Retention versus frequency for mobile product categories

One of the frequent points I try to make on this blog is that metrics are a reflection of your strategy you’ve chosen, not the other way around.

This is particularly important in the context of comparable numbers, like +1 day or +1 week retention, DAU/MAU, or the plethora of other metrics that are used to assess a business. It’s not a good idea to just blindly try to hit a certain set of metrics – different kinds of products have different sets of healthy numbers. The best example is something like tax software, which has a DAU/MAU of essentially zero but you can still build Intuit out of it. On the other hand, if you compare favorably or unfavorably in your category, all the better. I previously wrote about this in the context of DAU/MAU and “nature versus nuture for products”

On this note, Flurry recently updated their retention versus frequency chart for different mobile app companies and it’s worth checking out.

The outliers are super interesting:

Communication is both super retentive and high frequency, but man, what a busy space :)
Streaming Music, Games, and Dating have a lot of frequency while you’re using it, but you soon abandon the app and go somewhere else. Probably a good argument for products in this category to try to make money right away, since you won’t keep them for long
News, Sports scores, Reference, Weather have high retention, but not necessarily high frequency. Probably some great businesses to be built here, especially when you can tie it to some kind of transaction – sports and reference, in particular. Weather, not so much?
Retail is probably apps put out by brands that aren’t super useful. The other stuff in that corner all sounds junky
Photo and Video surprisingly has terrible stats for something so important. Maybe outside of Instagram, it’s sort of an overrated category?

Anyway, worth reading the article and looking at the diagram more closely. Thanks again to Peter Farago at Flurry for putting this together.

UPDATE: Nabeel Hyatt of Spark Capital (previously GM Zynga and serial entrepreneur) wrote some excellent commentary on this chart as well. Worth reading.

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http://www.gordonbowman.com/ Gordon Bowman

Interesting that single player games have a much higher retention than social games over the long run. I would think that the social ties would keep folks coming back longer. But I guess social games tend to be more faddish.
http://twitter.com/ntippmann Nick Tippmann

Interesting that frequency of use / week is down almost 50% since their first report in 2009. Also that 30 day retention is down but 90 retention is up. What do you think the cause of this is? More app choices combined with people only sticking with the one they like? Here’s a link to Flurry’s original post in 2009 http://blog.flurry.com/bid/26376/Mobile-Apps-Models-Money-and-Loyalty
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

astute observation sir.
http://twitter.com/nabeel Nabeel Hyatt

I would be very careful about reading too much into this data, as the vast majority of products don’t succeed. This is not a benchmark of successful products in these categories. Response post: http://nabeelhyatt.com/post/34174764582/dont-benchmark-to-failure
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

nicely said.
http://andrewchenblog.com Andrew Chen

Similar point I wrote elsewhere:
“Good thought. I also think there’s some weirdness around the average of a category versus the exceptional cases. I could imagine that most social apps end up with mediocre stats since its hard to bootstrap a network, but that the exceptional cases are great. Another thing is the social and communication categories are pretty arbitrarily different. It’s hard to think they’d have very different stats.”
http://twitter.com/nabeel Nabeel Hyatt

just wish I had the raw data. :)

@andrewchen