4 ms·

The App Stores are not “long tail”

4 points by dansiepen 13y ago

smoyer 13y ago
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?
programminggeek 13y ago
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.
- bsder 13y ago
  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.
  - programminggeek 13y ago
    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.
    - bsder 13y ago
      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.

4 points by dansiepen 13y ago

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?

programminggeek 13y ago

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.

bsder 13y ago
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.
- programminggeek 13y ago
  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.
  - bsder 13y ago
    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.