It's been a while since we looked at the impact of Covid on the apps it hurt the most, but this week I noticed a positive trend.
Event ticket app Ticketmaster, which lost the majority of its downloads as lockdowns hit and events got canceled, has not only gotten back to pre-pandemic downloads, but has also exceeded pre-pandemic highs by as much as 51%.
Let's rewind back a few years.
2019 was a good year for Ticketmaster, the popular app for event tickets. Our estimates show it started 2020 with 756,000 downloads in January. But then the country locked down, and downloads dropped fast—Just 32,000 downloads in April.
After a year of low downloads, and as the U.S. started the first reopening back in early 2021, downloads started growing.
In July of 2021, Ticketmaster added 709,000 new downloads, according to our estimates. And then, in August, it hit a new all-time high with more than a million downloads in one month. The highest they reached pre-pandemic was 938,000.
September added 1.3 million downloads, and October added a massive 1.5 million new downloads. It dropped a little in November, but it's still very high.
People are eager to go back to normal, and they're doing it by app, a trend that's visible across pretty much every aspect of our lives now. The second gold rush for app developers is taking place right now.
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