I just wanted to point out that that last graph is outrageously misleading. The bars start at around -20,000, which makes the 11x difference between the USA and Spain bars appear to be only a 4x.
I doubt this is intentionally misleading, since I can see no incentive for doing so, but it just goes to show that you have to be careful with infographics - they're very easy to lie with, even accidentally.
I participated in Free App of the Day promotion about 4 years ago. For the week that it was featured, we experienced about 360% growth and made it to the top ten in our category. Free App of the Day took a percentage of our profits afterwards for a few weeks riding the long tail. In the end, it was win win for both of us.
We experimented at work with them and yes it "worked". Thousands downloaded the app in India, China and Egypt, drove us to #2 in our category, then 2 days later back to the basement again. Not worth it. I hope Apple kills these folks.
you experimented with appgratis, trademob, or who? curious to know who didn't work for you. if you don't mind sharing, was it a game, or what kind of app was it? thanks!
I experimented with AppyFridays in April on Mac App Store (free for a weekend) and the app got spot n.1 in its category in US, Italy, France, etc and made it definitely in the first 10 worldwide (Music category app, got ~10K downloads per day), bouncing back (slowly) to the normal (5$) price made the downloads return to the "a few per day" it was before (may be slightly more).
On the plus side, the promo was free (i.e.: no additional money to be part of it) and they had no requests for revenue sharing or the like.
Just a data point, I think that the app in itself plays a role... gaming and iOS are probably a better market for this kind of promo. (and, yes, app discovery is a serious problem).
If I were Apple, I'd be kind of embarrassed that my organic ranking system could be gamed this easily. I mean, there's a huge cottage industry (with its own jargon and professionals) built around figuring out the exact wizardry needed to get your web page highly ranked, yet on the AppStore, apparently the only thing that drives their ranking is "number of downloads".
I wonder if the result of all of these "discovery" apps will be a more complicated ranking system from Apple that takes into account more than just downloads...
The organic install part of this calculation seems pretty suspect. In order to get the organic lift mentioned in the article the app would need to be pretty highly ranked _and_ likely sustain that rank for a while before getting 65%-100% the additional installs.
Whenever running a burst campaign it is important to follow it up with sustained installs afterwards to try and maintain the rank for as long as possible to attempt to get some of the organic lift mentioned. It does not simply happen instantly.
I don't think it's a surprise that "advertising works". In any market (iOS or bars of soap), spending money up front on commercials/ads/promotion gets you some sales, and the rest happens through word-of-mouth, social sharing, social proof, etc.
$96K is a lot of money to spend if your goal is a top 10 non-game app. Not everyone can put up that kind of money.
And the more people do that (buying installs to kick off a campaign), the more expensive it becomes and more difficult to get in the top 10.
Yeah, I've heard it's really tough for freemium games now, because to get into the charts (to get organics) you have to compete with the ridiculous spending of the companies that are already there.
We were featured by Apple with our paid game (iPad only), and it got us up the charts quite fast (nowhere near top 10 though), but even with that, over a month we slowly tailed back to single digit sales. We didn't put much money into advertising though. But anyway, Facebook ads are working quite well for us now (much better than adwords).
Everybody who matters can put that kind of money up. Remember, the more expensive it gets, the more the ad space is worth for publishers and the more they can earn. As advertising gets more expensive, publishers earn more and can ultimately do more.
So how does this work for paid apps? If you sell your app for 2.99 and you're paying 1.20 an install, aren't you making money? I know I'm missing something here because otherwise anyone could pay for infinite installs and make infinite money.
The CPI is usually extracted out from CPM, and you are actually charged cpm(theres a couple that charge cpi/cpc). So since a free app has a much higher install rate from the view, it lowers the cpi.
The idea is for 100k they'll put youre add in front of 800k users, and 80k will install if its free. but only 1k will install if it costs money. numbers totally made up.
The ones that do charge cpi, if your conversion rate isn't high enough that theyre profiting[since they're paying per impression or could show an ad more likely to convert], theyll just kill your app and not advertise it.
I think it's not 1.20 for a paid install. Buying users can cost quite a bit more for paid apps (for instance I know from googling that Flurry's 'buy user' service doesn't work very well for paid apps).
But in the end, it's just a mad rush to be on the charts to get organics. Without that, it's kind of difficult with apps to make your money back from ad spending. It's not like you are advertising a hotel room where one purchase through your adwords can net you a 100+ dollars (plus all the room service that person will consume!). In apps, typically, you lose money buying users (if you were only counting ad-spend vs revenue from those users that installed).
It's a shame that the App Store is becoming this commercialized. One of the best things about it in the early days was the fact that indie games could get noticed internationally. Sure we get games like Infinity Blade but indie developers gave us Tiny Wings.
Maybe Apple will implement something similar to Steam, where this is still possible.
Yes, and I think it's true of many platforms. It's best to be there in the beginning, before the flood haha. Look at Youtube, it was much easier to become a Youtube celebrity (or just garner MANY views) if you were on there since/near the beginning.
How many actual sales would $96000 worth of paid installs ultimately translate into for an app that isn't particularly original, addictive or brilliant. Would it even make the $96000 back before sinking back down the rankings without trace?
You don't just throw money at things. You take a calculated risk.
So before this spending on paid installs happens you need to have metrics on the Customer Life Time Value (CLTV). Now since you are buying users this calculation could be off.
If:
Customer Life Time Value > Cost Per User Aquisition
Then:
Spend money to acquire customers
So if you rank high and word of mouths spreads then you hopefully have organic growth where user acquisition costs equate to $0.
Ultimately if the game is quality probably. Each day on the top 10 brings in 10s of thousands, if you can hold out a week or two and have in-app purchases it can clear the cost. I am not a fan of buying success but sometimes buying notice is sometimes required. I have been through a few free-app-a-days and almost always it works, especially if the game is good and you have other games that get overspill.
I doubt this is intentionally misleading, since I can see no incentive for doing so, but it just goes to show that you have to be careful with infographics - they're very easy to lie with, even accidentally.