72% of iPhone app revenue comes from in-app purchases, up from 28% in 2010

In a recent presentation at the Verizon Developer Community Conference in Las Vegas, Hendrik Koekkoek of Distimo - once again - highlighted the importance of the freemium application model.

Specifically he revealed that the growth of free app downloads from the iPhone App Store has grow 34 percent since 2010, whie paid application downloads have grown by 7 percent. These figures were taken from the top 300 downloads in each category.

In-app magic

Further pushing the freemium format is the fact that, despite only 4 percent of apps on the App Store allowing in-app purchasing - apparently - 72 percent of revenue comes from apps featuring the method.

This 24 percent of revenue was attained via paid apps with in-app purchasing while 48 percent was attained through free apps with in app purchasing. The remaining 28 percent was attained through paid apps.

The figure of 72 percent represents a large rise from this time last year, when a mere 28 percent of revenue was attained through in-app sales.

The presentation also iterated that, even though Android had only started to allow in-app purchases in March 2011, in the US in August, 68 percent of the 25 most grossing apps were utilising the service.

[source: Distimo]