Viral Features = Runaway Success for Epik Photo Editor

Another week and another viral success coming from the photo and video world. This one dethroned Lapse, which managed to stay up high far longer than I expected!

Epik is another AI photo editor with a gimmick. At this point in the game, if you launch a photo editor you must have a gimmick...

This week, the gimmick went viral, propelling the app to the top of the App Store in the US.

Epik, which launched in late December of 2022 when the market for AI photo apps was hot, started rising up the charts in late September.

Over the last two weeks, the app's downloads grew from a daily average of roughly 90K downloads, according to our estimates, to a whopping 600K this Wednesday. What's interesting is that downloads were actually on a slow decline before this sharp u-turn.

If you've been reading for long enough you know that downloads are nice but it's revenue I'm more interested in - did Epik's revenue also grow with this surge?

Absolutely!

Our estimates show that Epik's daily net revenue from the App Store and Google Play ballooned over the last two weeks from a daily average of $15K to $340K on Wednesday. One day!

The lift was more pronounced on the App Store, which is Epik's bigger earner, where the country that's buying the most is not the US but rather South Korea! That also happens to be the case on Google Play.

In total, Epik saw 2.8M new downloads and $1.7M of net revenue in the last two weeks according to our App Intelligence. And that revenue is net which means what the publisher gets to keep after Apple and Google deduct their fees.

You're probably curious about the gimmick - Epik uses AI to give you photos a 90's yearbook look, and people can't stop publishing them to social media, keeping this loop going.

Features are continuing to play a major role on the App Store but the real lesson here is to have a revenue model before your app goes viral, so you can capitalize on it. Epik did that.