Free content is the bread and butter of Windows Phone Marketplace

Distimo, an app analytics firm based in The Netherlands, released its monthly report with some insight into the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. The Windows Phone 7 Marketplace has just celebrated its 1st birthday and is now the fifth largest OS application store behind the Apple App Store, Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, and BlackBerry App World in terms of total active applications worldwide.

The Windows Phone 7 Marketplace originally launched with 70% of its content being paid apps. It wasn’t until June, that free apps outweighed paid ones. While the number of paid apps is very close to the number of free apps available, paid apps only make up 16.5 percent of all downloads.

When looking at the top 100 applications, the category leader in both paid and free apps is Games followed by Tools & Productivity. Games make up 33% of free content while Tools & Productivity make up 20%. When looking at paid apps, games make up a massive 54% and Tools & Productivity account for 12%



The United States has the largest amount of daily downloads in the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, although when compared to the Apple App Store, the numbers seem very small. In one comparison of daily downloads of the top 300 free applications, apps were download 43 times more in the Apple App Store than the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace.

While the numbers are not that impressive when compared to other leading app stores, the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace has continued to grow by almost an additional 1300 new paid apps and 1650 free apps every month.

source: Distimo via mocoNews