AirPods earned 1 out of each 4 dollars from wireless headphones sold online in December

Market research firm Slice Intelligence estimated that AirPods, Apple’s $159 wireless earphones, took one out of each four dollars spent online on wireless headphones in December 2016. Launched on December 13, AirPods grabbed an estimated 26 percent share of online revenue in the wireless headphone market, beating out Apple’s premium audio brand Beats which captured an estimated 15.4 percent of the market, down from 24.1 percent between the start of 2015 and December 13.

In other words, Apple has managed to capture one-fourth of the wireless headphones market since the launch of AirPods. And if you also count Beats sales, the Cupertino company took almost 40 percent of online revenue in the wireless headphone market.

The wireless headphone market has grown steadily over the years, accounting for half of all online headphone sales in 2016. Just ask Beats, which dominated the wireless headphone market for the last several years. Back in December 2015, wireless headphones accounted for half the combined sales of corded and wireless headphones.

In just twelve months, that share has risen to as much as 75 percent. In other words, three out of each four dollars spent online on headphones went to makers of wireless headphones in December 2016.

The AirPods premiere was the biggest headphones sales day in 2016.

“On the December 13, the day of the AirPods release, spending on headphones was ten times greater than the pre-holiday average for 2016,” reads the survey. “It was the largest single day of online headphone spending last year.”

A whopping 85 percent of those who’ve purchased AirPods since launch are male. This is similar to the gender breakdown Slice reported for the MacBook Pro release in October. Male AirPods buyers also tend to be younger than their female counterparts.

In addition, more than one-third of the males who bought AirPods are millennials.

Slice has a panel of over 4.4 million online shoppers who voluntarily give Slice’s software access to their inbox. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Slice can map the entire purchase graph. The methodology may not be the most accurate, but it still provides an interesting insight into sales performance of AirPods.

Source: Slice Intelligence