Analysis of 45931 Amazon Alexa skills (September 2019)

At yesterday’s Amazon Hardware conference, Amazon announced that the Alexa marketplace now has 100 000 skills. While an impressive number, our previous analyses suggest that many of the skills on the Alexa marketplace aren’t very popular. In fact, 95% of the most prolific publishers’ skills don’t even have 1 review (that’s total of 6356 skills)! We were curious to see whether the Alexa marketplace is more quantity than quality, so we took a look at our database of 45 931 skills on the US marketplace. We’ll let the data do the talking:

The vast majority of skills do not have any ratings (0 stars). The next most popular rating is 5 out of 5. Does this mean most skills on the Alexa marketplace are high quality? Not quite….

Most skills have 1 rating. Those 5/5 skills we saw earlier? It just means they have 1 rating of 5/5. It doesn’t mean they are necessarily bad, but it doesn’t mean they’re excellent.
*We removed the 30075 skills with no ratings from this graph because it totally skewed the data visualization.

Here we see the number of reviews per skill. The vast majority of skills have one review. We also removed the 32384 skills without any reviews from this visualization.