Research on iPhone Application Sales
Tech Crunch recently posted an article by guest author, Alex Ahlund, that’s worth reviewing if you are interested in marketing an iPhone app. The article tries to answer the question most asked by application developers and those considering building an iPhone app–How much money can I make developing apps?
Ahlund conducted a survey to see if he could uncover any information that might shed some light on the answer for this question. He cautions readers not to take the information too literally, “I strongly encourage you to interpret this information only as an overview of the industry.”
Summary
Financial information is provided on 96 different developers with average units sold around 101,000 during an average of 261 days. The average price per application was $5.49 with around 387 sold per day. According to Ahlund, developers have seen a return of 15 times their development costs. Numbers may be skewed with the top 10% of developers being the ones with the best sales.
- 23% of apps sold less than 1000 units
- 56% of apps sold less than or equal to 10,000 units
- 90% sold less than 100,000 units
- 10% remaining sold 127,000- 3,000,000 units
*Note that Apple seems to be a key contributor in the rising sales of iPhone applications
Promotion Is Key
Success lies in being able to market your application so that it gets into the Top 100 or into any mentioned list. Being on a recognized chart creates awareness of the application and continued sales.
Other application marketing techniques include using Twitter, Facebook, forums, blogs, LinkedIn, and other social networks. Developers continue to search for their niche hoping to create an application that will catch on with consumers and incur high amounts of revenue. Ahlund states that success is a pretty basic product management theory, “Developers need to produce a fantastic product with high production values.”
Learn more about W3i entering the iPhone application distribution space. If you have any iPhone application distribution advice, please leave a comment.
To read Ahlund’s full article, click here.
Matt Machacek, Marketing Communications, W3i, LLC
Matt is a senior in the Marketing program at SCSU. Matt is applying his learnings to W3i’s social media outreach.
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