GPT-4o Reversed the Trend for OpenAI and Delivered Its Biggest Month of Revenue
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Trend Busting. Check out the full article for more insights.
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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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.
