Just noticed your app is priced at 1.99$...perhaps that's why you didn't require close to a 1000 ratings for 10k in revenue?
Nope, I'm talking about ratings. Only a small percentage of people who bought the game leave a rating or review. And it seems negative ratings may affect that percentage, causing a higher ratio. TanZen Lite has been downloaded over a million times, but there's only about 30,000 ratings in the US, and several thousand more in other countries.
Gotcha, good to know you meant ratings... you're right about the skewing related to the number of stars. I believe they've implemented a system where you'd leave a rating when removing an app. So theoretically, you'd have more folks removing an app they don't find appealing anymore and hence the lower Ratings:Revenue ratio. Summing it up, a great app with maybe 200 or so ratings might earn around 10kusd whereas a not-so-great (maybe even borderline boring) app would require 1000 or so ratings (with a 2.5 star average perhaps) to reach 10k in revenue. [all of this however at 0.99$, ones that are priced higher will have greater earnings numbers] Just trying to bring out the relationship between ratings and revenue, pointless for some perhaps.
There are always going to be exceptions, but I'd say any game that has a large number of positive ratings, is making a fair amount of money. And of course, the duration it took to earn those ratings also comes into play. It took around 11 months for TanZen to collect its 1900 ratings, and today still makes a fair amount of money each day, but certainly not enough to live off of.
Would you happen to be talking about the sales for 6/18? Hate to be the one to deliver the bad news, but this morning's numbers were in error. A few of the countries were giving double numbers, including the US. It's fixed now.
Well, that explains why I supposedly had so many updates on the 18th...it's been about 20/day for weeks now and suddenly it was more like 40.... (Speaking of which, that "only 10% of people update" thing I heard about a while ago is way off, at least for me; it's more like 70%.) --Eric
That's about what I've been seeing with TanZen as well. Of course, it's hard to say how much of that 70% are just people who hit Update All on their giant list of apps, and never actually play the game anymore.
True, but at least they haven't deleted it, which counts for something, I would think. I do think it's interesting that there's a small but steady stream of updates weeks after it was released, although the vast majority were naturally downloaded within the first week. --Eric
Do many people actually delete apps though? I remove games from my iPhone all the time (there will never be enough space for all the apps I like), but I don't think I've ever actually deleted an app from iTunes.
Not sure about people in general, but I do. I know they don't really take up much space, but any apps I'm quite sure I won't touch again, I just delete, so as to get rid of the clutter. Mostly these are lite versions which I'm done with, either because they didn't interest me or I bought the full version. --Eric
