OpenAI’s Sora Loses Its Top App Store Ranking to Dave’s Hot Chicken
Since its launch on September 30, OpenAI's Sora app has dominated the iOS App Store charts thanks to its easy breezy AI video generation and an initially loose interpretation of copyright laws. His reign came to an end on Friday. Your new champion is… Dave's Hot Chicken.
Yes! Net ChatGPT or Gemini or Threads or one of the other usual suspects. Dave's Hot Chicken now rules the App Store, where its slack-beaked, bug-eyed mascot icon expresses appropriate surprise at its appearance. How did it do? How to break the grip of OpenAI's golem TikTok? With something that people love even more than large language models: free food.
“They're running a promotion for free sliders in celebration of Drake's birthday,” says Adam Blacker, PR director of app analytics firm Apptopia. “Free food keeps the downloads flowing.”
If you're wondering what Drake has to do with any of this, he invested in the fast casual restaurant chain in 2021, and reportedly made a fortune when the company sold a majority stake to private equity firm Roark Capital for a reported $1 billion. For the third year in a row, the company gave away one (1) free slider to everyone who downloaded the app in honor of Drake's birthday. (The rapper and Raptors fan turns 39 today; the giveaway was Thursday.)
“We're celebrating a celebrity that's popular and that's relevant right now, as well as getting food in their mouths,” says Dave's Hot Chicken chief technology officer Leon Davoyan.
And it really is a lot of people. On a typical week, Davoyan says, Dave's sees between 20,000 and 25,000 new signups for its loyalty database. On Thursday alone, the promotion drove 343,531 new accounts — a bump of more than 10 percent for the brand's total membership in one day, according to the CTO.
It was enough to knock Sora out of the top slot for the first time since October 3rd, an impressive stretch for an app that is still invite-only. In the first 23 days since it launched, Sora has had 3.2 million iOS downloads in the US, according to app analytics firm Sensor Tower. That's a much faster pace than even ChatGPT, which, while similarly viral, has 2.3 million US downloads in the same time frame. (Sora is not yet available in the Google Play Store, but it has arrived.) OpenAI declined to comment.
While Sora will likely reclaim the top spot after the Drake promotion dies, Dave's Hot Chicken should continue to reap the benefits of its giveaway. Last year, according to Sensor Tower, downloads of the app in the four weeks after the same marketing push were more than 50 percent higher than the month that followed. All those free breads are worth the long-term profit.
