In the past four weeks, there were 45,000 new apps submitted to the iOS App Store alone. The chances that any of them will ever break into the top 1000 are effectively 0%, and even if they did, they’re still not seeing any amount of traffic to build a successful business.
Monetization is an even worse story since it’s how a majority of these apps plan to pay rent and keep running. According to a study done by Activate, the top 20 app publishers, representing less than %0.005 of all apps, earn 60% of all app store revenue. Ouch.
I think the point of the article is that maintaining a mobile app isn’t as lucrative as we’re inclined to believe from the outside.
The numbers we’re crunching are optimistic at best. For example, they mentioned 45k new apps in a period of a month. Assuming that only those 45k apps exist and everything is evenly distributed …
$1,000,000,000 / 45,000 = $22,222
That’s $22k per annum per app.
Even for a one-man operation that’s pretty rough.
In Naira that breaks down to 400k per month, so that’s good here, but not from the perspective of the person writing this article.
If you factor in another 45k apps coming in next month, and the next and the next, your money gets halved every month.
400k, 200k, 100k, 50k, 25k …
It didn’t even take up to six months for you to realize this is quickly becoming not worth it.
The App store revenue as indicated doesn’t account for in-app ads syndicated by advertising networks, does it?
Some folks don’t have any business with the app store revenue.
Besides TONNES of those apps are not built for any purpose other than for resell, check Flippa.com for how many new apps added for sale daily.
You may question why would app resell be attractive to any buyer, especially when installs are obvious jacked or bots and overall app quality is subpar?
Well, i’ve bought seeming establish sites to apply for certain premium advertiser feeds - networks would only take sites of certain quality and maturity into their network- hence i had to buy a matching site to apply. Same applies for apps. Premium feeds that can earn high bids per click.
Once you secure the feed you can chose to ditch the app fro any groomed source for channelling arbitraged mobile traffic.
Several years from now, daily added apps on the stores will continue growing without compensating growth or distribution on the app store revenue.
This would make sense if it was harder to get views on the website — but generating thousands of web views felt simple. Why wouldn’t ANYONE DOWNLOAD?
Maybe it was the conversion rate on the app store? Nope — that was sitting at 53%. So half of the people who got to the app store downloaded, but only two out of every one thousand would even click!!??!?!
