How $96,000 can buy you a top 10 ranking in the U.S. app store

This appears to be a marketing/advertisement piece so take it with a grain of salt.

you experimented with appgratis, trademob, or who? curious to know who didn't work for you. if you don't mind sharing, was it a game, or what kind of app was it? thanks!

I experimented with AppyFridays in April on Mac App Store (free for a weekend) and the app got spot n.1 in its category in US, Italy, France, etc and made it definitely in the first 10 worldwide (Music category app, got ~10K downloads per day), bouncing back (slowly) to the normal (5$) price made the downloads return to the "a few per day" it was before (may be slightly more).

On the plus side, the promo was free (i.e.: no additional money to be part of it) and they had no requests for revenue sharing or the like.

Just a data point, I think that the app in itself plays a role... gaming and iOS are probably a better market for this kind of promo. (and, yes, app discovery is a serious problem).

I completely agree. It's honestly quite hard to believe that they have calculated it to be precisely 80k downloads.

Yeah, I've heard it's really tough for freemium games now, because to get into the charts (to get organics) you have to compete with the ridiculous spending of the companies that are already there.

We were featured by Apple with our paid game (iPad only), and it got us up the charts quite fast (nowhere near top 10 though), but even with that, over a month we slowly tailed back to single digit sales. We didn't put much money into advertising though. But anyway, Facebook ads are working quite well for us now (much better than adwords).

Everybody who matters can put that kind of money up. Remember, the more expensive it gets, the more the ad space is worth for publishers and the more they can earn. As advertising gets more expensive, publishers earn more and can ultimately do more.

I think it's not 1.20 for a paid install. Buying users can cost quite a bit more for paid apps (for instance I know from googling that Flurry's 'buy user' service doesn't work very well for paid apps).

But in the end, it's just a mad rush to be on the charts to get organics. Without that, it's kind of difficult with apps to make your money back from ad spending. It's not like you are advertising a hotel room where one purchase through your adwords can net you a 100+ dollars (plus all the room service that person will consume!). In apps, typically, you lose money buying users (if you were only counting ad-spend vs revenue from those users that installed).

The CPI is usually extracted out from CPM, and you are actually charged cpm(theres a couple that charge cpi/cpc). So since a free app has a much higher install rate from the view, it lowers the cpi.

The idea is for 100k they'll put youre add in front of 800k users, and 80k will install if its free. but only 1k will install if it costs money. numbers totally made up.

The ones that do charge cpi, if your conversion rate isn't high enough that theyre profiting[since they're paying per impression or could show an ad more likely to convert], theyll just kill your app and not advertise it.

Ultimately if the game is quality probably. Each day on the top 10 brings in 10s of thousands, if you can hold out a week or two and have in-app purchases it can clear the cost. I am not a fan of buying success but sometimes buying notice is sometimes required. I have been through a few free-app-a-days and almost always it works, especially if the game is good and you have other games that get overspill.

You don't just throw money at things. You take a calculated risk.

So before this spending on paid installs happens you need to have metrics on the Customer Life Time Value (CLTV). Now since you are buying users this calculation could be off.

If:

Customer Life Time Value > Cost Per User Aquisition

Then:

Spend money to acquire customers

So if you rank high and word of mouths spreads then you hopefully have organic growth where user acquisition costs equate to $0.