Market research company comScore has recently been hard at work gathering and analyzing information for its 2016 US Mobile App Report and has just published its latest findings which concern affluent smartphone users and their app-related habits. As it’s no secret that the demographics of an audience vary greatly from one app to another, the Reston-based firm decided to explore this in more detail and has started with focusing on the smartphone owners in the higher income brackets in the US. More specifically, comScore drew the line at households whose annual income exceeds $100,000. After identifying representative samples of these households and analyzing them with its proprietary Mobile Metrix method, comScore concluded that rich people are significantly more likely to use apps related to travel, fitness, and dining in comparison to average smartphone owners.
According to the research, the app with the highest concentration of high-income household users in the US is OpenTable, a dining app which facilitates the process of locating a restaurant in one’s vicinity and booking a table. The second app on the list is Nike+ Running as comScore found that more than 71% of the app’s US user base belongs to high-income households. Official United Airlines’ app concludes the top three on this list while most of the other apps in the top 20 belong to either the fitness, dining, or travel category. Other than that, comScore’s research reveals that high-income users in the US also seem to be especially fond of a few casual mobile games and are apparently regular New York Times readers. You can see the entire list below.
Adam Lella from comScore speculates that the company’s findings may suggest a correlation between higher income and health-consciousness. While that may or may not be true, the other two most represented categories on the list are much easier to explain. Namely, as high-income people have more disposable income, and traveling and dining requires disposable income, it’s reasonable to presume that high-income people travel and dine more often. This research may not reveal any ground-breaking information but there’s still no doubt the data within it will be useful to marketers given the fact that people in the higher income brackets are an especially attractive demographic to advertise to.