Yes, he got back to me. I thought that he had a few tips or ideas on how to get featured, but he apparently uses some marketing company, so I am not interested.
Nothing constructive to contribute to the topic, but wow. Its like a market with only 1 monopolistic advertiser. We promote you, you fly, else you sink/tank/crash/burn. Anyone has any luck with off-appstore advertising? Like those shiny banners i'm staring down on the TA frontpage.
After we fell off of New and Noteworthy our sales plummeted to a nice big ol' "0". It just seems there are so many games to compete with that are in the $.99 range that if you are not featured you are no where. What really makes this bad for any software product is that it appears that you must expend 5 - 10 x the amt of marketing energy to get a few sales. A few nuggets on what we learned: One amazing thing that we saw during all our marketing efforts was that press releases had almost no impact on sales. Reviews did give bumps in sales. A contest giving away iTunes cash did give some good review and a bump in sales Banner ads seem to break even on sales I think it also just comes down to having a really high quality product that you can stand to either A. lose money on B. Have a lot of free time to self promote or C. Have a marketing company get you Apple marketing spots (but even that is very short lived)
I don't advertise with banners and stuff, but after Stick Escape being out for about a month now, it still sells over 20 a day. Not that it is spectacular, but I am very pleased with it and I hope to sell like that in the future for my other games.
Can you explain more about how this is done? I can see the beginning and end points (being I pay $ and app is featured), but I'm unclear on the connecting dots. I wasn't aware that the iTunes marketing spots were for sale.
Actually you are not paying for a position at all, it is more about the time it takes for you to be pitched to Apple. Marketing companies also help with PR and other activities not just N&N.
Because it is fun to be your own publisher It probably wouldn't make much of a difference and you would have to do a lot more paperwork and contract junk. Plus, if it sells well, you will kick yourself for not publishing it yourself and getting all the profit (after Apple takes 30%).
Exactly. Plus, as it is turning out with Chillingo, unless your app is the next iDracula, you will be treated like crap. It is best to be your own publisher.
Durak just got featured in the "What's Hot" Games section! Hopefully this is comparable to being featured in the regular what's hot section but either way we are very excited. Durak has been out for about 2 months now. I am not sure what it takes to get onto what's hot but we have been getting mostly 5 star reviews and bought a banner ad on toucharcade which might have helped for visibility. Other than that we spent lots of time polishing the game and hoping for the best. Thanks for everyones support Andrey
Im wondering what the popularity rating means when you preform a search in ITunes. IRobox has only been out a few hours and its popularity bar is full. I have no idea if this translates into sales or not. /n00b
Unfortunately, it doesn't have the same level of exposure, as it doesn't appear on the iPhone. But it's still great!
It doesn't. I believe it just means all the people who searched on the words you searched on, clicked on your app instead of another one. Just look at your rank in the top 100 lists, as it's all that matters.
