TikTok's Takes Aim at a Very Lucrative Industry

Ariel Ariel
4/15/22

This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #109 - Off to a Weird Start.... Check out the full article for more insights.


I've been talking about CapCut quite a bit. And with reason. CapCut is a newcomer into the lucrative video editor space.

The video editor space has seen significant year-over-year revenue growth and in a way, is the direct result of CapCut's parent, TikTok's success.

So it'd make sense TikTok would want to dominate it. But what would that mean for the 5,000+ apps in this space?

Well, the easy answer is quite a lot of money!

To get an idea of how big the video editor market is, I added up revenue estimates for all apps that have the term "video editor" in their name across the App Store and Google Play, which added up to a little over 5,000 apps.

Looking at the revenue over time, one thing is very obvious – it's growing, and fast!

Gross revenue, which our estimates put at around $430M in 2020, grew by more than 30% to $563M in 2021. For more context, the revenue in January 2020 was $29M. And in December of 2021, it was $58M, according to our estimates.

It gets a bit more complicated when you dig into the distribution, where you see that about half of that revenue comes from the very top 5-6 apps.

Clearly, CapCut can really do some damage there, and when I analyze 2022, later in the year, I'm sure we'll be able to see it.

CapCut has the users (through TikTok) and is free, which is an unparalleled advantage. But... does it have the features?

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The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.

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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.


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