Social Networking, by the numbers

Free apps dominate Social Networking, and paid ones barely register. Of the 3,881 apps tracked, 3,501 are free and 378 are paid, a 90.3% to 9.7% split. Among the apps that do charge, prices cluster near the bottom: 142 fall between $0.01 and $0.99, and 137 land in the $1 to $2.99 range. Beyond that, things thin out fast, only 59 apps ask $3 to $4.99, 27 sit at $5 to $9.99, and just 13 go for $10 or more. Publishers clearly aren't counting on price to drive revenue here. Most seem to treat pricing as an afterthought rather than a strategy.

Look at ratings instead of app counts, and the whole picture flips. Yazo has put out 50 apps but only holds 2 ratings total. MySeat.com Media Inc. released 48 apps and pulled in 589 ratings combined. Zooma B.V. has 31 apps and, remarkably, 0 ratings. Nexenture's 24 apps sit at 0 as well. KidizzApp shipped 18 apps and earned just 1 rating. Matrimony.com Ltd's 17 apps have 792 between them. These names lead the pack for sheer output, but not one comes close to 0.1% of the category's 109,724,961 total ratings. Even stacking the top three publishers together doesn't clear that 0.1% mark. Putting out a lot of apps doesn't mean anyone actually notices. Volume and relevance just aren't the same thing here.

Nearly all the weight in this category rests on a handful of apps, and none of them appear anywhere on the app-count leaderboard. Facebook alone carries 27,545,178 ratings. WhatsApp Messenger trails behind with 18,375,679, Messenger holds 13,205,513, Discord - Talk, Play, Hang Out has 3,499,950, and Life360: Family Safety & GPS comes in at 2,991,808. Add together everything the busiest publishers released, and it still doesn't match these five apps combined. The category's median rating lands at 4.4, and this small cluster of names effectively carries the entire category, while thousands of other listings, many of them free and never rated at all, sit largely unnoticed.