Unpacking the App Store's Million-Dollar Monthly Club
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Millions and Billions. Check out the full article for more insights.
How many apps and games do you think make more than a million dollars on the App Store? And for the sake of consistency, let's go with net revenue, so what they get to keep after Apple takes its share.
Maybe 50? 100? 200?
Higher!
I rounded up every mobile app and game that our App Intelligence shows as having earned a million or more in the last month using Explorer, and the list included 503 results.
More than I expected, and a good reminder that there's a lot of money in the App Store, and as we've seen almost across the board, it's growing.
Let's dig into this club and see who's earning more than a million dollars of net revenue on the App Store. Every. Month.
Let's start at the very top - TikTok and YouTube!
The two lead the list with YouTube in front and TikTok immediately behind it. Both also sit in a small club of their own - the $100,000,000 club. A club of two.
FYI - Net means after Apple takes its cut.
50 of the remaining apps earn between $10M and $100M monthly, and that group includes familiar names like Tinder, 3rd on our list of highest earners, all the way down to Call of Duty and Clash Royale, 36th and 44th on the list, respectively.
The remaining 453 apps and games have net revenue in the single-digit millions, and include a variety of games such as PUBG and Toon Blast, ranked 46th and 50th, respectively, and dips all the way down to Street Fighter Duel in 496th place, just a few spots from the bottom.
OfferUp, a marketplace for used goods, sits in last place.
Overall, games accounted for a little more than half of the entire list - 271 or 54%. The non-games span 20 categories led by Entertainment, Social Networking, and Photo & Video.
And of all apps and games, only one is paid. Just one, and that's Minecraft. All other apps are free with in-app purchases.
That's the App Store. Google Play is a whole other beast. Let me know if you want me to run this analysis for Google Play as well.
App Intelligence for Everyone!
The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
