US Alexa Skill Growth Declined In April
The number of Google Actions available to U.S. users saw an increase of 40% over the past month, from 165 to 232. While impressive, Google Home still cannot compete with the number of Alexa skills which now total over 11,000 in the U.S. However, the new total also shows a decline in growth. The totals for March indicated an 11% growth for the month, while for April the totals indicate only a growth of 7.7%.
Also noteworthy is that despite the lack of monetization opportunities for Alexa skill developers, the number of custom Alexa skills still outpaced the growth of Flash-Briefings, with an increase of 9% and 4% respectively. It will be interesting to see if the recent change in Amazon’s advertising policy for Alexa will change this ratio in the coming months. The new policy appears to explicitly allow advertising for streaming music, radio and flash briefing skills while prohibiting custom Alexa skill from the same opportunities.
Germany and UK See an Increase in Alexa Skill Growth
The same cannot be said for Alexa skill growth in Germany. The number of Alexa skills increased 20% in Germany, from 935 to 1,174 in total. Almost a fourth of these new skills were Flash-Briefings, which have nearly doubled in the past month. The UK also saw a rapid growth in Flash-Briefings with an increase of 150% from the previous month. This is no surprise as Amazon introduced new developer APIs to facilitate Flash-Briefing development for the UK and German markets at the very end of March. Clearly, the move has been successful in accelerating the growth of new Alexa in these markets.
Alexa Skills Pass 10 Thousand in US, 4 Thousand in UK, Germany Trails
