Money from Space: How Apps Make $1 MILLION a Month on Horoscopes

Do you think it's hard to earn $1 million a month? Ha! Ask astrologers – these guys definitely know how to make that kind of money without trying too hard. And now we're not talking about esoteric practices, but about pure marketing.
Read a large material with interesting examples and use them in your products.

The author has no relation to the reviewed products.

“Prozharka by Dima Garnik” is a format in which I tell why certain applications are popular, what distinctive features they use, and what you can try to implement in your own.

Story

It is difficult to name the exact date of the origin of Astrology, which has undergone many changes: merging with the cultural, scientific and mythological context.

By the beginning of the second millennium BC, “astrology of omens” was known – it helped people psychologically cope with astronomical observations in the sky, such as eclipses of the moon and sun, passing comets, meteorites burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere, etc.

Around the 5th-4th century BC, individual horoscopes appeared, based on the creation of calendars of favorable and unfavorable days depending on the 12 signs of the zodiac.

From Ancient Egypt it migrated to Greek culture, and then to the East. Each culture added something of its own, and as a result, there was a division into 2 main concepts:

Media start

Fast forward to 1930, where the popularization of horoscopes in modern society happened thanks to enterprising guys from the Sunday Express newspaper (still in existence today), who simply wanted to increase their sales and circulation.

First, a front-page article was published about the newborn Princess Margaret Rose, the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II: “What the stars predict for the new princess.”

Of course, all the newspapers wrote about the birth of the princess, but Sunday wanted to stand out and invited a fashionable astrologer and palmist at that time, but he had such a busy schedule that he sent his student to draw up the princess's natal chart.

The article was very popular with the public, and the newspaper decided to contact the same astrologer again so that the “student” could give new predictions.

Apparently relying on his premonition and the imperfection of the technical mechanisms of that time, the newly-minted astrologer makes a prediction about a major catastrophe…

On October 5, 1930, the British airship R101 made its first intercontinental flight to the Indian part of the British colony, and before it reached its destination, it crashed into a hill in northern France.

48 of the 54 passengers and crew die (read about the last flight of the R101 on Wikipedia – a terrible coincidence).

The “Prediction” attracted a lot of attention: both to the astrologer and to the newspaper that published such a “terribly accurate” forecast. The newspaper immediately signed a long-term contract with him, and the author began to write a separate column about famous people whose birthdays fell on the current week.

This approach does not arouse much interest among the audience: princesses are not born every week, and a regular column is not on the front page. After searching for various options, it was not until 1937 that an astrologer came up with the format of an impersonal horoscope, which was divided into 12 signs of the zodiac and satisfied all potential readers.

After that, the circulation of the publication increased several times, the column with horoscopes was fixed in one place, and this was gradually picked up by all other publications. In this form we know horoscopes to this day.

By the way, the astrologers' community was outraged by the idea of ​​”universal” horoscopes – because it led to a drop in their earnings: why pay for your personal “forecast” if you can read it in the newspaper, along with the rest of the news?

Evidence base

I may upset someone now, but let's run through the points why astrology is recognized as pseudoscience:

• Astrology is based on assumptions about the influence of planets on human life, but these assumptions have no scientific basis. Moreover, forecasts, in general, have long been irrelevant, because there is a constant shift in the trajectories of the planets.

• The results of astrological forecasts often do not agree with each other and are not confirmed by scientific research. The predictions of one astrologer do not coincide with the predictions of another astrologer.

• The 2,100-person experiment — which began in London in 1958 between March 3 and 9 — created 1,050 pairs of children born at the same time (astrological twins) — meaning they would have identical birth charts. Scientists have been tracking their destinies, professions and life trajectories for decades and have seen no patterns.

• In another experiment, an astrologer, in a double-blind study, had to match a person's zodiac sign with his or her test for an accurate psychological portrait of an employee, which contains 462 statements (CPI – California Psychological Inventory). There were no matches.

Our days. Marketing of top apps

CHANI

I would like to start with this app, because it has excellent revenue figures: only 10K attracted users on iOS – bring in $600K in revenue and this is monthly! Apps with such a conversion are simply units.

The figures, of course, fluctuate from month to month: sometimes it’s $400K per month, and $500K, but the ratio of money earned per user is very high.

There are tons of horoscope apps, including free ones, so why do people buy them? In addition to the standard esoteric arsenal:

• Transits

• Birth charts

• Moon phases

• Current sky

• Astro weather (what is this anyway…)

• Horoscopes for the day and for the week

They expanded their functionality and added more down-to-earth things:

• Setting goals

• Daily Affirmations

• Meditations

• Daily educational content

All together, it gave a good effect for the feedback loop: the user can go into the application every day and not just “read the horoscope” for 30 seconds, but get stuck for a much longer period of time.

Nice design, thoughtful marketing and voila: over 40K reviews in the AppStore and an average rating of 4.9.

Monetization is pretty standard: most of the content is locked, but you can activate a yearly subscription with a full month of free trial.

This way they show that they are confident in their product – the user signs up and forgets about it until a month later when the payment is debited from him.

Important! Not every product will be suitable for such a long payment delay, you must have:

– either a product for regular use, where results can be measured over long periods (for example, women's cycle trackers),
— either a product that involves the constant generation of new content (for example, Netflix),
– or a product where during the time of use you make a very large contribution, which is then difficult to give up (for example, Spotify: after you have been creating your library with playlists for a month, it will be difficult for you to give it up).

NEBULA

The next app is completely different from the previous one, although the essence is the same. It would seem that there is nothing else to come up with, but these guys went through the “customer pains” and delved into the topic of relationships:

• Find your soulmate

• Bring back your ex

• Restore current relationships

• Check compatibility with your partner

But that's not all. The creators of the service understand that astrological services sell very well when there is not just an impersonal service, but there is a “face” who provides the service.

Moreover, the most common marketing channel in the field of astrology is word of mouth. The name of an astrologer (magician, sorcerer, seer, palmist) is passed from mouth to mouth, so it is good when a service can show the “face” of a specific “performer”.

The service has created a whole catalog of “performers,” with the ability to select one suitable for a specific “task,” read reviews, look at the profile, etc.

As for monetization, the service also has a very good conversion rate:

• iOS: with 100K installs per month, revenue is $700K

• Android: with 50K installs per month, revenue is $100K

• WEB: with 740K unique visitors per month, based on the fact that they know how to attract quality traffic and convert it well, then the average conversion into a paid user will be 2.5%, total: 18,500 paid users per month from a website, at the lowest price of $10 (based on the cost of a minute of conversation with their astrologer at $1), that's another $185K monthly.

One of the interesting techniques: when a user gets to a sales web-onboarding, where he fills in all his data to get an astrological report about himself, then at the end, as is the classic, he receives an offer to pay for access to the results.

If he does not do this, then after a while notifications will come to the mail: first that he forgot to pay, if there is no response, then the next letter comes – already with a discount, if there is still no response, then the discount is increased, if there is still no response, then it is offered to take the report for free – the main thing is to leave the card details (for possible future monetization).

They understand that they have already paid for the user by bringing him to the service, so they want to keep him at any cost.

CO-STAR

Well, let's finish the selection with one more interesting example.

Let me remind you that all these services work in the same niche, with identical functionality, where it is almost impossible to come up with any difference, at first glance, but all these guys still manage to do it.

If you work in a highly competitive niche where there is no room for unique options and you don't know how to stand out, then you just haven't thought hard enough. Think some more 🙂

So, what can surprise you with the following service:

Total differentiation from competitors

Stylish, technological design, which says that this is something new and modern, and there are no attributes of magic: balls, mysticism, reading fate by hand.

Social proof, inclusion in a group

This is an attempt to say that a user will not be an outcast because he believes in mysticism, which, in fact, was once considered “science” too!

“Everything is fine, you can trust us…” — the site even has a whole section dedicated to a historical excursion about geo- and heliocentrism with beautiful animations (that’s how they should teach in school!).

Let's reassure those who doubt (removing objections)

And for dessert: what if we say that our data is so accurate that we get it from NASA, plus we have trained AI models, daily updated data, modern technologies and, in general, science in full swing!

In addition to blatantly manipulating facts, they attract famous personalities and various media outlets to cover their activities.

Doesn't matter, What they will write about you, it is important Who will write about you (then you can put their logo on your website or in the application).

New York Times, Vogue, Vanity Fair, singer Dua Lipa – and now the editors of the AppStore have already twice nominated you for “App of the Day” and given you a large amount of free traffic.

As for monetization, these guys have not been as successful as their colleagues, but still have an acceptable result:

• iOS: with 200K installations per month, revenue is $400K-500K (depending on the month);

• Android: with 60K installations per month, revenue is $50K (by the way, an excellent result of monetization of Android users);

• WEB: with 737K unique visitors per month, these guys are not so good at attracting quality traffic—let's take the average conversion of 1.5%, total: 11,050 paid users per month from the website, at a minimum price of $5 (based on the cost of subscriptions), that's another $55K per month.

What's interesting is that this is work involving attracting new users.

From the very start, the user is offered to share a list of their contacts in order to add several people from there and calculate compatibility with them (again, we attract new users by paying for just one).

There is even a separate tariff that will be cheaper, but only if the user you brought registers in the system.

The Future of Astrology Apps

Of course, everything comes from the audience's demand. Is anxiety and uncertainty growing in the world? And so is the demand for psychotherapy, astrology, unhealthy food, timekillers, and “cheap domafin.”

Good news (for some, not so good): Apple no longer places such applications in the AppStore, and rejects them for review with the SPAM mark, stating that there are already enough similar, repeating applications in their App Store. Only those that managed to be placed earlier remain there.

conclusions

Example CHANI clearly shows what is more important not quantity users, and the quality users, they manage to earn big money, even on 10K attracted users.

Moreover, at some point, having reduced the number of attracted users by half, they only increased their revenue. This means that they can work very well with their target audience and not be scattered.

Plus, they launched right at the very beginning of the first lockdown, during the pandemic. People's anxiety was at its maximum, and such apps met the demand very well.

Example NEBULA says that it is important to understand what pain points your audience has, and you need to build your marketing based on these principles.

Example CO-STAR speaks about the importance of correctly differentiating yourself from your competitors and trying to find at least some differences so that the consumer’s choice falls on your side.

As their practice shows, you can search anywhere, for example, in processing objections:

• Pseudoscience? And we use NASA data!

• Ayurveda, shamanism, chiropractic? We have astrology “without this crap” ©!

• False prophecy? And we use Artificial Intelligence – is that also a false prophecy in your opinion?