

There’s no ‘organic’ on the App Store - erickerr
http://yardley.ca/2011/03/11/theres-no-organic-in-the-app-store/

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Tycho
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.

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consultutah
What I want to know is the cost to be in the top 100 if you purchase installs.

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alex_c
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.

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YooLi
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.

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biot
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.

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aresant
Rovio just released another update, app store defaults to show reviews only
for the most current version.

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biot
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.

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wkasel
Its 20-30k for paid apps. But often, if the app sucks - it won't stay on top
very long.

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wmf
Can anyone provide some background? How do you "purchase application
installs"?

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gyardley
I should probably write a blog post on this too.

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.

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nobody_nowhere
Interesting! That's a pretty clever way to goose your CPA performance.

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gyardley
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.

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nobody_nowhere
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 :)

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alexbosworth
We have been contacted by these people who sell access to the 'Top' list.

Zero 'organic' is overstating it, but there definitely is a reason that there
are terrible apps in the top paid lists.

