Is Anyone Still Reading Real Books?
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Let's Go Viral. Check out the full article for more insights.
A few weeks ago, I looked at the amazing revenue growth of Audible, Amazon's audiobook arm. The app earned $33M of net revenue from the App Store in May, up 1,500% since 2020.
My theory was that more people want to read books but instead are going with the more convenient audio version. I personally don't find audiobooks a replacement for physical books, but I'm obviously in the minority here.
Well, Audible is not the only sign there's more demand for books and less demand for reading all at the same time.
Headway, an app that offers book summaries, has hit a new peak of downloads in June.
According to our App Intelligence, downloads of Headway have been rising consistently over the years, starting at 150K in January of 2020 and ending with 1.4M in June of 2023. That's across the App Store and Google Play, and the distribution is fairly even across the two.
On the App Store, those downloads resulted in $44M of net revenue. That's what Headway gets to keep after Apple takes its share.
There isn't that much competition in this space but with such growth from Headway and Audible I expect to see more apps and platforms trying to take a share of that revenue and that growth.
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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.
