
A Christmas iFart explosion: Nearly 40,000 downloads and $30,000 net - jasonlbaptiste
http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/27/a-christmas-ifart-explosion-nearly-40000-downloads-and-30000-net/
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cperciva
I'm now starting to understand why the YC motto is "make something people
want", rather than "make something useful".

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timr
The people who want this will want it for about 15 minutes, then they'll want
something else. It's a fad.

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ReverendBayes
If they pay for it within those fifteen minutes, that is all that matters.

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timr
Only if your goal is to win the lottery. What's left after the last iFart has
puttered out?

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vaksel
everyone should watch the movie idiocracy....that's where we are heading at
breakneck speeds

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kirubakaran
Steve Jobs:

"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy.
The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older,
you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people
exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is
optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the
networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the
truth."

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html>

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asnyder
I suspect the revenue will continue to spike over the next few weeks as new
iPhone/iTouch owners get acquainted with their devices.

I also suspect that with these numbers an iBelch app must be in the works.

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wallflower
The team who launched iFart is an example of how the success (you can call it
that - $0.99 is perfect price for people seeing it in AppStore on their new
iPhones - will be very difficult to unseat iFart) was probably not an
accident.

<http://friendfeed.com/joelcomm>

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xelfer
I'm wondering how accurate this article is. I'm an iPhone developer, and the
iTunes connect website where you monitor your download statistics has been
down since the 24th for a 4 day scheduled outage. It's still down now:
<http://itunesconnect.apple.com/>. I can't see any possible way they could
know how many downloads they've had.

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pmorici
If the app contacts their web servers after it gets installed or in the course
of use.

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matthew-wegner
We do this with our iPhone games, like Raptor Copter (hunt velicoraptors in
your Chinook helicopter!). It's part of our achievements/leaderboards
framework, so we kept it in, but it also lets us compare the total number of
sales to total iPhone device ids in our database. Piracy isn't a big problem,
and we generally don't care anyway, but the data is available.

We had the scrolling LED sign in our office rattle off sales in real-time,
which was fun for awhile.

As a quick piracy note, you can also detect pirated iPhone apps this way:
<http://thwart-ipa-cracks.blogspot.com/2008/11/detection.html>

Back to iFart--I can't imagine many people would pirate a farting $0.99 app,
versus a more expensive, more popular game. Maybe 1% or less?

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xelfer
That's quite useful, thanks!

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nazgulnarsil
I think people here read too much into outliers.

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mother
I will never be rich.

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redorb
probably not

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undertoad
The virtual beer looks to be doing well too, at $1.99.

