Re:1 Billion Paid out through the Apple App Store - Really?
by boucher on Sunday June 20, 2010 @08:39PM
(#1447528)
Of course, like the distribution of free vs. paid, it's likely that a majority of the money is going to a minority of the paid apps (I would imagine a pretty similar 85% to 15% distribution), which means its probably working out decently for the top 15% but not so much for the rest of the developers. A substantial portion of the top apps are also likely the ones from companies like EA or branded apps like Scrabble, especially given that most of those apps go for $5-10, higher than the average sales price.
Re:1 Billion Paid out through the Apple App Store - Really?
by aristus on Sunday June 20, 2010 @10:53PM
(#1447764)
"Average" figures are usually meaningless if not outright deceptive. If Bill Gates gets on a bus the average net worth shoots way up, but it doesn't mean a thing.
Consider a distribution where the top app earned $1,000,000, the next ten earned $100,000 total, the next 100 earned $10,000 total. The "average" earnings would be $10,000. But the vast majority of apps (100 out of 111) actually earn about 100 bucks.
Re:1 Billion Paid out through the Apple App Store - Really?
by wallflower on Monday June 21, 2010 @10:14AM
(#1448830)
Without access to the actual iTunes sale data and using anecdotal information from people posting about their sales rank and revenue, my assumption is you could get a pretty credible grasp of how many apps are in the long tail/rarely purchased - just by looking at the number of ratings.
Zero ratings probably means near-zero downloads.
Though not everyone rates the app. In fact, some apps might not get rated until deletion.
- 90 million iDevices sold in the last 3 years
- in the last 2 years, there's been $1.43 billion in App Store sales
- 70% of that = $1 billion, was paid out to developers
- there are currently 225,000 apps available in the App Store
- 85% of all apps are free (according to the author)
That would indicate that an average paid app that debuted in the App Store two years ago has since grossed $42,370 -- of which the developer received $29,659.
(0.15*225,000= 33,750 paid apps)
(1,340,000,000/33,750= $42,370 in sales)
Doesn't seem too bad a deal, especially given the rate at which the iDevices sell. Before the end of the month, there's going to be 100 million iDevices in the wild. The number of potential App Store customers is growing at a high pace.