Scooter rental apps peak in August. That's been the case every year since electric scooters became a serious mode of transportation a few years ago.
With August (kind of) ahead, I wanted to look at 2022's numbers to see if we should be expecting a spectacular year for scooters, or whether the craze is all done and micro-mobility, as scooters tend to be called, is dead.
Before I get into the numbers, what do you think?
2022 is going to be big!
I've charted the downloads of Bird and Lime in the US, the two most popular options and also most available. And I focused on the US because it's where most of the demand is coming from + because the two aren't all available in the same countries, and I wanted to keep this and apples to apples comparison.
With the exception of April of 2020, aka covid, downloads have been consistently rising on pretty much an annual cycle, which means growing more in the summer and less in winter. Which makes sense, considering these aren't really the best when it's cold and raining but are super fun when it's nice and sunny.
Back to downloads. According to our estimates, Bird and Lime saw 250K new downloads in July of 2020, each. That nearly doubled to 440K in July of 2020 for Bird and a tiny bit less for Lime.
Bird welcomed 615K new users from the US in July of 2022, and Lime saw 540K, according to our estimates.
If you do the math quickly, August should add close to three-quarters of a million new users for BIrd and a bit less for Lime, and that's only in the US. So yes, I predict August 2022 will be the biggest month of downloads for these two.
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.