The New AI Cartoon Trend Caused a Big Spike in Downloads for These Apps
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Cartoon Money?. Check out the full article for more insights.
The internet was buzzing with cartooned photos this week after OpenAI released an update to ChatGPT's image generation capabilities. There are lots of clever ways to leverage these new capabilities, but for some reason a lot of users decided to cartoon themselves and share it online.
The trend got so big that a bunch of developers bet on it by shipping apps for that very quickly!
And the downloads came. Not for those new apps but rather for two incumbents because cartooning photos is nothing new on the App Store and Google Play.
I looked at every app that turns photos into cartoons using Explorer. There were more than I expected, and not new ones either. Although ChatGPT made this hot, the technology has been around for a while. In fact, OpenAI's image generation isn't available via API so it can't be easily wrapped into an app. Developers who jumped on this opportunity used something else.
But of the many apps I looked at, only two saw a noticeable increase in downloads: ToonApp and ToonMe.
Can you guess why?
The two are the top results (or top 5) for every keyword combination that includes "cartoon" in this context. They were ready for this wave even though both were released more than four years ago (2020 and 2021).
According to our App Intelligence, ToonApp's downloads rose 59% and ToonMe's by a whopping 221% on Friday, compared to an average day.
In more absolute terms, all the hype resulted in 61K and 184K additional downloads for the apps, respectively, between Wednesday and Friday. Additional means downloads above the daily average.
Money, please?
Unlike the surge in downloads, revenue for both remains fairly similar to its daily average. That's surprising, considering both apps are very aggressive with their paywalls, showing you a paywall on launch with a well-hidden close button.
But both also offer a free three-day trial which could be why the revenue hasn't kicked in yet. We'll know in a few days, and I'll follow up with an update in next week's newsletter (so make sure you're subscribed).
There's a lesson here for developers - be ready. ToonApp and ToonMe have very optimized product pages. The screenshots are focused, they have a video of the app in action, and their keywords are on point. They're playing the ASO game very well, and that's why they're winning right now and not the many apps that launched in the last few days.
Is your app ready?
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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.
