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Fun fact: if your app has a reasonable conversion rate, you can basically buy your spot on that list temporarily by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on
by mdonahoe 9y ago
Fun fact: if your app has a reasonable conversion rate, you can basically buy your spot on that list temporarily by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising.
It usually isn't sustainable, but can be helpful during launch of a new game to make sure it gets attention. I think it was easier than cracking the Top Free list, since fewer apps have IAP.
The ad team at my previous game company would do this and not tell the rest of the rank-and-file employees. We'd be psyched to see our app in the top grossing list... meanwhile the ad team would be spending more money than we were earning.
- idunno246 9y agoyears ago, the dollar amounts werent that large even. my game company bought us all gift cards and told us all to each buy a couple hundred dollars in our app to bump a couple spots. another interesting thing, basically everyone on the top grossing chart knows roughly what the others are making - as you adjust ad spend you adjust your revenue, and when you pass someone you know how much they are making. (or just through word of mouth or multiple games) even more crazy was buying tens or hundreds of thousands of downloads to get to the top of the free charts from bots, before apple claimed to be cracking down, which then triggered a couple percent of that in legitimate downloads. those 'organic' downloads from the charts ended up costing a fraction of what paid ads would have cost if you average the bot download cost over them. then marketing/coo lying about not using bots......dont know why they thinks they can hide stuff from the engineers
- gberger 9y ago> my game company bought us all gift cards and told us all to each buy a couple hundred dollars in our app to bump a couple spots. Is this allowed?
- koolba 9y agoSure why not? It's like opening a restaurant and paying people to eat there for a while to generate fake social proof.
- freehunter 9y agoFake it until you make it. It's natural conclusion of Doing Things That Don't Scale: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html http://paulgraham.com/ds.html First 100 people through the door get 15% off! Beta testers get the full game half price! And of course, authors do this on the NYT Best Seller list all the time... buy enough copies of your own book at enough book stores and you'll shoot right to the top: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Best_Seller_list#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Best_Seller...
- michaelmior 9y agoThe first two examples of discounts you cited are very different from just paying to directly inflate your ratings.
- freehunter 9y agoI'm trying to show a progression from "discounts" to "more discounts" to "we'll give it to you free just to get more 'sales'" That's why I called it a natural conclusion. The only difference between giving someone a coupon to entice them to buy something from you and buying it yourself is how much money you're losing in the short term. It's on the same spectrum, just at different ends.
- jakobegger 9y agoNo, this is not a spectrum. Offering a discount or giving copies away is marketing. Buying copies yourself and pretending someone else did is fraud.
- je42 9y agoThis only works ( and also for Appstores) if your expected LTV is high enough that the real users will bring in enough money to recoup the initial spent. If your book/game is crap, the it will fall again, you lost your money and your spot in the charts.
- 9y ago
- Angostura 9y ago> >everyone on the top grossing chart knows roughly what the others are making ... or what they're spending on advertising :)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- zeroer 9y agoI know who you're talking about.