iPhone's Digital Marketplace: Characterizing the Big Spenders

TL;DR

This study analyzes a large dataset of over 776 million digital purchases on Apple devices, revealing spending patterns, user demographics, and purchase behaviors, especially among big spenders, to better understand mobile shopping habits.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale analysis of mobile digital spending, modeling purchase behavior and identifying key characteristics of high-value users.

Findings

61% of spending on in-app purchases

Top 1% of users account for 59% of total spending

Big spenders are more likely male, older, and less US-based

Abstract

With mobile shopping surging in popularity, people are spending ever more money on digital purchases through their mobile devices and phones. However, few large-scale studies of mobile shopping exist. In this paper we analyze a large data set consisting of more than 776M digital purchases made on Apple mobile devices that include songs, apps, and in-app purchases. We find that 61% of all the spending is on in-app purchases and that the top 1% of users are responsible for 59% of all the spending. These big spenders are more likely to be male and older, and less likely to be from the US. We study how they adopt and abandon individual app, and find that, after an initial phase of increased daily spending, users gradually lose interest: the delay between their purchases increases and the spending decreases with a sharp drop toward the end. Finally, we model the in-app purchasing behavior in multiple steps: 1) we model the time between purchases; 2) we train a classifier to predict whether the user will make a purchase from a new app or continue purchasing from the existing app; and 3) based on the outcome of the previous step, we attempt to predict the exact app, new or existing, from which the next purchase will come. The results yield new insights into spending habits in the mobile digital marketplace.