Behold, marketers — some iPhone numbers you can work with, finally

April 6, 2009 | Matthaus Krzykowski | Comments |

It seems like a report comes out every week with new statistics on the Apple App Store phenomenon. And the story is almost always the same: The App Store is huge and getting bigger.

Today, comScore released the newest such report breaking down the cumulative base of applications installed via iTunes, thereby revealing the true size of the audience an individual app can reach. This actual audience size has been a major point of interest for marketers and developers for a long time. After all, the number could be used to estimate how much revenue an app might bring in with advertising or premium features. In the report, comScore also exposes the U.S. penetration rates for the App Store’s top 25 applications based on their number of installs. Here’s what it found:

The 32 percent penetration rate for Tap Tap Revenge means that the app has been downloaded by nearly one out of every three iTunes users. What else does the chart show? Twelve out of the 25 most popular mobile apps were games, including classics like Hangman and Pac-man. That’s pretty much what a typical VentureBeat reader would expect. In a survey conducted for our recent GamesBeat conference, we found that Apple’s iPhone will be the gaming industry’s favorite platform going forward. Among non-gaming applications, Stylem Media’s “Backgrounds” applications had the highest installation base, followed closely by the top social networking applications, Facebook and MySpace Mobile.

But it’s the penetration data that will probably spark the most debate within the mobile industry. Two weeks ago, mobile advertising network Admob came up with a pretty good estimate for the size of Apple’s mobile user base in the U.S.: 15 million. By multiplying this number by the penetration rate for an app, you can get a pretty reasonable idea of the number of users that app actually reaches. For Tap Tap Revenge, for example, 15 million multiplied by the 32 percent penetration rate equals 4.8 million users. A figure like this can greatly help marketers and developers come up with more reliable estimates for mobile advertising and premium service revenues.

The other nugget in the comScore report is a chart comparing the amount of time app users spend looking at specific types of content with the amount of time average internet users spend looking at it. It turns out iPhone users exhibit higher engagement with content categorized as retail, conversational media (social networking and blogs), entertainment, sports and search sites vis-a-vis online users. This is rich data for mobile marketers — particularly the figures showing high engagement with retail sites. To my best knowledge, mobile commerce has yet to gain much traction. But based on this data, it looks like iPhone users actually do buy products via their handsets, and want to do so more often. As we’ve reported, advertising targeted to iPhone users has gained momentum in recent months — and rightfully so, it seems.

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About the Author, Matthaus Krzykowski

Matthäus is a freelance writer for VentureBeat covering the mobile space. He is also a startup founder, consultant, conference organiser and regular speaker on the global circuit. At VentureBeat, Matthaus writes many of the analysis and trend pieces on various mobile themes. For example he broke the news that MySpace and Facebook had overtaken mobile-only social networks in terms of traffic. Also, he was part of the team which ported Android on a netbook. In addition he was coordinating the MobileBeat conference in San Francisco for the second year running. He is either to be found in San Francisco or Maastricht, the Netherlands. Follow him on Twitter at @matthausk, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Facebook User
    It doesnt say however how many people installed it because it was top of the list and SEEMED good, used it once, realized it was garbage and never used it again or uninstalled it.
  • matthaus
    Sure. As I say we are still talking estimates here. And one can refine any model with additional assumptions. Related to your argument, for example, according to Greg Yardley from Pinch Media (an iPhone analytics company) less than 5 percent of downloaded iPhone applications are kept longer than a month. I just did not want to go too deep with parameter discussions like this in the piece. Still, these comScore numbers are pretty useful, imo.
  • Areas
    Yes but by then, the product has had exposure
  • these are all free too...except labyrinth(except if thats the lite version). I wonder what paid apps would look like
  • Yes, i'm wondering the same thing as Allen. Would love to know what % of users have even purchased an app -- i know a lot of users have a mental barrier against paying for digital content.

    I believe Sudoku (14% penetration) is a $2.99 app. Assuming they didn't give it away for free upon launch or something, that's an impressive number: 14% x 15M x $3 each = $6 million in US sales.

    Are there others on here that are paid? (don't have time to search each one unfortunately).

    Jonathan
    http://blog.jwegener.com
  • matthaus
    @Allen, Jonathan.

    Will follow-up with comScore on that. If you got any more questions, let me know.
  • Hey Matt,
    Any followup answers about paid app installs?
  • matthaus
    Hi Jonathan. I will be on a call with comScore later in the day, actually ...
  • Oh, awesome!

    Yeah, I would love to hear about the penetration % of the leading paid apps, and some more general numbers about what % of user have ever paid for an app. It would be awesome to know how much the average user has spent on apps (because then you could work out some numbers about apple's royalty revenue).

    Thanks.
  • matthaus
    @Jonathan
    Your VB free data inquiry service has found out the following: "We (ComScore) "do not differentiate (yet) on paid versus free apps, nor do we have a way of measuring engagement. We are working furiously on enhancement to our reporting capabilities, so will have more data soon!"
  • Oh, one more note about your calculations. You say that there are 15M apple devices in the US. That's slightly off -- the admob article you linked to is quoting Nielsen numbers which measure mobile web users, not devices.

    From that same page: "Apple announced last week that they had sold 30 million combined iPhones and iPod touches. Our data suggests that about 75 percent of those are sold in the US"

    So the number of US devices is around 22.5M rather than 15M. Unless 7.5M have been bought in the US and shipped overseas :-)

    Jonathan
    http://blog.jwegener.com
  • matthaus
    Hmm, I talk about users, not devices.

    Admob refers to about "15 million mobile Web users for Apple in the US" & I talk about "Apple’s mobile user base" & "number of users that app actually reaches". I took users because the comScore data refer to users.

    The 22.5M on devices seem to be right. Besides Admob Greg Yardley over at Pinch Media also comes up with his estimate of 22 to 23 million devices running apps.
    http://www.pinchmedia.com/three-quarters-of-iph...
  • Sorry Matt, my post was unclear -- i'm using devices and users as interchangeable terms which is confusing things. I was trying to emphasize that the 15M number from Admob is MOBILE WEB users, not TOTAL users. The total number of devices in the US is 22.5M (US sales are 75% of 30M device sales according to that article). I assume that if there are 22.5M device in the US, there are also 22.5M device users in the US.
  • KenC
    There are NOT 22.5M iPhones in the US. Apple announced that it had sold 30M iPhones and iPod touches by the end of 2008, worldwide. 17M were iPhones and 13M were iPod touches. Of course, several more million have been sold since then.

    From the numbers I have seen, about half of iPhone sales are US, and the other half ROW, rest of world. So, with 17M iPhones sold, that would mean about 8 to 9M in the US, not 22.5M.
  • KenC
    Personally, I find AdMob's numbers a little suspect. Their demographic base is smaller than other sources.

    I looked at the linked AdMob blog and this is what it said:

    <<Apple announced last week that they had sold 30 million combined iPhones and iPod touches. Our data suggests that about 75 percent of those are sold in the US and if you make the assumption that two-thirds of the combined iPhones and iPod touches use the mobile Web or applications that gets you to a total of 15 million mobile Web users for Apple in the US. This estimate might be a bit high, but you get the idea.>>

    So, their data "suggests" "about 75 percent", with "the assumption that two-thirds". You get the drift. These are VERY ROUGH estimates. Look at how vague and general the numbers are. The level of significant figures is nil.

    My own estimate is that 50% of those devices are in the US, and probably 80% or more access the mobile web, multiply by 30M and you get 12M. Whatever, it's just an estimate.
  • Where are you getting your 50% in the US estimate?
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