Amazon App Store makes 89 cents for every iTunes dollar

Just one year after launching, Amazon outpaces Google as second in the mobile app market

Amazon is far outpacing Google in the mobile market and has got the iTunes App Store in its sites.

The Amazon App Store revenue is roughly 89% of iTunes App Store revenue as of February 2012, according to new data announced by mobile analytics firm Flurry on Friday.

This puts Google Play, formerly known as the Google Android Market, in the precarious third place spot with only 23% of the revenue coming to the App Store. Amazon has made amazing progress, a lot thanks to its Amazon Fire device that was selling like gangbusters over the holiday season. Amazon has also been known to vet for quality apps, run promotions and market to everyone with an Amazon account.

To get the latest data, Flurry looked at a set of top-ranked apps that have a presence on all three stores: Apple, Amazon and Google Play -- looking at approximately 11 million daily active users for this specific study.

When we compare these results to the study that Flurry published in its December report, we see that Google has held steady at 23 cents of revenue for every dollar going to iTunes (Amazon was not a part of the previous study.)

Flurry states that Amazon’s online strength is the core strength for Amazon, which Google lacks in its wheelhouse.

The App Store may have some concerns about how strong the selling power is with Amazon and if it could soon take a bite out of Apple's revenue stream.

Earlier this month, Apple crossed a record 25 billion downloads from more than 550,000 available apps and Google announced in December 2011 that it had crossed 10 billion downloads from 400,000 available apps.

With Amazon already delivering more than three times the revenue in its app store compared to what Google generates,  we may see a larger clamoring of developers to get onto the Amazon store.  

This app store finding comes on the heels of Amazon announcing its desire to beef up its video catalog by 3,000 by closing a licensing deal with Discovery Communications. 

This was the biggest single addition to the Amazon Prime list of streaming videos including programs from Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, Investigation Discovery and the Science and Military Channel. This means that Amazon Prime customers will now be able to stream TV episodes and specials from those channels, as well as from the company’s 25-year programming library.

Popular programs included in this agreement are: Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs,” TLC’s “Say Yes To The Dress” and Animal Planet’s “Whale Wars,” “Cake Boss,” “Mythbusters” and the deeply beloved program series turned near-calendar-holiday “Shark Week.”

Amazon Prime customers pay the $79 per year for the service, which also includes free two-day shipping and access to the Kindle Lending Library.

Amazon now hosts more than 17,000 titles for streaming, and 120,000+ movies for rent or purchase through Amazon Instant Video. 

Last month Amazon signed a similar deal with Viacom and had continued to grow its catalog since DEcember when the videos available were just 13,000.

Amazon Prime has been getting some serious push through the marketing of the Kindle Fire tablet, which has helped boost membership north of 3 million.

While the boost in Amazon Prime offerings is a great addition, the company still has some stiff competition to deal with as Netflix continues to hold a lion's share of the market and video hosting services like YouTube are flooding money into the creation of original content and grabbing up music licensing agreements with VEVO. 

Prime Instant Videos are viewable on the Kindle Fire, Mac, PC, or Roku and as well as select blu-ray players.

So just as Amazon has gone after the tablet market and the streaming video market, the online retailer is quickly becoming the biggest competitor on the mobile application market too.