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iPhone App Sales Numbers Continue to Impress

Wednesday August 13, 2008 11:23 am PDT by Arnold Kim
Apple released the first month's sales reports to iPhone and iPod Touch developers earlier this week. These numbers represent the cumulative sales from the iTunes App Store launch on July 11th for the month of July. While Apple had started providing daily download stats for developers, the stats for the lucrative first couple of weeks had been a mystery.

iPhone developer Tap Tap Tap has published their first month's (July 11-Aug 2) sales numbers for their applications: Where To? [$2.99, App Store] and Tipulator [$0.99, App Store].

The bulk of their revenue came from Where To, a $2.99 application that uses GPS that helps "you find points of interest around you." This one application brought in $50,597.40 in net revenue to the developer after Apple's 30% cut. While much has been said about the success of Sega's Super Monkey Ball and other high profile applications, Where To's numbers reveal the success of an app that has held a popularity ranking in the 50-70s amongst paid apps (ranked in 300s amongst all apps).

Meanwhile, MintApps is a small iPhone developer who provides another point of data with sales from their nutritional facts application called Mint Nutrition [$4.99, App Store]. Mint Nutrition has generated over $1,900 of net revenue after becoming first available on July 21st. The $1900 in sales covers a 12 day period between July 21st through August 2nd. The app's popularity currently ranks only in the 800s amongst all apps and has not broken into the top 100 paid apps. Yet this still represents an average sales of 45 apps/day or $158/day.

Tap Tap Tap's John Casasanta notes that the relative popularity rank influences sales significantly:

We were teetering around the 50th rank for Where To but then slipped under it. It seems that once you drop past that, youre on a free-fall since the App Store on the iPhone only shows 50 in its top list, compared to 100 in iTunes on the computer.


Ranking stats obtained from Medialets

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