Onavo: where is the money?

Onavo, a company that tracks the usage of mobile applications, decided to find out what is more important for earning – a loyal, but extremely narrow audience or the love of the masses.

American Onavo is noticeably different from companies like Flurry. The fact is that it is focused on users, not developers. The Extend app released by Onavo, for example, helps customers track their mobile spending.

So, Onavo decided to compare box office hits with each other not by profit, but by the quality of their audiences. To do this, the company’s analysts took the top 25 box office American games of last November, received information about how many iPhone users in the United States play them on a monthly basis, the average level of engagement, and also calculated the relative amount of user costs.   

As a result, it turned out that the largest market shares in terms of audience are not for the leaders of the top box office applications, but for Angry Birds Star Wars (3.9%), Subway Surfers (3.5%) and Bike Race Free (3.4%). In turn, higher-grossing projects, like Legend of the Cyrptids and Rage of Bahamut, have much smaller audiences. But thanks to the loyalty of a small number of players, they receive super profits. 

In principle, it was no secret to anyone. Another thing is that, for example, we often encounter the fact that young developers dream of capturing the market by releasing something very simple, suitable for everyone. But, it seems to us, a much more productive way in the current conditions is to work for a certain, perhaps very narrow niche.