NFTs Skyrocket Reddit's Mobile Revenue to Highest Ever

Ariel Ariel
10/28/22

This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #137 - Mixed Signals. Check out the full article for more insights.


Reddit's mobile app topped the charts for a good chunk of days last week. That demand also gave the red alien its biggest day of revenue ever!

What happened? NFTs!

Reddit recently joined the NFT game, and unlike Twitter's controversial NFT integration, Reddit leaped forward and opened an NFT marketplace.

Reddit calls them digital collectible avatars, but they really are NFTs.

The launch offered a selection of avatars based on Reddit's alien mascot from a curated pool of creators picked by Reddit. All sold out almost instantly!

Downloads rose 45% on Sunday as word spread, bringing in nearly 250K users across the App Store and Google Play, according to our estimates. Demand continued into the week with Monday adding a similar number of new users and Tuesday only dropping by a little bit.

Revenue growth was even more exciting. We estimate that collectible avatars brought Reddit more than $170K of net revenue, meaning after Apple and Google take their fees, on launch day.

Revenue sloped down fairly quickly as the collectibles sold out, but is still high because Reddit isn't just making them available but is also providing the wallets necessary to keep and trade them.

In Total, Reddit's mobile apps were responsible for nearly $500,000 of net revenue, about a fifth of the massive total Reddit earned in and out of the App Store and Google Play.

What's next? Reddit introducing millions of people to NFTs is a big deal. Their choice of not calling them NFTs, a technical term I never really thought could go mainstream, is very clever, and probably has something to do with how successful the launch was. But more than that, it means that just like what Coinbase and Robinhood did for crypto last year, Reddit could do for NFTs now.

Reddit isn't the only marketplace for NFTs in an app, but there aren't that many alternatives. Veve is the biggest such marketplace, and it's trend isn't looking good. Reddit could change that.

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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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