Remini Rides the AI Cartoon Wave and the Downloads Double, But Something's Missing

Last week I looked at how ChatGPT's new image generation sparked demand for cartoon generators and how downloads exploded for the apps that had the best App Store Optimization.

Well, both apps I looked at last week are still trending high! Downloads dropped a bit but are still significantly higher than before. Even revenue increased!

That's why I wasn't surprised when I saw Remini's downloads doubled. But I was curious to see if its organic or not. First, let's look at the downloads:

According to our App Intelligence, Remini's downloads doubled last week and stayed high for the entire week. The trend started sloping down this week, but downloads are still much higher than the average.

Between 3/29 and 4/8, the day downloads started surging, and by the writing of this insight, Remini got 7.3M estimated downloads. That's 3.6M downloads more than the same period earlier in March.

Brazil, the US, India, Indonesia, and Turkey saw the biggest increases in absolute terms. Together, these five countries were responsible for 4M downloads since downloads doubled, and of those 1.6M were above the expected average.

In four of the five countries, the increase marked a several-hundred percent rise. The odd one out if India, which gets Remini the vast majority of downloads so an increase of 292K downloads isn't a big deal.

But, did they convert?

Not as much as I'd expected. According to our estimates, Remini's revenue rose by less than one percent, a small enough number that could be the result of normal market fluctuation and nothing else.

Cases of many new downloads but little to no new revenue tend to mean the push wasn't organic, like what we saw with ToonApp and ToonMe last week but rather supported by ads, and that's what I think happened here.

A look at our Apple Search Ads Intelligence shows that in the last week, Remini has spent on a variety of keywords that include "ghibli" in them. So much that Remini had the highest share of impressions across all competitors in the US.

I'd still expect some of those downloads to convert, so this isn't great, but it's another good example of how important organic optimization is.