

AppCraver Offers to Review My App for $50 - ObieJazz
http://www.millertinkerhess.com/?p=23

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pg
"How do you get on the Top Paid Apps list? You sell lots of apps. How do you
sell lots of apps? You get yourself on the Top Paid Apps list."

They could fix this by using exponential decay like Reddit and HN do with
stories on the front page.

~~~
weaksauce
That's a good solution.

Another solution is to offer a few different top paid lists for each of the
common selling price ranges. So have one at 0-4.99, another at 5-10, etc....
That way some of the more expensive ones are treated quasi fairly.

Also the ratings should be weighted towards the people that actually purchased
the app.

~~~
pg
Or they could sort the list by expected return. I.e. by the chance of selling
a copy times the sale price. That would also maximize Apple's revenue.

~~~
DenisM
That requires expertise, not unlike, say, picking a winnig startup to fund.
:-)

~~~
pg
I meant they could do it based on past data.

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ObieJazz
Normally I'm not a fan of self-posting but I wanted to follow up with the
discussion that went on here last weekend on this subject
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=472408>) and let anyone who's interested
know that AppCraver was the offending party.

~~~
silencio
aha, you outed the site in question :) which was the same one who offered the
same deal to us..and they still haven't reviewed our app one month later.
backlogged indeed that they can't catch up with so many other sites that do
just fine?..

i took a closer look at the site and their traffic after an informative
discussion with another hn reader via email, and i'm really wondering if any
devs that paid for this found it worthwhile.

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DenisM
Excellent. Now we know all the develoeprs who paid for their apps to be
reviewed.

~~~
ObieJazz
I'm not sure that's the case. Although it's likely that many of the app
reviews on AppCraver were paid for, there's no way of telling that a
particular one was. For example, there are a couple of negative reviews on the
site which I imagine weren't paid for.

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jacquesm
I think that the best way to make a lot of $ on the iphone is to price your
app $1 or thereabouts. Better to sell 1M people your $1 app than 5000 * $10.

~~~
tlrobinson
I think it all depends on the kind of app. If it's a silly little app that
anyone could find amusing then sure. If it's a useful app that only a certain
subset of iPhone users will find useful, then maybe not.

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BRadmin
"If Apptism is accepting money from developers, they ought to say so
prominently at the top of each paid review."

That should read AppCraver, not Apptism, right?

~~~
ObieJazz
Yes. Thank you for pointing that out—that typo's been fixed.

Speaking of Apptism, I like that site a lot, except that I can't figure out
what those little numbers in red circles mean. I'm sure they explain on their
site somewhere, just haven't found it yet.

