Ask HN: What percent of iPhone apps make less than $100?

6 points by ektimo 17y ago ↗ HN

I'd like to know what percent of iPhone apps make less than $100 and what percent make less than $10,000.

This site (http://www.moveyourweb.net/blog/guess-sales-figures-for-any-iphone-application/) estimates that an app will get between 200 to 550 times as many sales as reviews, but that wouldn't apply for a small number of reviews that could just be friends. But if you had a way to fairly sample apps, you could estimate how many make over $10,000. For 99 cent apps, 1 additional review would correspond very roughly to 350 * 0.99 * 0.7 = $243 so if you subtract 20 for friends it would mean the ones getting over 60 reviews are making over $10,000. Does that sound in the ballpark?

If you could estimate the revenue from all the high selling apps, you could see what is left over for the rest but I don't know if that would be possible.

So... anyone willing to make some SWAGs?

4 comments

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ujjwalg 17y ago ↗

I have more than 20 apps on the appstore. None of my apps have more than 20 reviews, so I cannot judge these numbers. This might be true for 99 cents app, but I am not sure how directly correlated will this be for >$4.99 apps.

ektimo 17y ago ↗

Are you getting more than 550 sales per review or less than 200 (for your total number of reviews)?

ujjwalg 17y ago ↗

I checked for a few we are selling for 99 cents.. and the numbers are close to 400

I checked a couple for $4.99 and the numbers are below 200 except a couple whose numbers are close to 300

so the theory seems to be working as long as you are don't count your own or your friend reviews.

mixmax 17y ago ↗

I have a hunch that the income distribution of Iphone apps follows a powerlaw. Things like this tends to do so (karmapoints and users of HN, for example, follows a powerlaw)

So if you can get data for a few apps, which should be possible, you can estimate the K-coefficient, and voila you can make a calculated estimate as to exactly how big a percentage of apps make less tham $10,000. And lots more too :-)