Occupy the App Store? Top 1% of monetized apps dominate 94% of US App Store revenue
The top 1 percent of earners don't just control the lion's share of money in the U.S. economy -- a similar disparity between the haves and the have-nots has emerged in Apple's own App Store economy, a new study reveals.
App discoverability heavily dictates sales, the latest app sales data from Sensor Tower reveals, as the top 1 percent of publishers accounted for nearly all of U.S. App Store revenue last quarter. In the first quarter of 2016, 623 monetizing publishers that include Supercell, HBO, Spotify and others raked in 94 percent of U.S. App Store revenue.
The remaining 6 percent of earnings, or $85.8 million, was distributed among 61,677 publishers -- the remaining 99 percent of all other App Store publishers.
Sensor Tower pulled data from the U.S. App Store regarding revenue for all publishers with at least one active paid or in-app-purchase-supported app. Downloads were compared to estimates for app publishers across the top charts for paid, free and grossing apps.
Of these apps, gaming, entertainment and music categories have drawn the most downloads with prior bestselling app publishers like Supercell, known for Clash of Clans, continuing to extend their dominance as they introduce new apps. App Store discoverability was shown to be a major driver in sales, affecting both iPhone and iPad installs.
Getting apps discovered by Apple's mobile audience has presented obstacles for many new publishers, and there have been recent signals that Apple is aware. Last month one report said the company is working on major changes to how searching operates in the iOS App Store, in an effort to help its audience discover content in a massive, ever-growing library of options.
While big-time publishers reap the most from the App Store, Apple too has benefitted from their dominant success. The App Store alone accounted for an estimated $6.4 billion in revenue for the company in 2015.
Apple itself revealed that the public had spent $1.1 billion on the App Store in just a two week period covering Christmas and New Year's to end 2015. Jan. 1, 2016 was reportedly the largest single day in the App Store's history, with $144 million in traffic.
App discoverability heavily dictates sales, the latest app sales data from Sensor Tower reveals, as the top 1 percent of publishers accounted for nearly all of U.S. App Store revenue last quarter. In the first quarter of 2016, 623 monetizing publishers that include Supercell, HBO, Spotify and others raked in 94 percent of U.S. App Store revenue.
The remaining 6 percent of earnings, or $85.8 million, was distributed among 61,677 publishers -- the remaining 99 percent of all other App Store publishers.
Sensor Tower pulled data from the U.S. App Store regarding revenue for all publishers with at least one active paid or in-app-purchase-supported app. Downloads were compared to estimates for app publishers across the top charts for paid, free and grossing apps.
Of these apps, gaming, entertainment and music categories have drawn the most downloads with prior bestselling app publishers like Supercell, known for Clash of Clans, continuing to extend their dominance as they introduce new apps. App Store discoverability was shown to be a major driver in sales, affecting both iPhone and iPad installs.
Getting apps discovered by Apple's mobile audience has presented obstacles for many new publishers, and there have been recent signals that Apple is aware. Last month one report said the company is working on major changes to how searching operates in the iOS App Store, in an effort to help its audience discover content in a massive, ever-growing library of options.
While big-time publishers reap the most from the App Store, Apple too has benefitted from their dominant success. The App Store alone accounted for an estimated $6.4 billion in revenue for the company in 2015.
Apple itself revealed that the public had spent $1.1 billion on the App Store in just a two week period covering Christmas and New Year's to end 2015. Jan. 1, 2016 was reportedly the largest single day in the App Store's history, with $144 million in traffic.
Comments
So? 90% of apps are crap. And of the remaining 10%, 90% is again crap (but of course less than the 90%).
This leaves us with 1% of apps -- and they should have 99% of revenue if it was just them, but they have 94% -- 5% more going to the 99% of crap apps.
In case you think that's too little, 1% is still like 10,000 - 15,000 apps out of over 1,000,000 apps.
Do you even know 10,000 non mobile apps? Do you even visit 10,000 web pages?
In search there's just Google and (sort of) Bing. In Social there's just Facebook, Twitter and Google+. In video it's 99% YouTube.
Those are actual monopolies and problematic situations -- not 10,000 good apps out-winning 1,000,000 of whatever sort people threw out at the App Store.
Verizon FiOS had a satisfaction rating of 71 but now that Frontier has been taking over, I'm thinking it probably tanked due to the complaints of outages. All the rest of the providers rank in the 50-60 range. Maybe because most people don't have a choice of provider. People tend to become dissatisfied when they don't have a choice.
(Listed by number of subscribers)
As an investor at the end of 2015 I checked out the S&P 500 stock listing and was surprised to find that only 28 companies (5.6%) of the 500 companies listed made more than 50% of all of the profits for the year.
Since someone brought up "occupy", excluding the top 5% high net worth individuals the average of the remaining 95% of US residents has a negative net worth (net worth compares mortgages, credit cards, and other forms of debt to all savings (but excludes social security or retirement benefits) and assets).
A good example would be this app with it's cruddy comment TextView handling! Down-score!
This a number of consequences. Nowadays, every app needs to have its own marketing campaign (website, facebook page, twitter account, Google adwords campaign, ...). For non games apps, the revenue model is also moving away form the 30% commission scheme, as the added value of the App Store is no longer in line with the 30% . More and more apps are offered for free and the money is collected via the related website, which needs to be there anyway.
It might not be a monopoly in the "US legal" terms (like e.g. AT&T once was deemed to be), but it's a de facto monopoly of online video.
And it also uses that position to power-struggle creators, etc on its term, e.g:
http://www.digitalspy.com/tech/vod/news/a675053/youtube-will-remove-all-content-from-artists-who-dont-sign-its-red-subscription-deal/
And, yes, when ONE site has 90% of eyeballs for online video, it is a problem. Might be convenient to you, but it's not a sign of a healthy market.
By the way I didn't know that YouTube had 90% market share for online video. That's impressive. Where did you find that?