YouTube's About to Lock In Its App Store Revenue Lead
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #138 - Everyone's Breaking Records!. Check out the full article for more insights.
YouTube has become one of my main channels for acquiring knowledge and entertainment these days. In other words, it's what you'll find me watching when I'm sitting on my couch.
And since I don't like ads I happily pay for YouTube Premium.
Looking at the App Store's Top Grossing chart, I'm not the only one -- YouTube has been one of the most sticky apps on the chart.
Last week they announced they want to cement their place on the chart even more, I mean, YouTube announced the price of Premium is going up, which will make it even easier for the app to keep its top-grossing place forever and ever.
I'd normally look at revenue over time to see just how much it grew, but YouTube has been one of the highest-earning apps for so long that there isn't much interesting to look at. Lots of money. Great.
Instead, I want to look at something else, so I asked Josh, our head of data science and the one who tipped me to the increase, to run through all of our top-grossing ranks data and rank the top apps by the number of days they spent at the top of the chart this year.
The results were a little different than what I expected.
YouTube had the most days as the #1 top-grossing app in the US App Store this year. 235 days so far this year (out of a total of 300 since the year isn't over yet). While high, that wasn't a real surprise.
What is surprising is that not a single app or game managed to get close!
TikTok, YouTube's chief rival, managed to snag 17 days in the lead. A tiny fraction when compared to the red monster. ESPN, which swings a lot when it comes to revenue, spent just 12 days in the top spot.
Even if you add up the rest you won't get anywhere near YouTube's total. And now that the price is going up, expect those others to have even less of a chance.
FYI - Did you know I have a YouTube channel where I talk about apps? If you prefer watching over reading head there and subscribe.
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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.
