If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video should be worth at least a thousand pictures, or a million words (depending on your FPS). When it comes to making your app more attractive a video is a great way to show value off quickly and get the download.
Videos aren't nearly as easy to produce which really makes me ask - do app makers actually use them?
I used Explorer to quickly find all the apps and games that have a marketing video and the numbers surprised me a little.
To get an idea of how popular videos are, I looked at the number of apps that have a video right now, broken down by store, category, and popularity.
App Store vs. Google Play
432K apps and games have a video. I watched quite a few and it's really interesting to see how different companies present their apps.
Most of those videos, 362K, belong to apps and games on Google Play. Apple is known for being a lot more strict about preview videos making them more of a challenge to produce so they market the app well because just app UI just isn't enough in my opinion.
This is an impressive number of videos -- more than I expected to see.
But...
When we put these figures in the context of the entire store, things change. 4% of apps in the App Store and 10% of apps on Google Play have a video. And even though I said apps I meant apps + games.
That's not a ton, even on Google Play where it's easier.
Games, Games, Games.
Another way to look at the popularity of videos is by category, and finally, games are at the top of the pile. On the App Store and on Google Play!
Games accounted for 38% of the combined total. Drilling in by store, 45% of all apps with a video were games while on Google Play that number is a tad lower, at 36%.
Education came in at a distant second, followed by utilities, Business, and Music.
Based on these numbers I'd say that if you have a game, a video is most likely expected. That's not as true for apps, so if you're making an app and want to stand out you should consider it, but it's not an absolute must.
Not Just the Popular Kids
And lastly, an obvious question -- are videos reserved for the most popular apps?
I used total ratings as a gauge for the popularity of an app and summed up all apps and games with a video into groups.
Looking at the distribution, it's very obvious the answer is no. Apps across the board have videos. Apps with fewer than 1,000 ratings accounted for 75% of the total. On the other end of the extreme were apps with more than a million ratings. Those accounted for less than half of a percent.
"Videos are only for popular apps" isn't a good excuse.
Should you experiment with a video for your app? Probably. For your game? Absolutely.
What's your experience with videos?
I'm going to start this in reverse because the thing we've been waiting to happen has finally happened. If you've been f...
October is behind us so we crunched the numbers and ranked the most downloaded mobile apps in the world. While I don't h...