

Top 20% of iPhone devs make 97% of the category revenue - rkalla
http://www.industrygamers.com/news/iphone-devs-in-top-20-make-97-of-total-category-revenue/

======
gte910h
Numbers are interesting, however it's a small, non-representative survey.

This is also just for games, not for other apps.

Also, I'd probably consider this not very useful at all due to a survey defect
that caused strange numbers:

>"One of the things I really wanted data on was a snapshot of what the last 12
months have looked like for game developers on the App Store. However, the
questions I created to gather this data clearly confused respondents. The
intent was that devs enter only revenue from games released within the last 12
months, but many developers provided revenue from the last 12 months for all
their games. This made the data I collected for these questions largely
useless for the purposes I wanted. Further, most people didn’t understand the
instructions and didn’t match the sales revenue to the non-sales revenue in
the two questions, making drawing conclusions there impossible, also. You’ll
see later on that I did manage to get some basic data from it, but couldn’t do
the detailed analysis I had hoped for."

~~~
alperakgun
yes but they are useful, or does anyone else know better stats how much mobile
developers earn? apparently majority of mobile app developers don't earn
enough money to cover their opportunity costs or development costs.

~~~
gte910h
What is a mobile developer? Someone who spends 2 weeknights worth working on
an app? Or a guy who does nothing but that for months, hiring full quality
artists, etc.

I think the issue is many mobile apps aren't fully baked ideas implemented
with the full range of work.

------
rkalla
Additionally:

    
    
      The top 1 percent of iOS game developers earn over a third
      of all that cold, digital revenue.  In contrast, the bottom
      80 percent of iOS devs are splitting a mere 3 percent of 
      all App Store game revenue between one another.
    

The parallel with the current state of wealth in America[1] is interesting. I
feel like there is something, sociologically, to be said there but I have no
idea what it is.

Put another way: "This behavior of the top 1% capturing a huge portion of the
environment to themselves is mirrored in our wealth as well... why does this
pattern re-occur?"

[1] <http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html>

~~~
wbracken
Maybe we should tax the top 1% of game devs to support all other game devs.

~~~
william42
That sort of amortization is how the publishing industry for books works,
IIRC; most books lose money, but the few successful ones make up for it.

~~~
jaredsohn
An even better example would be game publishers.

(But as others have noted, it applies to many industries. Venture capitalists
who invest in startups is another example.)

------
jbooth
I'm actually surprised that this isn't even more pronounced.

Zero marginal production cost, while the long tail is very long. If I'm buying
10 apps, I'm just gonna buy the best 10 and ignore the rest.

------
extension
20% seems way too high to me. I bet if you took a truly random sample, it
would be less than 5%.

But per app or per developer statistics don't really tell you anything except
that the app store is saturated with junk. It's just noise, and there is a
world of mechanisms to filter it out.

The real interesting stat would be revenue per talent-hours or something, but
obviously that is hard to measure objectively.

~~~
rkalla
I wonder if a (rough enough) algorithm might be to filter all apps in the app
store and only analyze apps that have more than 1k downloads then see what the
profit split looks like so you (hopefully) filter out brand new apps that you
don't care about, or junk apps that have been buried algorithmically by Apple
already.

------
Woost
The more interesting question here isn't "what % take in the most money" but
what kind of money can you expect to see? As in, if you write an iphone/ipad
app, what are the maximum returns you could see? It'd also be interesting to
find out how much money has angry birds, or fruit ninja made off just the app
store?(not counting merch sales) Additionally, how does it break down? (in app
purchase/initial purchase, ad revenue, etc)

Overall reports are interesting, but not that useful, since there is a ton of
crap that no one in their right mind would buy...and if you're doing it as a
business you wouldn't produce a product that low quality (we hope)

------
tvon
How does this differ from other software markets?

~~~
z92
My guess is not much. Everyone will want to spend his money on best of the
list, specially when all those are same priced. Thus the top 5% will garner
all revenue while the rest will starve.

------
mikepmalai
Not surprising. The 80-20 (or 90-10) rule (top 10 to 20% of paying customers
account for 80 to 90% of your revenues) applies to all sorts of businesses.

