A Record-Breaking October for ChatGPT
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Betting Big. Check out the full article for more insights.
Over the past two years, ChatGPT has become more than just a helpful AI companion - it's turned into a revenue powerhouse. Just in time for OpenAI's transition into a for-profit organization, ChatGPT capped its biggest month of revenue ever.
Here are the numbers, along with a sneak preview of our upcoming State of AI industry report, highlighting just how big the AI market has become - thanks largely to ChatGPT.
ChatGPT ended October with the most downloads in a single month and the most revenue in a single month. Completely reversing the trend most apps are experiencing, where downloads are down and revenue might be up.
According to our App Intelligence, the app ended October with 32M new downloads from the App Store and Google Play - beating its previous all-time high by 33%. That all time-high was the prior month, where downloads crossed 20M for the first time and ended up with 24M downloads for the month.
Like most games, ChatGPT's new downloads largely came from Google Play which outpaced the App Store two to one in October. The US, India, and Brazil lead the charge and were responsible for delivering 28% of the new downloads - again a different figure than for many other apps.
But like most apps, ChatGPT's massive revenue haul came directly from the App Store, dominated by the US.
Our estimates show ChatGPT brought in $48M of net revenue from the App Store and Google Play in October. And that's net which means what Sam gets to keep to feed those hungry GPUs after giving Apple and Google their fees.
Month over month revenue rose 30%, according to our estimates. Not the most for ChatGPT, but the most at this scale.
Powering an Entire Industry
I hinted before at a bigger report to come soon, an that is indeed the case! The team has been hard at work collecting, analyzing, and compiling a report on the entire AI app market. We put a lot of effort into understanding the micro categories that make up the AI category and have mapped out not only where things have been but also where they're going and where the opportunities are.
Yes, there are still opportunities in AI.
This report is coming very soon, so keep an eye on your inbox. But here's why I'm bringing it up - Our analysis shows that consumers spent nearly $1.3B in the top 1K mobile AI apps since 2023. Of that, 47% came from general assistants, most powered by ChatGPT.
You might think general assistants, or thin wrappers as some would call them, is a small/shrinking category. If you do you'd be very wrong because it's the second largest category by number of apps and largest by revenue.
Another interesting tidbit is that about 25% of all consumer spending in the top 1K mobile AI apps was generated by (drumroll...) ChatGPT!
This is a weird case of OpenAI having its cake and eating it too all at once. While I'm not sure how long this will go on for I do know there are lots of opportunities in AI right now. Our report will give you more insight into where those are.
App Intelligence for Everyone!
The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.
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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.
