Eat The Rich: The App Economy’s Middle Class Is Booming…And So Is The Poor
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
>>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)
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...
[2] Potentially flawed assumption.
These are things like your bank's app, a Salesforce app, etc. I wonder how many those would subtract from the "bottom".
Regardless, I agree with your overall assessment of her data.
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.
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.