Consumers spent $3.8B on mobile entertainment apps in Q1

Entertainment continues to be a big money maker for publishers and app stores alike, and streaming services in particular have seen huge gains since the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020: That’s two take-aways from the newly-released Appfigures Streaming App Report.

The app intelligence company estimates that consumers spent a total of $3.8 billion on entertainment apps for their mobile devices worldwide in Q1. $2.1 billion of that was spent on streaming apps, while another $0.9 billion was spent on short video apps, including TikTok.

Spending on streaming apps was up 383% from Q1 of 2019 – the last comparable quarter before the pandemic. Music streaming app revenue grew 191% during the same time period, while short video app revenue increased by more than 1500% – something Appfigures primarily attributes to people buying coins to reward live streamers on TikTok.

Appfigures numbers are just for mobile payments, and don’t include any revenue derived from customers signing up for a service on their smart TV, or via the web. That’s especially notable in the case of Netflix, which has long sought to avoid paying app store fees. The company phased out the ability to sign up for a paid plan from within its iOS app years ago, and more recently began telling people who still pay for their Netflix subscription via the App Store that they would have to resubscribe via other means.

As a consequence, Netflix generated just $67 million in worldwide App Store gross revenue in Q1 – less than half of what anime streaming service Crunchyroll brought in during the same quarter. That’s despite the fact that Netflix was by far the most-downloaded streaming app on the App Store in Q1.

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Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash