
The App Stores are not “long tail” - dansiepen
http://www.rudebaguette.com/2014/02/25/app-stores-long-tail/
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programminggeek
I'm not sure that the author of the article understands how ecommerce or
search engine marketing work because it is almost exactly the same problem.
The top 5 listings matter the most, the next 5 are much, much smaller, and
everything past that almost completely doesn't matter. That is life on Google.

Pretty much the same reality exists on app stores. The biggest difference is
the relative cost to rank on another keyword or the long term marketing halo
effect that you get in traditional search engines like Google. It costs a lot
more to build an app and rank on a dozen or so keywords.

There absolutely is a long tail, it's just a different distribution curve.

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bsder
No, the problem is I can't get _AT_ the long tail.

Here's an example: what are the top 500 games on the Apple App Store? What are
the top 500-1000 games? What about 1000-1500? What about 10,000-10,500?

I can't find those. So, not only is there no long tail, there is _NO TAIL AT
ALL_.

Sure, if I specifically know the app I want, I can go get it, but I have no
effective search outside that.

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programminggeek
You have the search built in to the app store. A lot of people use that. It's
how a lot of apps get found. Otherwise, there would be only 100 apps
downloaded ever.

Also, Google doesn't show you the top 500 websites on Google per se. They show
you the top for a particular keyword in whatever order they want. People
navigate by both top lists and search.

It's not like app stores are missing a search engine.

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bsder
But you have to know the keyword. Which means that you had to find out about
it from somewhere other than the app store.

For example, once Flappy Bird hit GooTube, yeah, everybody in the universe was
searching for "flappy".

 _Prior_ to that, how do you find Flappy Bird? You don't. That's why a lot of
people were speculating that the Flappy Bird author used several different
methods to spam the review system.

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smoyer
There's another problem with the app stores ... they're crowded with
applications that should have stayed web-sites. I think the problem in the app
stores are more related to the prominence of the front-runners. Nobody goes
looking for an app that's the 100th in a category. So the work of marketing is
still up to you.

If there's truly no long tail, perhaps people will stop creating software to
feed these stores (economics says they won't continue to perform tasks that
have no benefits) but will that solve the problem or create worse ones?

