Store Intelligence, one of Sensor Tower’s flagship products, shows download and revenue estimates, which can reveal the performance of a user acquisition campaign or show up and coming apps newly released in the market. With the new chart type called RPD, which stands for revenue per download, you can track revenue moving from one billing platform to another

Since the Apple App Store and Google Play Store implemented the change in how they tax subscription apps, you can see certain subscription apps like Spotify start to migrate away from the app store payments and turn towards direct billing through the web. This document will show you an example of how the RPD chart can help with seeing the effects of market trends.

Discover How Subscription Apps Change Revenue Streams

Before, the app stores applied a 30% fee on all apps in both app stores. However, with time, the companies that owned subscription apps saw a decrease in revenue due to this tax on both stores. To accommodate, the Apple App Store agreed to lower the tax from 30% to 15% if a user was on a subscription for at least one year. Even though this helped the revenue numbers for subscription-based apps, you can see the trend of subscription apps start to steer away from mobile payments and go toward more web-based billing. Below, I’ll show you how this trend can be seen with the RPD chart.

To see an example of the above trend, please follow the below steps:

1. Go to any tab in App Analysis under Store Intelligence

2. For the Chart Type on the right, click on RPD

3. Enter the names of the apps you would like to compare RPD for. For the example below, I’ll use Netflix and Spotify. Spotify stopped allowing new subscribers to sign up using Apple payments in 2016. As a result, you can see that Spotify’s RPD starts to decrease around April 2017.
    

4. Using this chart, you can track this trend and see how other subscription-based apps might follow suit in the future.

Although you can use the RPD chart for competitive analysis, there are numerous use cases for this feature. The above is just one market trend example that you can track through the new RPD feature. More use cases like this can be seen through our help page. Sensor Tower’s platform provides data on the mobile ecosystem, but you can draw conclusions and figure out the reasons why the data looks the way it is based on current industry knowledge.

Note: The Store Intelligence product is only available to Enterprise accounts. Please contact your Strategy Consultant or Customer Success Manager to see if your account has access.

For more information or if you have any questions, please email support@sensortower.com