Apify Category Growth Race: BUSINESS +32% in One Week
Apify Store category growth (7d ending 2026-05-16): BUSINESS grew 32% on actor count (+257 to 1,055). AUTOMATION led absolute add (+259) but only 2% growth on its 12,874 base. SOCIAL_MEDIA led user demand (+13,961). Three races, three leaders.
The Apify Store added 1,635 new actors and 50,436 new 30-day active users in the seven-day window closing 2026-05-16. Both numbers split across 23 tracked categories. Neither splits evenly.
Three different leaderboards emerge depending on which growth metric the question prioritises. The category leading on percentage growth of catalog (BUSINESS, +32%) is not the category leading on absolute new actors (AUTOMATION, +259). Neither is the category leading on new active users (SOCIAL_MEDIA, +13,961). For publishers deciding where to ship next, the difference matters.
Three leaderboards
Percentage actor growth
Among categories with a base of 100+ actors a week ago, the percentage-growth ranking:
| Category | 7d Δ actors | % growth | Base |
|---|---|---|---|
| BUSINESS | +257 | +32.2% | |
| EDUCATION | +34 | +41.5% | |
| MARKETING | +27 | +8.4% | |
| REAL_ESTATE | +108 | +5.7% | |
| NEWS | +66 | +5.5% | |
| MCP_SERVERS | +32 | +5.4% |
(Categories with a base under 100 — SPORTS at 6 actors, GAMES at 8 — produce noisy percentages and are excluded from the headline ranking.)
BUSINESS’s 32% week-on-week catalog growth is the largest move at meaningful base size. The category went from 798 actors to 1,055 in seven days. That is roughly one new BUSINESS actor every forty minutes for a week.
EDUCATION’s 41% growth is similar in shape but operates on a smaller base. Going from 82 to 116 actors is meaningful for publishers in the segment but the absolute volume is one-eighth of BUSINESS’s add.
Absolute actor adds
| Category | 7d Δ actors | % growth | Base |
|---|---|---|---|
| AUTOMATION | +259 | +2.0% | |
| BUSINESS | +257 | +32.2% | |
| DEVELOPER_TOOLS | +193 | +2.6% | |
| LEAD_GENERATION | +175 | +1.8% | |
| REAL_ESTATE | +108 | +5.7% | |
| OTHER | +93 | +2.3% | |
| SEO_TOOLS | +75 | +4.5% |
AUTOMATION leads on absolute new actors (+259) but its base is so large that the growth rate is 2.0%. The category is mature — over 13,000 listings and counting — and adds at a rate that reflects ecosystem maintenance more than land-grab dynamics.
BUSINESS and AUTOMATION sit on opposite ends of the maturity spectrum. They added almost the same absolute number of actors this week. One did it from a base of 798. The other did it from a base of 12,874. BUSINESS is in active formation; AUTOMATION is in steady-state.
User-demand growth
| Category | 7d Δ users | Base users |
|---|---|---|
| SOCIAL_MEDIA | +13,961 | |
| LEAD_GENERATION | +11,933 | |
| AUTOMATION | +5,013 | |
| JOBS | +2,358 | |
| SEO_TOOLS | +2,250 | |
| DEVELOPER_TOOLS | +2,168 | |
| AI | +2,050 | |
| VIDEOS | +1,824 |
The user-demand leaderboard does not look like either of the actor-count leaderboards. SOCIAL_MEDIA added 13,961 30-day active users — more than the next category by a significant margin — on a catalog that only grew by 51 actors (0.76%). That means the demand growth in SOCIAL_MEDIA is concentrated in actors that already existed a week ago, not in new listings. The category is mature on the supply side but still gaining demand on the buyer side.
LEAD_GENERATION shows a similar pattern: +175 new actors but +11,933 new users. The new actors do not explain the new users. The user growth is hitting established LEAD_GENERATION actors.
BUSINESS, the actor-count leader, adds only +433 users on its +257 actors. The new BUSINESS actors are averaging less than 2 users each in their first week — consistent with the long-tail distribution on the Store, where new actors land in the 1–9 user bucket as a default outcome.
What the three leaderboards together mean
| Pattern | Read | Example categories |
|---|---|---|
| High % growth + high absolute adds | Active land grab; new category formation | BUSINESS |
| High absolute adds + low % growth | Mature category; ecosystem steady-state | AUTOMATION, DEVELOPER_TOOLS, LEAD_GENERATION |
| Low actor growth + high user growth | Demand catching up with existing supply | SOCIAL_MEDIA, LEAD_GENERATION |
| Low growth on both | Demand-saturated or declining segment | (none in this week’s data — all 23 categories grew) |
Three of the four patterns are visible in the May 16 data. The fourth (declining) does not show up in any category this week. Every tracked category added both actors and users in absolute terms. The “race” framing is about relative pace, not about which categories are alive.
Density, not growth, predicts new-actor returns
Growth rate is one dimension. Per-actor demand density — sum of category demand divided by category actor count — is the other, and the two correlate less than they should.
The full per-actor density ranking across all 23 categories spans 54× from top to bottom: OPEN_SOURCE 60.4 (inflated by Apify-published free flagships — RAG Web Browser, Web Scraper), TRAVEL 39.6, SOCIAL_MEDIA 38.2, VIDEOS 33.7 at the genuinely efficient mid-tier. LEAD_GENERATION 22.1, JOBS 20.4, AI 16.8, SEO_TOOLS 15.5 in the working-market band. DEVELOPER_TOOLS 8.5, NEWS 8.4, AUTOMATION 8.4, MARKETING 8.1 in the capacity-overhang band. BUSINESS 2.3 at the bottom — the same BUSINESS that leads on percentage actor growth this week.
The implication compounds the growth analysis. BUSINESS publishers landing this week are entering a category with one of the lowest per-actor demand floors on the Store. The 32% catalog growth is real, but it has not been matched by a buyer-side response — yet. AUTOMATION publishers face the inverse: high catalog count, mature 8.4 density, no room for an unremarkable new entrant.
What the three leaderboards together imply
For publishers deciding where to ship next, the three growth metrics combine with density to point at distinct strategies.
TRAVEL and VIDEOS reward craft. Mid-sized catalogs (1,062 and 1,751 actors), 30–40 users-per-actor density, manageable competition. A competent new entrant can plausibly capture 50–200 users without becoming category leader.
LEAD_GENERATION and AUTOMATION punish generic entrants. The Q1 2026 lead-extractors census documented that the segment leader uses one-phrase positioning (“No Cookies”) to clear the density floor. AUTOMATION has no equivalent canonical differentiator and 13,000 existing actors.
BUSINESS is the open-but-empty category. 32% weekly catalog growth from 798 actors means leaders haven’t been established — but the 2.3 density says buyers haven’t arrived either. New entrants get to compete for the first-credible-entrant slot, but the absolute demand reward in the first quarter is small.
SOCIAL_MEDIA tailwinds reach the top 20 only. The +13,961 new SOCIAL_MEDIA users distribute the same power-law shape visible elsewhere — most lands on the top 20 actors. Publishers outside the top 20 see category growth in the aggregate stats, not in their own dashboards.
The aggregate “Apify Store is growing” framing is true at every tier but not at the same rate in every direction.
Sources
- Signal Census pulse: store_pulse.json (data window 2026-05-09 → 2026-05-16; 23 categories, 50,436 new active users, 1,635 new actors)
- Signal Census: Apify’s Long Tail — 57% under 10 users
- Signal Census: Apify Store May 2026 — totals + demand-led phase
- Apify Store categories