I'd like to know what percent of iPhone apps make less than $100 and what percent make less than $10,000.<p>This site (http://www.moveyourweb.net/blog/guess-sales-figures-for-any-iphone-application/) estimates that an app will get between 200 to 550 times as many sales as reviews, but that wouldn't apply for a small number of reviews that could just be friends. But if you had a way to fairly sample apps, you could estimate how many make over $10,000. For 99 cent apps, 1 additional review would correspond very roughly to 350 * 0.99 * 0.7 = $243 so if you subtract 20 for friends it would mean the ones getting over 60 reviews are making over $10,000. Does that sound in the ballpark?<p>If you could estimate the revenue from all the high selling apps, you could see what is left over for the rest but I don't know if that would be possible.<p>So... anyone willing to make some SWAGs?
I have a hunch that the income distribution of Iphone apps follows a powerlaw. Things like this tends to do so (karmapoints and users of HN, for example, follows a powerlaw)<p>So if you can get data for a few apps, which should be possible, you can estimate the K-coefficient, and voila you can make a calculated estimate as to exactly how big a percentage of apps make less tham $10,000. And lots more too :-)
I have more than 20 apps on the appstore. None of my apps have more than 20 reviews, so I cannot judge these numbers. This might be true for 99 cents app, but I am not sure how directly correlated will this be for >$4.99 apps.