After a long break in blogging, it’s time to come back with a bang! We have just passed the 1 million mark in Soctics downloads recently and I wanted to share some interesting download data with everyone. We have run 2 promotional campaigns with the great guys at AppGratis. Without them, this amazing result wouldn’t have been possible.
We follow a classic App Store model with Soctics: we offer a separate free and a paid version. Our most recent promotion with AppGratis had an amazing effect on our numbers. On the day of the promotion with them, they generated more than 450.000 downloads for us. It’s a mindblowing number! We made the paid version free during the promotion and climbed to the top charts easily in many countries. I’ve collected the best spots we gained on the free charts according to AppAnnie during the promotion day.
| country | downloads | games | overall |
| USA | 109,684 | 4 | 8 |
| Germany | 57,844 | 1 | 1 |
| Brazil | 53,046 | 1 | 1 |
| UK | 45,807 | 3 | 3 |
| Italy | 40,354 | 2 | 3 |
| Spain | 30,576 | 1 | 1 |
| Mexico | 22,643 | 2 | 3 |
| Japan | 14,989 | 19 | 37 |
| Switzerland | 9,304 | 2 | 2 |
The chart above gives some good ideas about comparative market sizes for the free apps. Look at the US market where we barely entered the top 10 overall apps with 110k downloads while about 50k is enough to come out as the overall top app in any other market.
After we switched Soctics back to paid, we managed to climb the paid charts a decent extent given our huge momentum.
| paid | grossing | revenue | ||||
| country | downloads | games | overall | games | overall | |
| USA | 242 | 140 | 310 | 499 | 802 | 601.975 |
| Germany | 115 | 50 | 93 | 118 | 176 | 286.0625 |
| UK | 109 | 79 | 156 | 257 | 381 | 271.1375 |
| Italy | 50 | 46 | 92 | 131 | 212 | 124.375 |
| Brazil | 42 | 25 | 61 | 102 | 162 | 104.475 |
| Switzerland | 25 | 71 | 135 | 189 | 310 | 62.1875 |
| Spain | 20 | 25 | 73 | 118 | 209 | 49.75 |
| Mexico | 19 | 119 | 244 | 398 | 744 | 47.2625 |
| Japan | 11 | 399 | — | — | — | 27.3625 |
Revenue numbers are estimates here but good enough for presentation purposes. The app’s price is $1.99 and the offered IAPs have been bringing about 25% of our total revenue on top of that. Combining this with the download numbers we see close estimates for each country, showing revenue levels required to climb the top grossing charts. There’s a significant difference between the paid and the grossing positions, this is of course just another evidence how strong IAP revenue is today in the App Store economy.
Again, the massive size difference between the US and anything else is trivial based on these numbers. Another surprise was the bad shape the Spanish market seems to be in. Given the fact that we are talking about a country with nearly 50 million people, I really expected a stronger app economy there.
I hope you find these results informative in case you were wondering what it meant to be on the top of the charts in these countries.