

Eat The Rich: The App Economy’s Middle Class Is Booming…And So Is The Poor - zher
http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/01/eat-the-rich-the-app-economys-middle-class-is-booming-and-so-is-the-poor/

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credo
_> >Now look at 2012: the long tail is responsible for 68% of the revenue
generated, with the top 25 at 15% and the top 26-100 at 17%.

>>Bottom line, in the new app economy, there’s no struggle of the 99% here.
The richer are getting richer, but so are the middle class and the poor. And
those last two are gaining fast._

She seems to be defining "long tail" as all apps that are not in the top 100
ranks (i.e. 99.98% of all apps are in the long tail)

Not surprisingly, this definition leads her to the absurd conclusion that the
poor are getting richer.

However, data (see <http://daveaddey.com/?p=893>) suggests that the bottom 80%
of apps probably make just around 3% of app store revenue. If you define poor
as apps in the bottom 50%, I'd say that their daily revenue is either zero or
negligible (and a "middle-class" app in the 55th percentile isn't making much
more)

~~~
hkmurakami
I had similar suspicions as well.

The only graph/data that actually supports "the masses getting richer" by a
_per app_ basis is the last graph which shows revenue per app rank[1].
However, this graph only shows the top 100 apps, which when taking the
universe of 600,000 apps, is only 0.0166% of the universe.

Let's suppose that "middle class" of the app universe would be around the 70th
percentile in the universe [2]. In this case we should look at the year over
year revenue growth and market share growth of the 180,000th ranking app in
the app store. I wonder if we could get numbers on such stats?

[1]
[http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/revenuen...](http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/revenuenormalize_byrank-
resized-600.png?w=640)

[2] Potentially flawed assumption.

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hdivider
I wonder how the revenue distribution will look like for the Windows 8 Store.
Say, a year from now, when things have evened out and an appreciable fraction
of Win7 users have upgraded.

Given that Microsoft will always be promoting Xbox LIVE games more heavily
than any other games, I suspect we'd see a significantly less even
distribution. Still, that might provide incentive for indies to raise the
quality bar as much as possible.

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_delirium
This seems roughly right, but out of curiosity I wonder what the results would
be like per-developer rather than per-app, if those numbers are possible to
come by.

It's plausible that these numbers mean what the article interprets them to
mean, that a long tail of _developers_ is getting a larger share of the
revenue than previously. But, as-is, these graphs don't exclude the alternate
explanation that the "rich" people/companies, so to speak, are still pulling
in most of the revenue, but by switching to a many-small-apps strategy.

