The last couple of years have been a rough year for video editing apps. I'm not talking about the 30% drop in demand or the 140% increase in revenue across the top apps.
instead I'm talking about CapCut, TikTok's video editor that's been quietly gaining a tremendous amount of market share from the incumbents.
If you've been following me for long enough you know I've been keeping an eye out for CapCut for quite a while. Pretty much since its launch.
When it was free I knew they were aiming to gain popularity and when they inevitably started monetizing I knew it was game over for the incumbents - unless they evolve drastically.
And they... didn't really. You can see that by the major shift in market share moving from the top 5 video editing apps and to CapCut.
I grouped Facetune, Splice, Picsart, VSCO, and Lightroom together and compared their revenue to CapCut's over time.
Our App Intelligence shows that in January of 2023, the top 5 apps commanded 96% of the revenue in the 6-app group leaving CapCut just 4%. Fast forward 22 months and things are much different.
As of October 2024, CapCut's share of revenue rose to 42% leaving the incumbents just 58% to fight over. That's more than 10% the share in a market that monthly revenue rise by $38M (net) across all six apps.
it won't take long for CapCut to cross 50%. The road to complete domination will be short. Unless the incumbents do something really drastic.
Will they?
Anthropic bet big on a timely Super Bowl ad that mocks ChatGPT for Claude. The data shows it worked even better than they expected.
What does it look like when AI apps dominate both the download and revenue charts? January 2026 gave us a pretty clear answer.