Another Overnight Sensation Comes and Goes - The Numbers Behind MD Vinyl
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #125 - Another Overnight Success. Check out the full article for more insights.
A new(ish) app jumped to the top of the App Store last week and in a true "overnight success" fashion, dropped far and fast within just a few days...
In case you haven't seen it, I'm talking about MD Vinyl, an app that adds a widget to your iPhone with a spinning record while you listen to your music.
Let's have a look at what being an "overnight success" this summer means in terms of downloads and revenue.
MD Vinyl claimed the #1 spot in the US App Store between Tuesday and Saturday last week, but it didn't magically appear there. Instead, it slowly traveled up the top chart for a few days. It had a similar trend while going down.
Before this crazy week started, the five-month-old app was getting around a thousand downloads a day, according to our estimates. Considering what it does, that's a bit higher than I'd expect.
It then started climbing the charts, peaking at 241 thousand downloads last Friday. That's massive! Our estimates put the total for the last 30 days at a million downloads worldwide, a little over half of which came from the US.
But easy come, easy go... By Tuesday, MD Vinyl was no longer the top app. It actually disappeared completely from the Top Apps list in the US. According to our estimates, on Tuesday, MD Vinyl saw around 18 thousand downloads, a fraction of last Friday.
Here's the kicker - I haven't been able to figure out what caused MD Vinyl to pop. I couldn't find a clever TikTok campaign or even an accidental one. And I searched! If you have a clue, please let me know.
But more importantly, regardless of how, what this shows us is that is is possible to rise up the charts, even in 2022.
Oh, I also promised revenue, which MD Vinyl earns using an in-app purchase (not a subscription) that unlocks unlimited songs. Oh, I forgot to mention, even though the songs come from Apple Music or Spotify, MD Vinyl won't spin them unless you pay.
So, does popular mean money? Not in this case. According to our estimates, MD Vinyl earned just $44 thousand in net revenue in the last 30 days. At a one-time cost of $2.99 that nets out to roughly 21 thousand purchases, which, if you continue doing math on, suggests 2.1% of downloads turned into money. And it's not a subscription, so that's pretty low.
So more more importantly, make sure your app has a business model that makes sense.
Also, check the grammar of your paywall. MD Vinyl didn't, and I can't unsee it.
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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.
