It depends how many apps you're competing against. There's hardly any apps for development/coding, so if you publish something half-decent, your target audience will know about it. Of course that target audience will be much smaller than that for 'social games' or whatever. To publish a social game app, unless it falls into a readily identifiable niché, then it could languish in obscurity regardless of quality.
I remember seeing some posts on the iphonedevsdk(?) forums promising to get any free app to the top 100 for something on the order of $3000-$5000. I suspect most of those use a few thousand iTunes accounts and automated downloads.
It's hard to find 'organic' in a lot of things. As soon as there is money to be made, someone will figure out how to exploit that 'organic'. Ask Google with their search results. It's the basis of advertising--he with the most money gets his product in front of the most eyeballs.
That said, I would love some organic in the App Store as well, but every scenario I can imagine to accomplish it, I can also imagine how to exploit.
Something I've been wondering about is why Angry Birds has under 100 reviews while Smurfs Village has over 1200, many of which are nonsense like one which was a 5-star review that said only "ok". I know some apps do a better job at encouraging reviews, but the sheer volume and garbage quality of many of the reviews makes me wonder if they're offering in-game rewards as payment.
Yes, this is correct. I just checked and Angry Birds has 267,000 reviews across all versions. It's just surprising the number of reviews for Smurfs Village: 71,000 in total for a game that is 4 months old as of today. Maybe this just highlights my inability to understand the appeal of click-wait-repeat style of games.
> many of which are nonsense like one which was a 5-star review that said only "ok"
I recently got notified by the iPhone Things app with a message along the lines of "most people only rate the app when they delete it. If you're using Things, why not rate it right now?" and a button to go directly to the review page. I had no idea until I had clicked through that a textbox would be involved; I was expecting to just click on some stars and go back to my app.
Essentially you buy inventory from a specialized ad network, and they charge you by the install, using UDIDs to match the users who click on the ads with the users who installed the app. That way you get charged only for the users they actually sent you.
Most application ads convert poorly, so the companies doing the most volume in this space run 'incentivized' ads, where the user gets some virtual currency for installing the app.
For example, if they're playing 'Tap Widget', which normally charges for widgets, the user can get a widget for free by installing an application.
The user wants the widget, so they install the advertiser's application. The ad network sees the install and tells Tap Widget to give the user his widget. The advertiser gets a new user, so the ad network gets paid. The ad network takes their cut and passes the rest of the money on to Tap Widget. This works out pretty well for all parties.
I own a chunk of Flurry, one of the companies that specializes in this. There are others.
Thanks! I can't take credit for it, though - incentivizing CPA offers was probably first done by Gratis Network a decade ago. That was for actual physical goods - complete five offers, refer three friends who do the same, get a PlayStation or an iPod.
Later, the model was adapted for Facebook games, with the offers remaining the same (insurance quotes, etc.) but virtual currency used as the bait. On iOS, the focus is on application installs, but it's still pretty similar to the Facebook model.
I can only recommend the model under very particular circumstances, since what you gain in conversion rate you lose in traffic quality. If users are shown a list of ten different offers, they'll pick the offer that sounds most appealing, but at the end of the day they really just want the incentive. Companies like Gratis were constantly churning through their advertisers, as each advertiser figured out that most of the traffic they bought couldn't care less about their products.
On iOS, the advertiser churn doesn't happen, because the installs are just a proxy for front-page App Store placement - and at the moment, anyway, App Store placement doesn't have anything to do with application usage. Because of this, the advertisers get what they want, consider any application usage they get a bonus, and the incentivized model keeps working. If Apple were to change the 'top free' list to take into account time spent in app, the model would have to be changed.
Apple probably doesn't care much about how much you use the apps, as long as you come back to the store. Even for the free apps, they're probably thinking primarily about store engagement rather than app engagement.
As an apple shareholder, I like revenue optimization, but I can imagine it's pretty frustrating if you have a horse in the app race. Or out of a general sense of fairness :)