FingerBakery Blog

Majicdave on Twitter wrote today about a sales email he got from Apperang, a site which pays users to download their apps. Because the site I am about to launch is related to app marketing, I have looked into Apperang as well as a couple of other sites who pay for downloads. Here is my view on how unethical this stuff is:

On a couple of sites I’m not linking, you pay for reviews. I think most people who are paying people to review an app want the review to be good. I am pretty sure both places I have seen offer this service also allow the developer a method to stop the review from going up at all, which basically clinches that they aren’t just selling reviews, they are selling GOOD reviews. Just the fact that the users they are paying for the reviews KNOW that the developers may nix a negative review is probably enough to make almost every review overwhelmingly positive. This is a pretty annoying corruption of the usefulness of the App Store.

On Apperang, you pay for downloads. I don’t think this is in itself unethical, if the intent is not actually to game the charts. I signed up as an Apperang user to see what apps were up for download, and while I don’t recall them all, one of them was Mytown which I understand is a very very popular app with millions of users. The information the Apperang salesman gave me on how many downloads they could provide makes me think that Mytown definitely isn’t using them to just move up in the charts – they don’t need it and this wouldn’t help much. I think Mytown just said “cool, another way to market our game” and used it. To me that doesn’t seem unethical at all, and I don’t think Apperang advertise their product as “game the charts!” at all or even mention that.

The interesting thing to me about Apperang is that when I looked into it, it is owned by W3i Mobile Solutions, who it looks like have been doing this as a business model for quite some time, paying people to install programs on platforms other than iPhone (I think Windows and Flash apps mostly?). So, I don’t think they started Apperang as a way to game the charts, I think it is more intended for developers who want to increase their userbase for other reasons (money of course! via advertising or maybe IAP).

That of course doesn’t mean some developers can’t use it to try and game their way up the charts, but I have a feeling (and hopefully this will make anyone who thinks I am being a shill for Apperang here realize I am not!) that just using them to drive pure downloads would not be profitable. The cost of getting a game up the chart and having it stay there long enough to make a big difference would, I think, not make sense.

I think their service probably works best for free apps that make money from advertising. For one thing, it’s way cheaper to hire them to promote a free app: for a paid app you need to pay them their fee PLUS the cost of the app.

So, for a 99 cents app, if they are charging 20 cents as their fee, you pay them $1.19, they give their users 99 cents to install the apps, and you get 70 cents back from Apple. So you have paid 49 cents to get someone using your app.

For a free app, you just pay them the 20 cents. Not only is it 40% of the other price, but your actual cash outlay is 6x smaller, so you if available cash is an issue you can get 6 times the downloads without having to wait for Apple to pay you back.

I think one of the most worrying things about the whole idea of people buying their way up the charts is that it will become some really widespread thing and corrupt the integrity of the App Store. I don’t think that’ll happen. For one thing, I just don’t think there are enough people out there who are going to sit there and install apps for 20 cents, especially if there are less than 20 available to get paid for (as I think there were when I looked at Apperang). If you raise the price, more people will get involved and install stuff, but then the cost to the developer becomes more prohibitive and it becomes even more of a question of whether gaming the rankings like this is even profitable (again, I feel very strongly it isn’t).

The good news for anyone worried right now is that from all the info the salespeople for the various services have told me, there just aren’t near enough people installing stuff on their devices to give anyone a chance to buy their way in. Maybe in a year if they have thousands of people installing stuff for money it’ll be different.

Sorry if any of this post is rambling, I wrote it quite fast so I’d be done it in time to go see Inception tonight!

One last post: I have mentioned the app marketing site I am part of launching quite soon: If you are an app developer with a good app that wants to showcase it, get in touch with me and I will send you info about it, basically a video you can watch about it. It should be a cool way for people to get their apps in front of more eyeballs without any real risk or huge monetary outlay or anything crazy like that (if you have read my previous blog entries on that sort of thing!).

I am hoping the site gets some decent attention when it launches, so the first bunch of apps we feature may get extra benefits from that.

Oh yeah, you can email me fingerbakery at gmail and I’ll send you the info.

Posted this to my Twitter earlier: http://www.pocketgamer.biz/r/PG.Biz/PG.biz+Opinion/feature.asp?c=22308

An interesting article about perceived value in app pricing. For me, the most interesting bit in this article is near the end when the author is talking about In-App Purchases. I wrote something recently in the comments on this post from Games From Within which basically said I think what the author is getting at, that by using in-app purchases, you let your app’s user decide what the app is worth to them, and pay accordingly. A casual player may pay nothing or pay 99 cents, but if your app is compelling/useful/cool/whatever enough, you will end up with users who are happy to more, who are HAPPY to pay more. Here is my comment pasted in here, it may make a bit more sense in the context of the (excellent!) blog post it was replying to:

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I definitely think that free+IAP is an incredibly strong model for apps that fit it (and Flower Garden seems like one of the best fits).

I think sometimes people forget that a lot of people WANT to spend more money, and IAP lets them. There are games out there I would spend much more than $1-$3 on if I could get more enjoyment from them. I bought all 5 IAPs for Ramp Champ for example, and if they released 20 more I’d buy all of them and be ECSTATIC about it. The IAP model allows people who WANT to spend more money to do so, without having to raise the price of the app and shut out the people who just want to spend 0.99 or 1.99.

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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)

By the way, after my experiment with running ads on Admob, I ran another $50 buy because I wanted to REALLY try and get the lowest clickthrough ratio possible (to ensure the most actually-interested buyers) and try a few different ads. My plan was to change my app’s price a couple of times and see how it affected the sales through the ads, and also try to write my ad so noone would want to click it except people who genuinely wanted an iPhone poker app. As with my first experiment, I knew I would lose some money, that was expected.

Long story short, I failed at writing a less clickable ad and I got a way higher CTR than my previous ad. Woops. On top of that the Admob campaign system is kind of idiotic and I wasn’t able to break that $50 into 3 different campaigns for whatever reason.

I talked to a couple of people who have also done campaigns on Admob for their apps, and when all is said and done, one thing is clear: It is a terrible idea. I (and others) are pretty positive that a huge number of the clicks you get are misclicks, and just in general the ads do not work. I knew from the start that these ads would not be immediately profitable or anything, but they are just garbage. I don’t think companies buying ads on Admob have any clue what a sewer their money is going down, but I shudder to think what the actual ROI is on Admob ads in general. Dismal.

Oh and click fraud, I have serious wonders about it. There was just a big fraud case discovered with a developer listed as Thuat Nguyen selling 40+ Vietnamese-language comic books and how people’s iTunes accounts were hacked to buy them. This is kind of interesting to me because this is something I wrote in an email 11 days ago to someone about possible click fraud in Admob iPhone apps:

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As insane as it sounds for people to do this for 5 cents, I would not rule out there being companies out there who are developing crappy spam apps and sticking (Admob ads) in those apps, then hiring people to sit and click ads in them constantly. Admob says they have click-fraud detection technology, but who KNOWS how effective it is. It seems nuts to think people are clicking for 5 cents, but I don’t see why they wouldn’t be, there are already a bunch of people who do menial tasks on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site for way less than that, and there are tons of spammy appmakers with hundreds of apps in the store. I bet there is at least one company in China or somewhere with a ton of free apps that just hires people to click on the ads.

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Now that the whole thing about the Vietnamese/Chinese iTunes hacking has come to light I am even more convinced that there is a decent chance this is happening somewhere. I mean, anytime there is any method of making money online, someone is trying to game or cheat it in some way, and I don’t see why Admob would be any different.

So iAds launched about a week ago, and I’ve been reading stuff on the web very closely when it comes to any data on them, and there does seem to be some good info coming out. This article by Markus Nigrin is very interesting, and while he doesn’t actually state any CPM info (I assume this is due to an Apple NDA), it seems like the CPMs are awesome and the fill rates are bad.

This is what I figured would happen, it seems pretty obvious: Apple announced iAds as “wow look how much these ads are going to cost!” which is awesome for developers, but maybe not as easy to pitch to advertisers.

I think if any company other than Apple proposed a system similar to iAds with big intrusive, flashy ads that cover the whole screen and cost a fortune, people would have dismissed the viability immediately. Apple can sell ice to eskimos though, so who knows, they may be able to make this work long-term.

iAds will probably come into their own once they start applying crazy targeting to them. I don’t see how a company like Nissan is going to get $10 CPM value out of an ad placed in some free game that mostly younger people play, it seems pretty clear the real winners are going to be apps for older people with disposable income – if I had a GPS driving navigation app I’d be considering sticking a free version with iAds out there as fast as possible, that’s for sure. If I had a Doodle Jump clone I wouldn’t expect to get HUGE benefits. But who knows, it depends on how hard Apple decide to target these things. But if they’re charging really high CPMs, I can’t see how they are pitching it to advertisers other than by saying “we are going to target the hell out of these ads to rich people”.

I don’t know where I’m going with this whole post haha! I know the CPMs are pretty seductive right now, I had definite thoughts about whipping out a free version of Pokerbot with iAds in it, but when I really think about it, I’m not sure if it’s worth it for me personally.

It’s easy to look at some sample numbers and do some fuzzy math and get convinced that your app is going to make a ton of money from the ads, but if the numbers look REALLY good, you might have to stand back and say “wait, is my app REALLY going to create that much value for advertisers?”. To me, this is going to be what really makes or breaks iAds long-term. Noone is going to be able to make hundreds of dollars for toooooo long if their app is only bringing a really marginal amount of value to the table.

When I first decided to get into apps and learn to program them, it was clear that I would make an app while I learned. This is how I have generally done programming before, in fact the only reason I got into programming years ago was because I had an idea for a website and had no way to make it happen other than program it myself.

I had a bunch of ideas, and I settled on a heads up poker game for a few reasons. I thought I could do a better quality one than the ones out there, I wanted to add cool achievements and bonus rounds, etc. Also I have been into poker myself for ages and tried most of the apps out there (as well as playing on the actual online sites like Pokerstars and Full Tilt Poker a ton) and I have a pretty good clue as to what makes a poker game fun (or not so fun).

From a marketing point of view, I thought poker was a decent choice because there are tons of people who enjoy playing poker, there are a number of iPhone poker apps that do well sales-wise, and I figured if I created one that was of high enough quality, people would play it.

That last paragraph is where the problem lies: Just because there is a market for something, does not mean it is marketable. Sounds confusing, and maybe I am not wording it perfectly, but here is what I mean:

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Let’s compare the audience for 2 app categories: The first category is location-based check-in apps such as Gowalla and Foursquare. The second is poker-related apps such as the Zynga iPhone app and whatever else is out there.

I of course can’t be sure of exact numbers, but I’m pretty familiar with both these categories, and I feel like the audience for each is fairly similar, numbers-wise. I’d be hard-pressed to really guess which is bigger in terms of pure number of users.

The problem is though, poker apps are a lot harder to market. Although card games are games, they’re not the kind of games that game review sites cover (although stuff like Sword & Poker does get covered, an awesome poker/RPG combo that leans more to the RPG side). Poker sites and message boards have all spent the past 5 years having to deal with huge numbers of spammers/shills/salesmen who are trying to sell something (anything gambling-related attracts a lot of people trying to make a fast buck), so if you just post an innocuous msg board post like “Hi guys, I’ve released a cool poker game, check it out” or whatever that would be fine on a lot of message boards, it will be deleted almost immediately on any poker message board. What’s more, most of the big poker sites make so much money covering a certain set of products that get affiliate income from (rakeback sites, online poker sites, etc), they aren’t really in the business of promoting something they can’t profit from. One well-known poker discussion site actually used to delete any threads where it’s users discussed a certain poker site that didn’t charge rake (rake is the money the poker site takes from each pot). They just did this because they felt threatened by this business model: If this site got popular and all the sites had to move to a rake-free model, this discussion site couldn’t make affiliate anymore. So yeah, sites that purport to be poker news or media sites tend to actually just be shills and not useful unless you’re sticking money in their pockets.

Also, even if all the poker media sites do cover a game like mine, it’s not some magic bullet, because the type of people who would really like my game are more casual poker players, the type of person who doesn’t site and read poker news sites, the type of person who downloads some poker games on their iPhone, plays a bit of poker on Facebook, that sort of thing. Those people are just not concentrated in any easy to locate spots online, they’re just scattered because they’re very casual.

Now contrast that to the Gowalla/Foursquare category: If you make some new check-in/location-based app that does anything even remotely cool, there are a TON of tech blogs that will be aching to cover it, and a huge percentage of your potential customers are reading those sites on a regular basis.

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So, I mean I’m not making excuses for Pokerbot not blazing up the app charts yet or anything, I never thought it would be a top 10 game or anything, but I do kind of regret that I stopped at “a lot of people would love to play this game” and didn’t go further and ask “how will I reach these people, are there certain venues online where they congregate?”.

Now there’s also a chance that my game isn’t smashing up the charts because it isn’t as good as I think. A lot of people make apps that aren’t as good as they think and I am not ruling out at all that I may be one of them. However, I’ve played a lot of Pokerbot’s competition, and for the people who are into this type of game, I think it stacks up very well. It’s not the flashiest app compared to some of the amazing games that are out there on the App Store, but as far as a heads-up poker game, I think it’s pretty darn good, I just wish I could actually get the people who PLAY this sort of game to play it. Oh well, I still have some ideas up my sleeve, we’ll see what happens!

I thought I’d just write up a blog post on something a little different that I did while doing promotion for Pokerbot that wound up getting me some good reviews in the iTunes App Store:

Touch Arcade have a forum where you can announce your games when you release them (or while they’re upcoming). I’m sure most people who release games all post them there. They also have a forum for promos and contests, where it’s a pretty common practice to give out promo codes for your app. I go to Touch Arcade a fair bit and everytime I’ve looked at this forum, developers are just pasting in 10 or 20 (or more sometimes) promo codes and TA reader will just grab them as fast as they can and use them. I’ve actually done this once, there was a program on the Cocos2D forum (where devs also often post promo codes) that I saw and redeemed as fast as possible without fully knowing what it was for – I thought it was a certain type of app, but in my hurry to get the code before anyone else, I made a mistake and ended up deleting the app pretty fast.

I figured I would post 10 codes to that forum since I had a few handy after writing to all the app sites,etc. I could find, but I didn’t want just the 10 most bored people who refresh the promo codes forum the fastest to get them, I wanted 10 people who might actually play/enjoy my game. So I posted just asking that people read the thread for my game in the “new releases” forum there or go to it’s website, and then post 1 thing about my game in the promo thread. I just wanted them to post something like “it’s based on Texas Holdem” or “it has bonus rounds”, or anything that showed they weren’t randomly clicking buttons, then I’d send a private message to the first 10 with a promo code.

So, long story short, not only did I get the codes to interested people, I also just said when I sent them the codes “If you like the game, leave a rating on the App Store or a comment in the main thread for the game here!”, and a large majority of them did so. In fact, not only did they leave ratings on the App Store, they also left reviews (I can tell because the ones who did use the same username on both sites).

So that was cool, I was just hoping to get the game out there a bit, but I ended up getting more App Store reviews and ratings than I expected (honestly I didn’t think anyone would bother). To me, the lesson here is just that if you spend half a second extra to try and get your game or app to the right people, it’s SO much more worth it than just lazily posting a bunch of codes. Most of the threads where people just post 10 or 20 codes on Toucharcade get maybe 1 or 2 replies saying “thanks got XA12312312123 code” or “codes are all gone” or something, but it’s so easy to just add a little twist and get some real feedback and ratings.

So that’s my 2 cents for the day, don’t just post codes willy nilly, take an extra minute to talk to people and get the codes to the right people and you can get some reviews with minimal effort.

Post in the comments here with any thoughts or talk to me on my Twitter account.

Okay, so now that 2 days have passed since my Admob purchase mentioned in my last post, and I have  seen the sales figures for those 2 days, I think I can write this entry with the results.

First, before I say anything else, I want to make one thing clear, because I feel like a couple of people maybe got the impression that I did this ad buy thinking “woo I’m going to buy $50 of ads and make a profit!”. I said in the first post, I definitely didn’t expect a profitable ROI from this. Just logically it is clear that running this sort of ad can’t really be immediately profitable, because a ton of people have run small ad buys like this in the past, and if they were immediately profitable, all those people would still be doing it, and ramping their buys up to a way bigger scale.

So here is why I personally did it:

My game Pokerbot was released last friday. I know it’s not necessarily the fanciest game in the world with 3D talking robots and online multiplayer options (yet), but I do think it’s a good, fun, solid game that people who are into Texas Holdem and iPhone poker games should like, with some cool and unique features. I used to be my own worst critic, a problem I finally solved by getting married, and I think I’m pretty honest when it comes to self-assessment.

The problem it has right now is that it may not be flashy enough for all the review sites to cover it (we’ll see), even with the extra bonus rounds and ONETIME features and stuff. So as of right now anyway, the game has not had much exposure at all to give it a jumpstart on the charts. It’s hovering inside the top 100 on the card games chart, but it hasn’t had a chance to get up to the top 20 or 10 for a while and see what happens.

For this reason, I think that Pokerbot is somewhat uniquely positioned to get more value from advertising than games that have been out a while and received at least some exposure. I don’t know what percentage of the $50 I will get back in the long term (it’s impossible to measure the true long-term effects), but whatever it is, I think most games would get back much less. (So don’t try this at home fellow developers haha! But really don’t).

Having said all that, let’s hit the numbers: It is hard to be 100% sure of how many direct sales I got through this ad buy. I think there actually is some definitive way to find out with some API that Admob provides where you can stick some of their code in your app (I think people who click your ads have their UDID sent to Admob’s servers and then if they launch your app, the API sends their UDID and Admob can tell they must have purchased the app, or something like that anyway). If I was going to run some huge ad campaign through them, I would use that.

My only way to check the numbers is basically look at the previous couple of days sales, then deduce that any increase kind of has to be from the ads, because nothing else was going on in the past 2 days that would cause a change. I also know a couple of people bought my game because of reading this blog post (THANK YOU!), so I have taken a couple of sales out of the equation.

So it looks like I made about $20 – $25 in immediate sales from this ad buy (not profit, just gross sales). My rank did go up a bit, and most importantly, my position when you search the keyword “poker” in the App Store went way up. It still sucks, but it went from maybe #250 to about #80 and at least it isn’t being beaten by spammy Lady Gaga apps like before. Getting visibility through this keyword is extremely important to me.

I wish I made a bit more of the $50 back (even though I didn’t really expect it to be as high as what it was),  so I could run more ads and chalk up the monetary loss to a promotional cost. If I could run 10 more buys like this and only lose $10 or $15 a time and also know it was making a significant impact on my longer term exposure, it’d be worth it. I don’t think it is though. For now I’m going to go with the more organic marketing methods (hope some reviews come through, let word of mouth build, etc.) and see if Pokerbot gets a bit of exposure that way. I have faith that if create something good, there’s always a chance that it will get the right attention.

So all in all, this experiment did basically turn out as I expected. I never thought I would make a monetary profit, but this is also just the kind of thing that is fun to me, being able to take some of the money the app has made and use it to mess around with stuff like this. It’s not like I was going to use that money to buy a yacht or something!

I’m going to cut off this long entry now, let me know your thoughts in the comments here or my Twitter account (and buy Pokerbot haha).