Spring is officially, here and with it, the hope that things will be going back to normal soon. Judging by the downloads, they slowly are.
This week I saw an interesting trend developing that's somewhat of a follow-up to an app I looked at not too long ago – Airbnb competitor Vrbo.
As travel becomes more comfortable, so does the need for an app to find a place to stay. Outside of hotels, which I'll analyze in a future article, that app used to be Airbnb. Its only similar competitor, Vrbo, used to spike from time to time, but overall it wasn't really a competitor.
That seems to be changing.
Since the beginning of 2022, Vrbo's downloads have been moving up and to the right consistently, breaking the app's own records for single-day downloads over and over.
Its latest high, this Monday (3/21) saw 67K new downloads in a single day, according to our estimates. Vrbo climbed to this number from around a half in January.
We've seen Vrbo peak in the past, and based on the data, I expected it to be more about paid user acquisition than about organic (aka. real) demand. Is that still the case now? Is Vrbo a name enough people know about? What's Airbnb doing wrong?
It's too early to tell, but it's nice to see that there's an alternative.
December saw a curious split: downloads dropped 2% while revenue sat at $1.3B. ChatGPT and TikTok dominated both charts as the mobile industry enters a new maturity phase.
Wall Street bet $2 billion on Polymarket, and downloads surged 1,172% in December. The prediction market banned in 2022 is now where Wall Street looks for signals.