U.S. vs International downloads affecting ranking? One thing that just occurred to me is that different apps may achieve different rankings even if they have the same number of total downloads due to differences in U.S. vs international downloads (just a hypothesis). Our app is pretty popular internationally. Today I posted a news item on our blog about how Spazzle is taking off in Taiwan (see: http://blog.fairladymedia.com/2010/01/11/spazzle-takes-off-in-asian-countries/). Even though our download volume is almost double our pre-Christmas baseline, we have not moved up in the rankings on the U.S. App store. This is probably due to the fact that most of the new downloads are international. This is one other reason that other people's numbers may not always match up with ours... our numbers are based on a minimum 20% international downloads. If your game is primarily popular in your home country, then it will take fewer total downloads to climb the charts. Any others have experiences with changes in U.S. vs. international downloads?
W.r.t. US v.s. international downloads, it seems some countries are favoring apps from their own country - even though it's not immediately visible where a game is from. My free ad-supported Mazer game (see sig) is being downloaded way more often in The Netherlands, even in absolute numbers. I have no idea why that is. W.r.t. ad spending: I noticed a steep decrease in fill rate after the holiday season, so I added a simple banner for my paid app "Sjoelen" (also see sig). I thought "my own ad is better than no ad at all" and to my surprise, sales of that app increased by a factor of ten. I don't have enough data to see whether that's a structural effect (that would be nice )
House ads We're doing the same thing by increasing the number of house ads relative to paid ads when eCPMs are low (as they have been since the holidays). Great idea!
I would treat download stats for the last week of the year with great suspicion. For our main app (Tap Studio), we saw downloads more than double starting right at Christmas. We didn't do anything to make this happen. Our ranking did not change at all. I think all apps saw their downloads double after Christmas as all those new iPod touchs and iPhones came online.
Christmas Excellent point That was the most recent data available and cited in the articles linked to in our blog post. You're right about downloads doubling over Christmas, but I haven't really seen any new data from devs following Christmas with new numbers. Our downloads haven't really dropped much yet.. Using the higher numbers would make our estimates high, which is good news for most people as it might actually cost less to get into the Top 25 than we're estimating
Major review sites Touch Arcade is the one we've gotten the biggest bump in sales from. Pocket Gamer, TUAW and 148Apps are others that different devs have had success with.
Its damn hard to get any preview/review from the sites mentioned. Slide2Play and Pocketgamer.co.uk were the (bigger) one that - at least - answered to an earlier request of mine.
E covered by toucharcade, you either have to have a game with absurd amounts of hype or great graphics gameplay am charm. I have a feeling your game might be covered on TA. I mean, it's lemming on the iPhone and iPod touch!
Would be great, lets see. And hey, you dont need to hype my little game that much anymore - you have already secured your promocode. Mmhh, although...please go on...
