So if you decided you must have a Top 100 app at all costs, just how much would “all costs” be exactly? Well, according to those AdWhirl folks, the answer is: $1,875 a day!
Recently, after passing over 1500 iPhone apps across over 1000 publishers, we decided to investigate what strategies successful developers were employing in order to get their apps noticed. What we discovered was that, although only a handful of apps were achieving critical success, many of their publishers (Storm8, Trippert Labs, Digital Chocolate, I-play, Webworks, etc.) were the same guys releasing success after success, and these publishers weren’t all large brands with huge marketing budgets.
So we dived into our ad data and determined that it was actually possible to simply “purchase” enough ad units to brute force an app into the top 100. The cost? Unfortunately, around $1875 a day in ad campaigns.
How do you come up with that? From the well worth reading downloadable PDF report,
You need about 2500 daily downloads to crack the top 100 in a popular category (the iPhoneapp POW by Inedible Software hit top 60s in Entertainment with 2800 daily downloads).
With untargeted ad impressions converting at a high estimate of 0.2%, we need 1.25 million ad impressions to get 2500 downloads.
Ad networks typically sell inventory on a CPC basis, at a minimum of 5 cents per click. With top networks performing at around 3% CTR, 1.25 million ad impressions generate 37,500 clicks.
This translates to a one day minimum cost of $1875, which is probably too expensive for many developers.
Indeed. And should you think their vested interests are overstating that, here’s an anecdotal agreement:
Fortunately, I know someone from the original Grocery iQ team. Grocery iQ was able to win the triple crown of apps: a Top 100 ranking, Apple Pick of the Week, and being featured under “What’s Hot.” What was its secret to success? When Apple released its Top Apps of 2008, Grocery iQ was in the top 50. I think that makes the Grocery iQ team qualified to talk about App Store success.
Jason’s first response to the $1,875 per day price tag: “Yup, that’s about right!” The Grocery iQ team dabbled with paid ad networks and calculated that to make the top 100, they’d have to spend close to that amount for at least two weeks. “Small indie developers simply don’t have that kind of money,” Jason said.
So there you go then. Our general impression had been that people who had tried buying ads for their iPhone apps were completely unenthused about the results … and now we have some hard numbers to back that up!
Colophon:
And we’re just about done with The Great WordPress Client Test, ch-ch-ch-checking out
Qumana 3.2.4!
This one really pushes our definitional requirement of native application, since although it is technically an OS X application package, it’s a bundled Java application. Which means that conventional editing shortcuts don’t work, formatted pasting is apparently nonexistent, and in general it’s ugly and clunky. On the other hand, it actually works the closest to the way we’d like our ideal workflow to go of any of the clients we’ve tried! Not insignificant, that. And you definitely can’t beat the price, given that it’s free; apparently they’re providing this client gratis on the theory that you’ll click the ‘Insert Ad’ toolbar button frequently after joining up with their Adgenta ad service. Which doesn’t interest us particularly. And although we’d really like to give it the much higher rating it’s workflow design deserves, there’s just too much crappiness about a Java app and its not playing nice with content sources for it to rate better than a 5/10. Although, if they ever did come up with a native version that played nicely with others, that would oh roughly double, I’d say…
Continue Reading →JUL