WP7 App Money
Number cruncher Distimo assembled some intriguing graphs comparing consumer activity on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace versus the Windows Marketplace for Mobile (per capita). The highlights include that games for WP7 are dominating both in popularity among its own market’s other categories and over WinMo as well. The whole top ten paid apps are made up of games on WP7.
Overall apps are cheaper on WP7’s market versus WinMo’s though on par with Android and Apple, price wise – according to this Distimo outfit which in this case contradicts earlier reports. Currently 57% of the top 100 most popular WP7 apps are less than $2 versus 37% of WinMo, and the average price of all paid WP7 apps are less than a third as cheap as WinMo’s which are more expensive than iPhone’s apps. Versus all other major app markets WP7 has the largest portion of paid apps priced below $2 and its paid apps overall are the cheapest.
Microsoft claims there are about 3,000 apps in WP7’s Marketplace and counting versus WinMo’s 1,350. That’s a good sign as WinMo’s had a year’s head start on WP7. And as with WinMo, six of the top ten apps (popularity) were produced by Microsoft. So those are getting-acquainted prices, and though I doubt there will be a lot of Black Friday shoppers making their mobile acquisition decisions based on app market pricing distribution, at least WP7 users may get into the habit of breaking the seal by becoming willing to pay for software after not regretting their first purchase, something that may eventually lure more developers.
If this guy’s right, that may be working already along with other factors with WP7 seeing an 80% increase in the number of registered developers since September, currently at 15,000. If you want to see some of this data plotted out head to Distimo or if you don’t like registering for things like this hit up Techcrunch.
I never said this was going to be an exciting article.
Doug Simmons
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Doug Simmons
Biographical info.. hmm. I have a history of not being able to strike the balance between what is "safe" to put into these forms and what is, in my mind at least, funny. Can't do it.
I presume when they crunched the numbers they dealt with the fact that in WP you have one app that is both a trial mode and a paid app. In Apple world that would be two apps – trh trial app and the paid app so one needs to be discounted.
Putting that aside, the WP Marketplace is on a different level than the WM one in all respects. MS wants devs to get paid in WP’s Marketplace. Google wants devs to have free apps but earn ad revenue. Apple is dominating the apps market and doesn’t care any longer.
Not only are the top 10 paid apps games, they are all XBox Games, ranging in price from $2.99 to $6.99 (2 of the top 4), averaging $4.99. A good indicator that users have no problem shelling out bucks for the things they want. It also gives a peek at the demographic being attracted to WP7, at least this early in the game. Add in Zune Pass (got mine last night) for music/video download and Exchange/Sharepoint/Office for business users, and WP7 turns into a something for everyone kind of platform. The Productivity, Tools and Business app categories are pretty thin (especially Business) right now, but I expect that they will get populated as more of the top developers step up to the plate.
Of the 64 apps (not including 19 games) I currently have installed, 19 are paid apps (30%) ranging from $0.99 to $4.99, with an average price of $1.90. Of the 19 games (only 2 in the top 10) , 10 are paid (53%), again ranging from $0.99 to $4.99, with an average of $2.72. So no doubt, games are where the money is. And note that I am far from fitting into the typical gamer demographic. So Microsoft can be expected to attract reasonable game revenue from all users and considerably higher revenue from gamers. As this was a sampling of one user, the margin of error is +/- 1. Well done Microsoft. Let’s see how Apple tops that.