Sora lost its top ranking in the App Store to Dave’s Hot Chicken

Since its launch On September 30, Sora app from OpenAI It dominated the iOS App Store charts, thanks to its user-friendly AI-powered video creation and initially loose video release explanation Of copyright laws. On Friday, his sentence ended. Your new hero is… Dave’s Hot Chicken.

Yes! no ChatGPT or twin or Topics Or any of the other usual suspects. Dave’s Hot Chicken now rules the App Store, with the mascot’s slack-billed, bug-eyed icon expressing appropriate surprise as he ascends. How did you do that? How did you break the grip of OpenAI’s TikTok golem? With something people love more than big language models: free food.

“They’re running a free SIM promotion for Drake’s birthday,” says Adam Blacker, PR director at app analytics company Apptopia. “Free food always leads to an influx of downloads.”

If you’re wondering what Drake has to do with all this, he invested in the fast-casual restaurant chain in 2021, and supposedly made a profit when the company sold a majority stake to private equity firm Roark Capital for I mentioned 1 billion dollars. For the third year in a row, the company is giving away one (1) free slider to anyone who downloads the app in honor of Drake’s birthday. (The rapper and Raptors fan turns 39 today, and the giveaway was on Thursday.)

“We’re celebrating a hugely popular celebrity who matters right now and also gets food into people’s mouths,” says Leon Davoian, chief technology officer at Dave’s Hot Chicken.

Which is really a lot of people. In a typical week, Dave’s sees 20,000 to 25,000 new sign-ups in its loyalty database, Davoyan says. On Thursday alone, the promotion attracted 343,531 new accounts, more than 10 percent of the brand’s total membership in a single day, according to the CTO.

That was enough to knock Sora out of first place for the first time since October 3, an impressive stretch for an app that’s still invite-only. In the first 23 days since its launch, Sora achieved 3.2 million iOS downloads in the United States, according to app analytics firm Sensor Tower. This is a much faster pace than even ChatGPT, which achieved 2.3 million downloads in the US at the same time, although it is similarly viral. (Sora isn’t yet available in the Google Play Store, but it’s coming.) OpenAI declined to comment.

While Sora will likely reclaim the top spot after Drake’s promotion is discontinued, Dave’s Hot Chicken should continue to reap the benefits of its giveaway. Last year, according to Sensor Tower, app downloads in the four weeks following the same marketing campaign were more than 50 percent higher than the month before. All those free sandwiches are worth the long-term gains.