Jul 14, 2010
Pokerbot featured by TUAW, quick look at the resulting ranking changes
Just a quick note that Pokerbot was featured as the TUAW (super popular Apple blog) daily app yesterday, which was awesome news! Thought I’d just put up a quick shot of the resulting changes in the game’s rankings. Nice to see some stuff happening for the game, and especially nice to see some email finally coming in from people about the game.
So far everyone who has emailed loves the game, which is really nice to know (I think it’s a game you need to play a bit more than 5 minutes to really appreciate it – but then everyone probably thinks that about their game haha), and my suspicions about who will be playing the game most have proven to be correct: Most people who have emailed are casual players who are fairly new to poker – one guy sent a screenshot and asked why Pokerbot won a certain hand he played, which I spent 5 minutes replying to as clearly and thoroughly as possible, only to realize after sending it that this same guy sent a second email a few minutes later saying he figured it out himself heh.
So anyway, here is the rundown of some effects being featured on TUAW had. It’s only ~30 hours or so of data so it’s not stunningly scientific or anything. I sure hope I can report on this again in a week or two and the rankings won’t have dropped too much, that’d sure be nice.
p.s. Pokerbot is on sale for 99 cents right now to try and keep the ranking up, grab it while it’s hot!
p.p.s. I’m currently working with someone on a product geared towards helping app developers promote their apps. We will be revealing more soon, so please follow my Twitter to keep up on that if you’re interested, it’s going to be pretty unique and cool.
(p.p.p.s. click on this graphic to see it at full size)
In the past week I’ve experimented with admob. With free apps it can work. I ran an ad for a free app and got quite a few downloads. For paid, forget it.
After the free ad success I went for a large spend (for me). I made sure the ads listed the price so people knew what they were getting. I got 15000 clicks. That translated into less that 30 sales at tier 1. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t expecting much, 1% and I’d have been happy. But 0.2%! The moral, do not bother with admob with paid apps ever.
(note: People reading this in relation to the TUAW post might be confused, I think Daniel meant to reply to the previous couple of posts about using Admob to advertise apps).
Anyhow, that’s quite interesting, do you feel like the return on investment will be positive long-term for the free apps? I guess it all depends on how much those apps make in the long-term from however you are making money from them.
What was your conversion rate for the free ads when you advertised them?