I'm thinking of using the FAAD service to promote my game Superflick. The cost is quite high, but has the potential to be quite beneficial. However not having used the service before and not knowing anyone else that has I am curious to know what the results are actually like according to a third (unbiased) party. So has anyone here actually used the service? Is it worth the $7k price tag they are quoting?!
I honestly have no freaking clue how they work. There've been devs here who got featured for free, for a portion of sales in the next 30 days after the promotion, and then you saying $7k (and me also having been quoted a large flat rate). There definitely have been apps that paid off using it, but in my interactions with them their sales people are crap. I told them what I was hoping to accomplish, how I'd be willing to negotiate a deal, and all I ever get back are emails with "oh, I can take $200 more off" or something to that effect.
It's a balance of cost to value, the way I see it. The question is: will you gain $7k dollars from people getting your app AND buying IAPs and stuff. If the answer is yes, it's definitely worth it. If you're not sure, don't get yourself caught up in anything. If you aren't sure if the value from there end will give you profit it's likely not worth it...
Personally, I wouldn't do it. I didn't know it costs so much! Like one other developer on this forum did and posted about it a few weeks ago... I (durring the week of Thanksgiving) made Goop free, from $0.99. There was no promotion besides a tweet about two days into the sale, and I would estimate I received about 200k-300k downloads. When you do change your price, many other price-change monitoring services will take note of that and feature/promote your app automatically. After the free sale ended, sales were indeed steadily higher than what they used to be before the sale. Unfortunately, Goop has no in-app purchases, but I did it more as a learning experience for our next game. Try putting your app free yourself first, you got nothing to lose. If it fails, perhaps give FAAD a try. Also, I'm not sure if being free for single a day is good enough...the first day Goop went free was great, but the subsequent days were exponentially higher. Hope this helps
I think that might have something to do with it, as they did say that they only take a limited number of free apps with IAP. Either way, the price is far too steep so I will see if they can be a little more reasonable pchukwura my game Superflick is free with IAP so, I can't really go down the same path as you unfortunately. Though I do have another app thats paid which I plan to move over to IAP so perhaps that one is a better candidate for FAAD. Thanks for you thoughts guys, I'll let you know how I go...
$7k is a LOT of money. It is hard to get that back after you switch back to paid. If you don't have IAP it might be extremely hard to get your money back. I managed 400k downloads for free. I might had 1 million with FAAD but money wise it wouldn't have been worth it (they wanted $3k) JC
Uh huh, then they quote somebody else the same thing an hour later. How many apps can fit in the top 25? Anyways, I tried them about a year and a half ago. They wanted half of the difference in sales for a month. It didn't work. Sales went up very slightly after going back to paid. Daredevil Dave had started to decline in sales by then - obviously or I wouldn't have tried it. I have no IAP. Dave had been as high as 8 or 6 in the app store, so maybe it had simply run it's course. For a thousand bucks...maybe, depending on your game. My opinion, you could spend $7-10k better elsewhere.
Wow, I thought 7k was a lot but 10k? schplurg is right, that sort of money can be spent elsewhere with much better results. Oh, and just an update on my progress. I've managed to get FAAD down to a more reasonable price of $4k. Which still isn't pocket change but from my research into the results of other campaigns it can work. I am combining it with a few other efforts, so fingers crossed My campaign will start at the end of the month, so I'll have more details then and post em back here if you guys are interested?
Very much interested. Anyone heard about any rev-share contract for FAAD promotions? I just did one in France and it was a rev-share deal. Reached #3 in France, but couldn't beat goddam Fruit Ninja!
It depends on your app. Is the app free with IAP the rate right now runs at $6500. The problem with free games is that FAADS businessmodel is based of off paid apps, switching their apps to free for a limited amount of time. Already free apps affects them negatively from a branding standpoint. The value proposal created by switching a regularly paid app to free is how they are able to expand and retain their audience. Since free apps affect them negatively they limit the number of free apps they feature weekly on FAAD to a minimum and the prices are higher. Either way, I think the money s only worth it if you have a good weekday for the push. Otherwise you can lose a lot of downloads. I would recommend using FAAD rather as a supplement than by itself...
For myself, they wanted 5K for BetterLetter but with the 5K, its a lot of moolah for me to spend on one sitting so i gave it up sadly.
