App Store Keywords for Entertainment Apps: What the Data Shows

Cells show estimated volume / estimated difficulty (0-100). Phrases were English everywhere, so non-English columns describe English demand.

The category label hides three different markets. "Streaming" scores 100 / 100 in the US, the maximum on both scales. "Tv guide" averages difficulty 9.8 and shows zero in Japan. "Trivia" and "karaoke" sit in the middle at about 33. A page that treats Entertainment as one keyword neighbourhood would misjudge all three.

Only 48.3% of US results carried the Entertainment genre; Music and Games each took 16.7%. Our phrase-to-category mapping is approximate, and in Entertainment it is looser than average because "karaoke", "trivia" and "podcast" overlap with neighbouring categories. Read the table above as how these phrases behave, not as a census of the category.

High exact-title share with high difficulty points to a market where the name field does a lot of work. Because correlation is not cause, take it as a hypothesis to test: if a phrase is central to what your app does, check whether the competitors that rank for it also use it in the name or subtitle, then weigh that against the 30-character limit. The guide on app name keyword strategy walks through that trade.

Geography matters more than usual. US results had a median of 101,834 ratings, Japan's 552. That gap is why "podcast" is difficulty 63 in the US but 29 in Brazil, and why a smaller storefront can be a more realistic first target; see choosing keywords you can rank for.

If you build a music or audio product, compare Music, where exact titles are nearly as common, and for anything built around live updates look at News. A gaming angle (trivia, quiz) is better tested against the Games numbers too, since 16.7% of US results for these phrases were games.

We picked six generic English phrases per category, queried the iTunes Search API (entity=software, limit=25) in the US, GB, DE, JP, FR and BR, and analysed the top 10 results of each of the 936 queries. "Exact-title" means the app name contains every word of the query, ignoring case and diacritics. The full method is in the research methodology, the study overview is on the research hub, and our general approach is on how we measure. Data: category CSV.

LocalASO, a Mac app, applies the same rating-count method to any keyword you type, in 52 storefronts and each storefront's local language. The one-time price is $29, and while the download is free, the app needs a license key to run. See pricing.