This Week in Apps - It's All a Streaming Game
This Week in Apps is a short, no-fluff, round-up of interesting things that happened in the mobile industry. Here are our top highlights.
U.S. Revenue Index (30 Day)
Insights
1. The World Cup is Peak Streaming for Sports! Where are They watching?
The World Cup kicked off last weekend to lots of controversy and a weird schedule, but none of that stopped many from watching the games. And I should say streaming.
You can watch the games through a few apps, but three have risen over the last week as the most popular options for streaming games.
The three include Peacock, FOX Sports, and Telemundo. Between Sunday and Tuesday, the trio saw 2.1 million new downloads, according to our estimates.
Of the three, Peacock's downloads rose the most, adding 315K new users on Tuesday. Telemundo came in second, adding 297K new downloads on Tuesday. FOX Sports added 278K downloads on Tuesday.
FYI - All of these trends are available through our App intelligence, which you can get for 50% off during Black Friday. The details →
Even though Peacock added the most new users, it was Telemundo who grew the most. On an average day, Telemundo adds a few hundred downloads. Yes, just a few hundred downloads. That's an increase of 98,900%. Peacock's growth, compared to its daily average, calculates to 420%.
FOX grew 1,223% because its daily average is much higher than Telemundo's.
I've been watching the World Cup for many many (many) years, and love that it's so easy to stream the games with such ease. I remember having to mess around with antennas to watch the World Cup growing up. A lot has changed since...
Let's see how far the US will go. I have a sneaking suspicion the downloads will end when the run ends.
2. Move Aside Mastodon, there's a New Twitter Replacer in Town
Leaving Twitter is all the rage these days. My entire timeline is full of people saying goodbye to the platform they're obviously not leaving.
Mastodon was where everyone wanted to go at first, but a few weeks into it, many who tried it realized it isn't the solution. I talked about that in Issue #138.
Where will they all go if not Mastodon? Right now, it looks like many are trying out Hive, which feels like a mix of Quora and MySpace, and is fairly buggy, according to its reviews.
Hive came out at the end of 2019. Initially, it was only available from the App Store and was recently released for Android on Google Play.
Before it caught the attention of Twitter abandoners, Hive saw just a handful of downloads. Not enough to be worth mentioning. If I had to guess, I'd say it's because of its mishmash of features, but that's not relevant as much because things changed very abruptly over the last few days.
According to our estimates, downloads of Hive started rising last Friday, hitting 66K downloads in a single day! They dipped over the weekend and then ballooned to 294K on Monday, followed by a similar number on Tuesday.
Hive was downloaded 735K times since it started getting traction last week. That's incredible, considering it wasn't at all popular before. Most of the downloads, 56%, came from the US. No other country had more than an 8% share of downloads, but the downloads came from many countries.
While high, this isn't a Twitter killer if you ask me. A combination of strange features, a focus on music, and Twitter not actually dying, all mean Hive is probably not going to replace Twitter any time soon. But, Hive has a revenue model for its app. That's nice.
3. Where's Everyone Shopping? The Most Popular Shopping Apps this Holiday Season
The holiday shopping season kickstarted very early this year. What used to start with Black Friday at the end of November started about a month early with Amazon's second Prime Day. Although Prime Day wasn't a big hit, many other apps have started their deals season around that time and some are pushing hard with ads.
I rounded up the numbers and ranked the most downloaded shopping apps in the US since the beginning of November*, and the top result is not Amazon.
Temu, a new entrant into the shopping race I looked at in Issue #139, was the most downloaded shopping app in the US in November*. Our App Intelligence shows Temu was downloaded by 6 million users, a hefty haul for an app that launched in September. Its unique value is super low prices on lots of things, but its real secret for growth is... Apple Search Ads, which Temu relies on heavily.
Amazon was not the second most downloaded shopping app in the US in November! That spot went to rival Walmart, which pushed its Black Friday campaign very hard and clearly did it right. It added 3 million users in the US in November.
Amazon came in 3rd, adding 2 million downloads (after rounding) from the US in November*, according to our estimates. The App Store was responsible for most of those downloads, as to be expected.
SHEIN and Bath & Body Works round out the top 5. Both have seen pretty stable downloads and both saw roughly the same number of downloads even though one has been around for a while and the other is fairly new.
Together, the top 10 most downloaded shopping apps made their way into 21 million devices since the beginning of November* in the US. Much like last year, the shopping season started fairly early, and we can see that by the number of downloads.
Several years ago I spoke with a founder who was passionately convinced that e-commerce will stay on the web and never move in-app. 21 million new downloads in a month tell a different story.
* November, in this article, refers to Nov. 1st to Nov. 22nd.
Grow Smarter, with Data.
Affordable tools for ASO, Competitive Intelligence, and Analytics.
4. Walmart's Big Black Friday Push Left Amazon Behind
Walmart and Amazon were both ready for battle this holiday shopping season. Amazon thought it'd beat everyone with its second Prime Day event of the year. That didn't exactly work, and while it was planning, Walmart had similar plans. It just started a bit later.
We're seeing the results of Walmart's strategy in this month's downloads -- and they're good!
So far in November, Walmart is beating Amazon in downloads on both the App Store and Google Play. Looking at how close the numbers are though, I suspect Walmart is following Amazon's downloads and pushing with ads and promotions as much as needed to beat them.
The trends are interesting! Walmart kicked off November with a big spike, getting ahead of Amazon for the first time in a long time. The trend sloped down right after for a bit, but peaked again a few days later and stayed above since.
In more absolute terms, Amazon added 2.5 million new users in the US between the App Store and Google Play while Walmart added 2.6 million. A small enough difference that's clearly the result of paid UA (aka User Acquisition, aka ads). Considering how much shopping will go through apps this holiday season, this is a good strategy.
For Amazon, these numbers are fairly standard. For Walmart, however, these numbers are much higher than the average. Roughly three times the average.
I expect to see Walmart's downloads continue to grow as it takes on new entrant Temu, which is currently in the lead.
5. Disenchanted is Disney's Biggest Streaming Hit of the Year!
Disney's Enchanted was a huge success back in 2007, so long ago it was time for a sequel. That happened! Disenchanted, the sequel, was released last week and even though I didn't like it, looking at Disney+'s revenue, on release day, it was a huge success.
In fact, it was the second-highest day of revenue in all of 2022, second to new year's day, which is always big.
This year, Disney+ averaged $1.9M of net revenue every day. Net meaning what Disney gets to keep after Apple and Google take their fees. The real numbers have a wide range, dipping as low as $1.4M and rising as high as $2.8M. There aren't many 2.8 days though.
Last Saturday, the day Disenchanted came out, revenue rose to $3.2M, according to our estimates. They didn't immediately drop, either. They remained high during the weekend and dropped to $2.9M by Tuesday, still higher than the last peak.
That's great for Disney+ which hasn't had an amazing year of growth in 2022 and recently had a CEO swap. And even though the movie wasn't as good as its predecessor -- according to me + Rotten Tomatoes, which gets it right some of the time -- it's really not relevant here.
What's relevant is the popularity of the Enchanted name, and now that we're entering a different stage of the streaming race, IP will play a major role in getting subscribers and also retaining them. HBO Max does a great job with that and Disney+ can too.
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.
Are you a Journalist? You can get access to our app and market intelligence for free through the Appfigures for Journalists program. Contact us for more details.
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.
