares this to figures from the US Electronic Software Association (ESA) claiming that for "traditional" gamers, the numbers are 34 years old and 60:40 respectively.

Social gamers chart

"It's clear that mobile social gaming is attracting a much stronger female base, as well as a younger average user," writes Flurry's Peter Farago in a blog post. "Among mobile social gaming, there is also greater density in the 18-49-year-old bracket, which indicates that iOS and Android devices are attracting users during their earning years versus, in particular, their teenage years, where they likely cannot afford more expensive mobile devices."

Flurry has also mapped data on US users in its sample group against US Census Bureau data, claiming that the average mobile social gamer earns 50% more than the average American, and is more than twice as likely to have earned a college degree.

The thrust of the study is that mobile social games deserve more attention from brands and marketing agencies. "The Mobile Social Gamer segment is highly engaged, younger, made up of more females, more educated and more affluent," writes Farago.

"In terms of usage behaviour, they use social games far more often than they watch prime-time television shows, and using for 25 minutes per day, are heavy users of this interactive content. Mobile social gamers are the new mass-market powerhouse."

"Mobile social gamers are the new mass-market powerhouse."

However, if mobile social games are to capitalise on this, they need more reach than just iOS devices, which is one reason why it's important for their developers to launch the games on Android and other smartphones as soon as in-app payments are available.