Mobile app revenue is off the charts! According to a recent study performed by Asymco, revenue for mobile apps is bigger than all of the combined domestic (US) box office of Hollywood movie studios. How? Well, these figures seem to be incredibly indicative of the world we live in. Less and less people are going to the movies, preferring to wait or torrent them instead. Meanwhile, the mobile app industry continues to grow exponentially.
Hollywood is now focusing on the international market in an effort to increase release profits. Now, summer blockbusters can take in as much as 70% of their worldwide total from international releases. There’s a reason Transformers 4 took place in and was focused on China. The recent box office records we’ve seen are largely because of the international markets.
Last year Apple paid out $10 billion to developers and Google paid out $3 billion. Apps on iOS employ 627,000 jobs in the US versus 374,000 in Hollywood. Please take a moment to re-read those two sentences.
To be fair, these data points don’t give a full picture of the wider movie industry and don’t account for movie theaters, video sales, or merchandise. Then again, these are only numbers for Apple and don’t even get into money made off of apps that don’t go through Apple like advertising, subscriptions and merchandise. Clash of Clans, the gaming app, has daily revenue hovering around $1.6 million! Obviously, big films make much more than that in an opening weekend but we’re talking about the industry as a whole. Apps are usable by everyone everyday, unlike films that are rarely seen more than once in theaters and only make six to eight week long runs in theaters.
Now is the time to get into the mobile industry, as it does not appear that this freight train has any indication of slowing down.
