It Must Be Christmas Mood or I Don’t Get the Fart App Making $10k a Day
by
on December 23, 2008,
I somehow dislike counting money other people make but in some cases it is just impossible to resist with today’s calculation being the money generated by the most popular application in the Apple App Store: almost $10,000 a day. Of course it must be a very appealing market if a developer knows it is possible to earn this much off one single application that took practically nothing to build.
But the most intriguing part to me is not how much a developer can make selling a $.99 application for iPhone or iPod Touch but the type of the application in question - it is actually iFart Mobile application which means that it allows users to make fart noises on their mobile devices.
Such applications appeared in the App Market after Apple had come up with less strict rules for acceptance of applications to the marketplace. It is amazing that MG Siegler actually counted around 50 of such applications already available for users to choose from. I continued the calculations and it turns out that if one wants to buy all the fart-related applications from the App Store, it will cost a total of $35.73 but some of the more expensive applications (an average fart app will cost $.99) are intended to generate all types of sounds, not the offensive ones only.
And while it is understandable that now that Apple admits such applications to the marketplace they do arrive and the number of new applications doing this pretty simple thing is quite amazing to me, I don’t know what must be the explanation for one of such applications to make it to the top position among the paid applications - after all, we usually expect a tool to generate value for users to reach such impressive results where people need to pay money (even if the amount is small). And what is the value in a fart application? Unfortunately I don’t see any myself but I do hope it is the frivolous mood of the holiday season that explains popularity of a tool like this one as otherwise it is beyond my understanding.
