Google Halts Payments in Russia
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #104 - This One's Going to Hurt!. Check out the full article for more insights.
Google announced early Thursday that effective immediately, Google Play's billing system is on pause in Russia. This comes days after Apple halted all Apple Search Ad campaigns.
This means a lot of developers are going to have a rough weekend, and developers who monetize with subscriptions will have it even worse.
How much worse?
I looked at our app intelligence for the top 200 apps and games in Russia over time to get an idea, and here is the last (almost) year in net revenue estimates:
$30,000,000 worse! And that's for the top apps and games, not even everyone.
Based on our estimates from the last few months, if this pause continues for one whole month, top developers will lose at least $30M of net revenue from Google Play for every month of thise pause. That includes revenue from paid app downloads, the few that still exist, in-app purchases, and recurring subscriptions.
I foresee subscriptions taking a serious hit and also the longest to recover unless Google does something special with those cancelled subscriptions.
This number felt serious enough that I was curious how it compared to other countries, so I added up those 11 months for all countries we provide estimates on (which includes all major ones), and here's how Russia ranks:
According to our estimates, Russia is 9th in terms of net revenue for the top 200 apps and games for the 11 month period, with $308M in net revenue from Google Play. Although 9th, Russia's revenue is pretty far off when compared to the top top countries.
Russia's top app and game revenue is roughly 23% that of South Korea (#3), 11% of Japan (#2), and only 5% of the US (#1).
So, while this will have an impact on many developers, it's likely to not be that big.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
