70 Cents Put Me on the Mac App Store Charts | Hacker News Reader

70 Cents Put Me on the Mac App Store Charts

lapcatsoftware.com

Misleading title: this is about how the author's app reached a high rank in the Mac App Store for a specific category yet he only saw 70 cents in profit as a result (one sale).

Really misleading title, and it's the title of the linked article. I don't see a way to parse the actual title to mean the author only saw 70 cents in profit.

"70 cents [in revenue was enough to] put me on the Mac App Store Charts". No different from "100,000 downloads made me #1 on the list".

It's very different than your proposed—albeit much better—alternate headline, as revenue isn't the only driver of store rankings. It appears dollars are a very small measurement for general category rankings (there's a different category for "Top Grossing"), since free apps also rank.

Having a headline of "One download was enough to get me to #18 on the app store" is not only clearer, it's also arguably more compelling.

FWIW I thought the article was about how the author reached a top rank by paying someone or investing in ads for 70 cents.

Yes I think your title is better.

But the charts in question are "Top Paid" and "Top Grossing". So it does seem like a very odd result.

From the article:

> if you take it upon yourself to publicly rip on one poor indie developer, then you are a malicious, pathetic troll who needs to take a hard look at yourself while trying to choke back the vomit. There's no lower scum of the earth than someone who would step on another person when they're down. You have this in writing, and you can quote it back at any villain who ignores my disclaimer.

What does it mean to 'publicly rip' on someone? Who knows. It's not objective, and yet we already have a call to vilify these people as the lowest scum on the earth.

I don't like comments like this because they divide us and encourage us to start purposefully creating single-issue litmus tests where if you fail---you're evil.

That's not good for a community such as our own, where criticism, technical inquiry, and practical business acumen is valued.

It is certainly right to censure those who go too far in their criticism, but only to the point of calling them rude, improper, and distracting from conversation. They are not heinous villains, they are impolite.

I didn't like it either. I work hard on shit that bombs out all the time -- it's just part of the game. You accept it for what it is and keep trying. In general, you put shit on the Internet, you take heat. It's just so cheap for others to give, so it's your responsibility to block out the noise--not everyone else's to not dish it.

That's actually a quite good website style.

Very readable, loads fast, no popups and no social sharing.

I don't know, 260 characters per line isn't exactly the pinnacle of readable typography, and those screenshots become extremely confusing side by side against a white background – you can't tell where one ends and the next begins.

It seems they took a cue from http://motherfuckingwebsite.com when they maybe should have looked at http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com instead.

Some people just don't care about how it looks as long it's readable (to a degree).

If you are not doing website design as a job, and you shun frameworks, and it's just your personal bit of space, then I don't see anything wrong with doing a 'Save As...' in Word and calling it 'index.html' (for example).

I too shun web-frameworks (as a hobbyist, you don't learn anything by using click-to-run frameworks), but the downside is: Is it worth spending hours cranking out a pretty layout, just for the 3 people who might accidentally read your site that month? No, not really.

But that's exactly what I wrote. It's not readable. It's hard to understand what these screenshots show because they appear to merge.

I hoped the two links would make my point – you just need to add two or three CSS declarations to make your raw HTML look nerdy and cool instead of obstinate. This is seconds, not hours of work: add a max-width and set your images to display block, maybe with a border so I can tell where it ends.

Nice one.

So the next question is did the ranking snow ball more revenue, or is the story ranking has a steep falloff AND it has no marketing value.

There isn't much volume on a sub-category like Social Networking apps on the Mac Store.

A top 30~ Grossing app on iPhone in the US grosses around $4000 per day, on the other hand.

What's the disparity from top 30 to top 10? $4K/day doesn't sound like much if it's only going to be for a couple weeks.

The 30th app consistently makes about $4k~ / day (in the social category). The 10th makes 10-15k~/day. About 4-5x the number to get other countries.

This is the social network category in one country on one device -- overall worldwide a dozen or so apps gross >$1m/day.

Why is this surprising? 1) Mac App Store (not the iOS App Store), so the volume of apps available and download counts is WAY lower. 2) A category where most apps are free, so by even existing as a paid app in this category you are going to stand out.

It is pretty sad that the math works out this way, but I think it is perfectly explainable.

That's life in any media. Where revenue for a category is very top heavy.

You can't compete with free

Now true at all. Paid products which are better than free offerings can compete easily. Broadcast TV has been free forever and people still line up to give cable companies $700 a year for TV.

I agree but in many categories you can't compete with free.

The author was in paid social networking apps.

Oh yes you can. Can I get you a bottle of water?

24 and 36 now..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com