Inside Social Games

As the iPhone App Store enjoys tremendous growth overall, comScore has just released numbers that detail what applications have been thriving the most. The report gives marketers a much better look at the actual audience size of apps from the iPhone app store.

One interesting metric reported was the penetration rates of the App Store’s Top 25 apps within the United States. These rates reflect the number of people that have downloaded the app as a portion of overall devices in use:

Within the chart, 12 out of the 25 apps were games.  Tap Tap Revenge topped the charts overall, boasting a 32 percent penetration rate. A major social game, iBowl (from SGN) came in sixth place at 24 percent.

These numbers, combined with recent projections by mobile advertising network Admob, can help in estimating both advertising and premium service revenues. According to Admob’s numbers, Apple’s mobile user base for the U.S. is around 15 million. As a result, Tap Tap Revenge has approximately 4.8 million users.

comScore also compared time spent searching for various types of content between iPhone app users and average Internet users. In short, those using the iPhone tend to spend more time in retail, conversational media, entertainment, sports, and search/navigation.

While these numbers provide more useful information than those reported in the past, they’re far from perfect. Some other questions remain unanswered: How many uninstalls were there? Since most of the apps on the list were free, how did the paid apps do specifically? How long were the apps used?

Nonetheless, these numbers alone have long been sought after by developers and marketers alike.

[via VentureBeat]