May was the biggest month ever for ChatGPT's mobile app. It reversed the decline in downloads and netted the app its biggest month of revenue, and pushed it across a new milestone.
All thanks to GPT-4o, OpenAI's newest model that's seemingly magical - even without ScarJo.
Let's have a look at both downloads and revenue so you see just how massive May was.
ChatGPT's downloads have been on the decline since November, when OpenAI paused new ChatGPT+ subscriptions, and for months were just dropping. By April, monthly downloads were down 26% when compared to November - ChatGPT's peak.
Our estimates show that May's downloads reversed that trend, growing from 13.9M in April to 18.7M in May - just a bit short of November's, but otherwise the highest since launch.
Reversing a negative trend is good, but making more money is even better.
Our estimates show that ChatGPT's revenue grew by $5.8M in May to $20.3M of net revenue from the App Store and Google Play (but mostly from the App Store). Looking back to its release, ChatGPT only had 4 other months where revenue growth was 40% or higher.
Those new downloads converted and converted well, giving ChatGPT's always-growing revenue a brand new peak and ushering it past the $20M mark for the first time. And that's all net, which means what OpenAI keeps after Apple's and Google's fees.
Most of the money, more than 34%, came from the US with Germany a distant second and the UK and Japan trailing behind Germany. I'm not sure what ChatGPT needs to do to grow internationally, but I'm sure that's coming.
GPT-4o is pretty magical, but I continue to believe the future of generative AI isn't in a textbox but rather in more focused tools that will bring "AI" to the masses.
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