App Store success: It helps if Apple likes you

Posted by Joel Johnson, April 22, 2009 10:28 AM | permalink

Enjoymentland has published their sales data for the first month of Locovore, their produce awareness application for the iPhone. It looks like if you can score a modest sales success (#64 in "Top 100 Paid Apps" for that month) and get featured on the front page of the App Store, you can pull in about $12k net. A healthy amount, but only if it keeps up.

As you can see, even the best press wasn't as effective as being blessed by the Apple Marketing team. Not sure what that means in terms of how to best market apps... basically, it leaves all of us at the unbeatable first law of marketing and promotion: build something interesting.

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Discussion

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#1 posted by Anonymous, April 22, 2009 12:15 PM

Hmm. I wonder what sort of "mutually beneficial agreement" Apple would take to feature an, er, deserved special attention?

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#2 posted by danilo, April 22, 2009 12:29 PM

Can vouch for this. Tallymander (tallymander.com) pulled in about ten bucks a day. Which I thought was awesome, since I didn't expect to make any money on it at all. Did it for fun.

Then Apple put it on the front page of the App Store as a Staff Pick. Suddenly, $160/day in sales.

Staff Picks or What's Hot positioning is hugely beneficial.

Take a look at this

#3 posted by CraziestGadgetsdotcom, April 22, 2009 2:22 PM

what about the boing boing effect? surely a bb or bbg mention is more powerful than anything on this graph. phhhft.

interestingly though is that the post-front page sales are not really any higher than the post blog-mentions sales.

Take a look at this

#4 posted by Joel Johnson, April 22, 2009 2:37 PM

Gizmodo and Lifehacker are much, much more popular than Boing Boing.