It's a subscription world now: Top 100 app subscription revenue surged to $4.6 billion last year in the U.S. alone

If you’re one of the people who laments how every digital service seems to be moving toward a subscription-based model, we’ve got some bad news for you: Consumer willingness to spend money on subscriptions is only increasing.

That’s according to a new report from market intelligence firm SensorTower. The firm’s report found that customers in the U.S. alone spent a whopping $4.6 billion on in-app subscriptions in the top 100 apps in 2019. That’s a 21% increase from the year earlier.

What’s more staggering is those numbers are for in-app subscriptions excluding game subscriptions—so only apps that provide content like streaming video, digital magazines, or software services. And while the $4.6 billion number covers subscriptions from both the Apple App Store and Google Play store, keep in mind that the figure doesn’t include subscriptions (such as Netflix) that people pay for outside the two app stores, nor does it include in-app subscriptions for apps that fall outside the top 100.

So who were the major winners of this subscription bonanza? Across both stores combined, Tinder dominated subscriptions. But when you break down top in-app subscriptions by store, the app with the most subscription revenue in 2019 in Apple’s App Store was YouTube, while the top app in the Google Play store was Pandora.

You can check out the full top 10 charts below.

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It’s a subscription world now: Top 100 app subscription revenue surged to $4.6 billion last year in the U.S. alone

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