Distimo analyst Gert Jan Spriensma has published the “iPad – Two Years In Review” (March 2012) report.
The report offers an extensive analysis of the Apple App Store for iPad. It dives into the general characteristics of the app store and aims to give developers better insights to base their strategy upon. All data covers the Apple App Store for iPad in the United States in February 2012 unless otherwise noted.
The major findings are:
• iPad users are willing to pay for premium content offered by newspapers and magazines in the Newsstand category. The category launched only six months ago, however more than 70k USD per day is already being made by the top 100 grossing Newsstand applications in the United States. The top grossing applications include: The Daily, NY Times for iPad and The New Yorker Magazine.
• The United States has been eclipsed by China as the largest market for free applications in the world for the first time in the history of the Apple App Store for iPad. During February 2012, the number of daily downloads in the top 300 most popular free applications in China exceeded 1.1M, while the volume among the top 300 most popular free applications on each day in the United States was just below 1M.
• The United States remains the highest grossing country for the Apple App Store for iPad. The top countries that developers should aim for if they have a one-off or in- app strategy aside from the US are: Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.
• Free Weather, Newsstand and Entertainment are the most attractive categories in terms of downloads per applications (we divide the volumes in the top 100 most popular free applications in each category by the number of available free applications in that category).
• Ten percent of all applications in the Apple App Store for iPad already feature in-app purchases compared to 6% in the Apple App Store for iPhone and 2% in Google Play. Seventy-four percent of the applications feature in-app purchases when we look at the top 200 highest grossing applications in the Apple App Store for iPad.
“Two years post-launch, there are over 180K applications available in the Apple App Store for iPad in the United States as of February 2012, which means that the Apple App Store for iPad is growing at roughly the same pace as the Apple App Store for iPhone,” Spriensma reports. “The high level of universal applications reveals that both systems are highly interconnected and enforce each other’s growth.”
“Compared to the Apple App Store for iPhone and the other stores that stock tablet applications, we see that the Apple App Store for iPad is the second largest store, after the Apple App Store for iPhone and Google Play in the United States,” Spriensma reports. “However, only a small proportion of applications in Google Play are optimized for tablets.”
The full report is available for free here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Lava_Head_UK” for the heads up.]
$70,000 per day for all of the top 100? Or for each of the top 100?
It wasn’t clear to me which way that was. If it’s the former, it’s hardly a success at this juncture — not when you consider the millions of dollars spent by consumers per day in other areas of the ecosystem.
$70k per day, or $25.5m per year, spent on magazines and newspapers in the Newsstand.
I have The Daily and the WSJ. I have other free ones but don’t spend much time with them.