ARPU

An app with 100,000 monthly actives, 5,000 subscribers, and $50,000 of monthly revenue has an ARPU of $0.50 and an ARPPU of $10. Twenty times apart, same business, same month.

The gap between those two numbers is the conversion rate, which is why the choice of metric decides which team gets credited or blamed. ARPU moves when more of the audience converts, when the audience grows without converting, or when prices change. ARPPU moves only on the last of those. A quarter spent on paywall testing shows up cleanly in ARPU and barely registers in ARPPU. A quarter spent introducing an annual plan does the reverse. Read one and call it the other, and the work looks like it did nothing.

Neither number is useful undivided. ARPU on a business selling across CTV, web, and mobile blends audiences with different conversion economics and different store terms, so the blended figure can rise while the platform that carries most of the audience gets worse. The same is true across markets once prices are localized. Splitting the metric by platform, market, and acquisition cohort is where it starts answering questions, and that split is the kind of subscription-aware reporting Insights exists to give alongside the funnel it came from. Paired with churn rate, ARPPU is also the input that turns a subscriber into a lifetime value estimate rather than a headcount.