The Highest-Earning Apps This Christmas

I've been waiting for this chart for quite a few months, trying to theorize who would win and by how much. Not to toot my own horn, but I got pretty close!

What I have for you here is a ranking of the highest-earning apps on Christmas day in 2021 in the US. I have one for the App Store, one for Google Play, and another combined. If you've been following the newsletter for a while, this should look very familiar.

Let's start with the obvious - streamers. YouTube, not a traditional streamer but a definite contender, was the highest-earning app on Christmas day, bringing in $3M in net revenue in the US, according to our estimates. Short a few thousands was HBO Max, which was my pick for the winner. Tinder, TikTok, and Disney+ rounded out the top 5.

We estimate that together, the top 10 highest-earning apps brought in $14M in net revenue in the US on Christmas day.

I can talk about the top 5 for far too long, but if you've been reading for a while, you probably know what I'm going to say. The battle between HBO Max and Disney+ seems to have a somewhat clear winner, but it's the battle between TikTok and YouTube that I'm keeping an eye on. I give TikTok a few more months to take over.

Instead of going through the rest, which you can do at your leisure, I'll point out a few apps I didn't really expect to see:

1. Twitch, the game streaming service that should have been here, almost lost its chances after revenue got cut in half in November following a hack and a leak. It would have been much higher and probably also appear in the combined list, but that didn't happen. Instead, it earned the #5 spot on Google Play.
2. VeVe, an NFT marketplace that became popular fairly recently after partnering with Disney. It didn't make the combined list, but it earned the #7 position on Google Play
3. Discord, the chat for gamers, is a slight surprise, earning the 10th spot on the App Store. Discord is a strong earner and had a good Christmas last year, but I figured that revenue would be eclipsed by streamers.
4. BIGO, a streamer I normally don't think about but should, snuck in at the 10th spot in the combined list. Every time I see BIGO's revenue, I am surprised by how much you don't hear about it. I'll change that in 2022.