[This guest post was written by Peter Farago, VP Of Marketing at Flurry. Flurry is an analytics platform that has been weaved into over 3,000 applications across the iPhone, BlackBerry, JavaME, and Android platforms, allowing developers to track and research usage and sales trends. You can read more of Flurry's findings over at the Flurry Blog.]
Consumer spending during the holiday retail season, beginning with Black Friday, is among the most important predictors of U.S. economic health. Since the late 90s, tracking online sales of websites like amazon.com on the first Monday after Thanksgiving, Cyber Monday, has become a second important barometer. The National Retail Federation, the world’s leading retail trade group, extrapolated that total spending for this year’s Black Friday “weekend,” Thursday-to-Sunday, was up 0.5% from a year ago. Additionally, Lazard Capital reported Cyber Monday sales were up strongly over last year, by 35%.
As we enter the holiday season, downloads in the iPhone App Store can also serve as an indicator of consumer spending. While App Store sales are small relative to online and retail, Apple’s September announcement that the App Store surpassed two billion downloads demonstrates how quickly this digital market is growing, having doubled in just the last four months. Further, according to Admob, the App Store is already generating over one billion USD in annual sales. Finally, the iPhone OS installed base, which sold more than 12 million units world-wide for the quarter ending September 2009, is reaching meaningful critical mass. Flurry estimates that, life-to-date, more than 34 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices have been sold in the U.S. through the end of September 2009. This equates to roughly 10% of the U.S. population.
Monitoring application downloads tracked by Flurry over the last six months, we observe strong patterns of seasonality and an aggressive ramp toward the holiday season. Note that because the iPhone installed base grew so dramatically between last year and this year, we have selected a time series trend analysis versus a year-over-year comparison. The chart below reveals three phases: first, strong summer downloads; second, a dip in September Flurry attributes to back-to-school; and third, strong growth over October and November leading up to the holidays. Specifically, October downloads exceeded September by 30%, and November further grew over October by an additional 16%.
Historically, the week after Christmas has been the strongest for data downloads to mobile phones, since consumers load up after receiving new handsets as holiday gifts. With download growth at its current rate, Flurry predicts that December downloads will exceed November by at least 20%, making it a strong season for Apple.
Nice post, Peter. :)
Awesome!!!! Working hard to get “2012 Zombies Vs Aliens” out on the App Store! 9,000 BC is going good too! This data is reflected in our sales :)
I find the same trends for sales of my app, songvoo.
I expect an even bigger spike after the 25th, not just because people will be unwrapping new iToys, but because many more will be unwrapping a shiny new iTunes gift card.
Upon reading the article I originally thought the same thing, but then reconsidered. While app downloads (which is what flurry is measuring) will increase, the actual cash influx to apple is when the consumers buy the giftcards, not when (after the holidays) they are used. In fact, apple would actually lose money after the holidays, because they have to pay some of the profit fromthe giftcards, to the app develpor.
Question is, what’s the best way to leverage this all?
Another upcoming barometer could be Free Shipping Day (Dec 17th) and the pickup for that. Only the second year of it; but, it seems to be getting some traction.
Wonder how many retail mobile apps make e-commerce buying recommendations based on free shipping offers. Could be an interesting app or metric as mobile commerce picks up and allows for impulse e-commerce buys (not tied to a computer).
PayPal put out some data on holiday sales as well, they are a pretty big barometer (see auctionbytes blog: http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y09/m11/i30/s01). And their mobile app is really nice…be nice to see m-commerce tracked better from e-commerce in the coming years.
Nate
http://www.shipwire.com
product fulfillment
Apple is going to rock after the Christmas.It will be great gift for Apple of Christmas.Nice post !
As it stands now app review websites are doing a great job telling readers what apps are good. It seams however that with the use of hard cash and in app advertising some applications still reach the number one spot in charts.
Example we have in the UK store an app currently number one in entertainment called Beautiful Boobs.
It has received 4060 Ratings in UK and 3456 of these are one star. It is incredible that an application this bad can reach the number one spot and I have to say the developer has done something extremely clever here ot get to this position in only a few days.
Our own app has had a staggering 250.000 reviews (world wide) and an average rating of 4 stars but is way down the same chart hardly visible to the general public. Our app os by far the highest rated bikini application on itunes so we are keeping our fingers crossed there will be a change to how itunes showcase apps on the first page.
TOP100 Lite – Lingerie, swimwear and bikini models
Rating: 4 STARS **** (out of 250790 ratings)
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/top100lite-updated-sexy-lingerie/id315329986?mt=8
Would be great to see Apple improve this and introduce a view by rating feature on i-tunes.
Good grief! Charlie Brown!
Which is the best bikini app? Really?
I guess I’m surprised that so few apps are purchased every month. I’m not sure why, maybe with a user base of phones and touch’s over 20 million I thought they might avg 1 app a month.
We planned for this month based on our experience last year with apps, of course there were only a fraction of the apps there are now.
We built a seasonal app Super Dance Christmas Elf (yes I know) and a non seasonal Super Dance Soul girl for after Christmas.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/super-dance-elf-christmas-friends/id341908857?mt=8
The thing is this appstore market is a moving target, who knows what will be going on 365 days from now.