The US is home to the largest Amazon Alexa skills marketplace. Explore these top skills to see what works (and doesn’t) with the largest userbase.
Explore the data:
Data at a glance*
Date: June 5th, 2020
Total number of skills: 52 247
Flash briefings : 10 209
ᵇᵉᵗᵃSkills with in-skill purchases: 505
Exclusive to the US marketplace: 32 942
* These numbers may not represent all skills on this marketplace
Top skills
The top skills (per most ratings) on the American marketplace offer great insights into how people use their Alexa devices. Like with the Canadian marketplace, several top skills are one-off invocations – things people would mess around and randomly ask their Alexa device. It’s notable that the top “complex” skill, Jeopardy, is basically the device’s flagship skill (highly advertised) and still has fewer reviews than two fart skills and a barking skill.
Special shout-out to HUGO.FM for having two of the most popular “simple” skills and to Matchbox.io for having 2 highly rated skills that also have significant review engagement.
You might have noticed that Find my phone is by Matchbox.io Inc while Question of the day is by Matchbox.io. I suspect this is because Amazon does not support transferring skill ownership between developer accounts without losing all the reviews and ratings. When Matchbox.io acquired Opearlo, they gained access to Opearlo’s account and changed their name to reflect the new ownership. This particular quirk in the developer ecosystem (can’t transfer skills between accounts) is worth keeping an eye on since I could see developers wanting to acquire smaller popular skills and build their skill roster.
| Icon | Skill | Developer | Invocation | Description | Rating count | Rating | Review count |
|---|
Only in the US
Did you know the US Alexa market has an exclusive Spanish language? It makes sense since the US is home to 41 million native Spanish speakers! However, this market is wildly under-represented with only 3 Spanish skills making it to the top 500 most rated skills.
| Icon | Skill | Developer | Invocation | Description | Rating count | Rating | Review count |
|---|
Flash Briefings
The most important thing to note here is that there are no Spanish flash briefings in the top 500 most rated. Maybe you will be the person to fill that gap?
| Icon | Skill | Developer | Description | Rating count | Rating | Review count | Random review |
|---|
ᵇᵉᵗᵃSkills with in-skill purchases
This table has some (Not all. Sound skills were not captured) skills with in-skill purchases. 67% of these skills have at least one user review, which is significantly better than all the skills on the US marketplace, where only 34% of skills have at least one rating. This might suggest the Amazon Marketplace promotes skills with in-skill purchases above those without. Adding an in-skill purchase could be a valuable strategy to improve a new skill’s discoverability.
| Icon | Skill | Developer | Invocation | Description | Rating count | Rating | Review count |
|---|
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