Unfortunately, RingDance has been our least commercially successful effort.  We had sold just 14 copies and given away 12 promo-code copies since the app was approved at the end of May — certainly not the blockbuster that we might have hoped for.  With this in mind, I decided to see what would happen if I just gave it away.  So, last week, I set the price for RingDance to US$0.00.  I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect.  We’ve done the promo-code thing, with relatively pathetic results.  Most of the codes that we gave away were not redeemed — they just expired.  I’d pretty much decided to stop developing RingDance.  The results simply didn’t justify additional effort, but I really do like this app, so I was hoping for some epiphany from the “Free” test.

That’s right, 399 copies of RingDance were downloaded in just over a week.  Our downloads for that week were >15x the downloads for the previous three months, combined.  We also received more than 20 additional ratings and one new review.  We haven’t noticed a post-promotion uptick in sales, but it did feel good to know that some other people are actually enjoying our efforts.  I was even inspired to start working on some enhancements to make the app perform better on old hardware and to be significantly more visually pleasing.  One other thing to note, the only “marketing” that I did for this test was the blog post mentioned above and a couple of tweets.  No press releases, no forum posts, nothing else.

This lame test leads me to believe that (a) iPhone users, in general, do expect apps to be free;  (b) “Free” trumps any silly marketing promotions; (c) There may be real potential for lite apps.

Now, if the Dungeon Masters at the App Store would just approve a couple of my lite apps, perhaps I’ll really have something to report.

AdMob chose to highlight the following results:

• Android and iPhone users download approximately 10 new apps a month, while iPod touch owners download an average of 18 per month
• More than 90 percent of Android and iPhone OS users browse and search for apps directly on their mobile device instead of their computer
• Upgrading from the lite version was the top reason given when users were asked what drives them to purchase a paid app
• iPhone and iPod touch users are twice as likely to purchase paid apps than Android users
• Users who regularly download paid apps spend approximately $9 on an average of five paid downloads per month

As the proud user of an iPod touch, I was thrilled to see that my fellow touch users are, by far, the most prolific downloaders:

There are a couple of interesting things about this chart.  First, it should probably be titled, “Avg. Downloads per User per Month,” but that’s nitpicking.  The other thing that caught my attention is that, while iPod touch users are nearly twice as productive (or perhaps counter-productive, depending on whether you’re their employer) as iPhone users in terms of downloading apps, they are much less likely to pay for their apps.  Nearly 25% of the iPhone apps are paid, while just over 10% of the apps on touches are paid.  This is another reminder that the user communities are not at all homogeneous across the two devices.

For this post, I’m going to focus on the iPhone / iPod touch.  Although the report also covers Android, at this point, I’m more interested in the results for our target platforms.

In going through the report, I noticed a couple of other bits that are likely to influence how I conduct campaigns for BluMtnWerx.  For example, the top three ways that users discover apps are, in order:

• Browsing through top App Store rankings
• Searching for a specific type of app
• Word of mouth (recommendations from friends or colleagues)

They also asked people who downloaded at least one paid app / month, “What Usually drives you to purchase a paid app?”  I guess that I shouldn’t be surprised, given some of the experiments that developers have conducted, but the top reason was (emphasis mine):

“I like the free version and upgraded“

I sure wish that Apple would approve iPuckLite!  It’s been waiting for nearly a month, now.

By contrast, the bottom two were:

• News articles or blogs
• A brand I know reaches out to me and introduces an app

Clearly, this reinforces the notion that getting high rankings in the App Store is the ticket to success.  It might also suggest that the effort put into blogging & self-promotion may have less impact (so why am I writing this?).  When I think about the results, though, I wonder whether the grassroots blogging and outreach are actually necessary prerequisites for getting good rankings on the App Store.

One place where the sample bias in AdMob’s methodology really comes through is the #4 item on their list:

“Seeing ads while using other apps”

The report contains some extremely interesting data on daily usage of apps.  Apparently iPhone users spend, on (weighted) average 84 minutes/day using apps, while iPod touch addicts are tapping away for 121 minutes/day.  The most fascinating thing in that data set, though, was the report that 21% of iPod touch users spend More Than Four Hours each day stabbing at their screens!  I don’t know whether to feel happy, or sad, if that’s true.

Finally, AdMob did some back of the envelope calculations to conclude that the App store paid market is currently (August 2009) about $200M per month.  Stunning.

Even if you don’t like AdMob, you really should spend a few minutes evaluating the information in this report and considering how it might impact your business.

“Scoreloop is a social gaming platform for mobile devices. It allows gamers to challenge other players, view global high score lists, organize buddy lists, and keep track of their achievements. It can be added to any game, enabling social features.”

Unfortunately, this bit looks as though it might have been written by engineers, rather than juiced up marketing types.  While everything they say is true, they really don’t do themselves justice.  Scoreloop completely transforms an interesting game into a challenging social experience.  It creates entirely new levels of intensity, competition and pressure in the game.  I’m absolutely engaged by knowing that my scores will be posted, or that I’m answering a challenge from another player.  I literally sweat over each missed shot and failed defense — in a game that I wrote and have tested thousands of times.

With Scoreloop, a straightforward game, like iPuck, becomes an intensely interesting competitive challenge.  I don’t just want to play, I want to win!  I want to log the high score.  I want to take on every challenger.

Beyond making a game much more compelling, Scoreloop turns out to be a significant marketing channel for us.  The game’s top scores, players, challenges and activities are shown on Scoreloop’s website, giving us another mechanism to reach potential players.  Further, challenges are issued with an invitation to download the game.  Finally, Scoreloop’s marketing folks (many thanks to Raphael Weiner!!!) provide additional outreach through announcements on their social networks.  All of these have helped us continue good sales of iPuck well beyond the traditional post-update bump.

Finally, and of equal importance, Scoreloop provides us with analytic information regarding how our game is interacting with their network.  Using this data, we are able to develop a picture of the type of player, the number of players, the number of games being played and the kinds of scores being achieved.  For me, this is particularly useful in thinking about how to design new games for even broader appeal.

Scoreloop was extremely easy to integrate into iPuck.  The coding to make iPuck “score” friendly far outweighed the integration work (After reviewing that analytics, I’ve realized that I should have taken a different approach to determining the final score in iPuck — this will be fixed in a future version and we won’t make the same mistake in future apps).  Dominik Westner, and his team, have done a wonderful job of preparing a straightforward interface to the Scoreloop SDK, and it’s accompanied by good documentation.  The nicest thing, though, is their support.  They answered all of our questions very quickly.  They even provided immediate real-time help to repair some mistakes that I made when I was setting up our first game account.  I certainly appreciated their location in Munich when I needed help at 2:00 AM PDT!

Working with Scoreloop is an extremely positive experience.  We are currently developing several new games that will all be Scoreloop enabled, and we’re going to add Scoreloop to another of our current games in a “soon to be available” update.  If all goes according to plan, we will have a number of Scoreloop enabled games out within the next few months.

I’m not the only one that really believes in what these folks are doing.  Scoreloop recently raised US$2.8M in their second round of funding.  Among the coverage generated by their announcement was this interesting interview with the Scoreloop CEO.

The people at Scoreloop are really providing a great service for iPhone game developers.  I’ve learned a lot from working with them, and I fully expect that our future games will be much more compelling as a result of our collaboration with Scoreloop.  If you’re a game developer, you should give Scoreloop a serious look.

The reviewer does a nice job of pointing out some of iPunt’s key features.  He has also included the app in one of his contests — we’d be thrilled if some of our readers won promo codes from him!  As always, we really appreciate the coverage.
 

 
If you have trouble with the embedded player, you can go straight to the video on YouTube.

The review also suggests checking out our iPunt tutorial video for more info: 

Thanks again to touchthemapples for the reviews!

 
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Technorati Tags:  iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple, mobile, iPunt, iPuck, YouTube, Video Review

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, the pool of credible reviewers for most apps is infinitesimally small relative to the number of promo codes available.  I decided to try to get some rough insight into the numbers involved.  Here’s what I came up with:

Let’s ignore updates and expirations for a moment.  According to the always excellent sources at 148Apps, roughly 77% of the apps in the store are paid (they claim to update their data daily, so this should be current info).  They also report that, as of today, there have been 63,013 apps seen on the store.  That would give us somewhere in the neighborhood of 49K paid apps seen in the store.  Multiply this by 50 promo codes per application and we determine that there have been just under 2.5 million codes potentially available.  I’d guess that far less than 50K of those were used by credible reviewers — how many truly credible reviews have you seen?  The rest are either going to waste, or being broadcast distributed (I include the “Massive App Giveaway” contests in this latter bucket).

Further, at least in my experience, most people who get a promo code don’t bother to follow up with a review.  Or maybe they’re just too polite write what they really think about my apps.  You might think that my friends would be willing to tell lies for me, but… then we’re back to the credibility thing.

If we accept that most of the promo codes aren’t going to be effective at generating blockbuster sales, we have to think about alternate objectives.  Will giving out lots of promo codes get people to use the app and talk about it, resulting in some new sales?  Will the availability of the promo codes bring attention to our team?  Will people, somehow magically influenced by the promo codes, at least visit our site?  As we move further away from money deposited in our accounts, the value of these becomes much lower.

Now for the bad news.  Some of the things that we’ve tried, include:

• Sending promo codes in personal emails directly to reviewers asking for coverage
• Providing codes to friends who promised to review the apps
• Sharing codes with other developers who frequent the forums where we contribute
• Responding to a small number of the requests for promo codes that accompany each app’s debut in the store — we did get a nice video review of iPuck this way
• Placing a block of codes on a friendly forum

Our results have been dismal.  Like everyone else, I’ve heard anecdotes (myths?) about how promo codes have really boosted apps.  Since ours aren’t having this effect, I’m forced to consider some possible explanations.  Perhaps promo codes can accelerate adoption of an app that’s already on a good trajectory, while not doing much for an app that’s still trying to be noticed.  It’s possible that promo codes provide more benefit within closely related / interdependent networks.  Maybe our apps are just not interesting to anyone but us.  Referencing back to the quantity of available promo codes, maybe the system just has such an abundance that codes for lesser-known apps are essentially without value.

It’s clear to me that this kind of success doesn’t justify the effort that we’ve put into managing and distributing promo codes for our apps.  We’ll continue to give them out to friends, because we kind of have to.  We’ll also be open to plausible requests for codes.  However, I’m completely giving up on using codes as proactive marketing tool.

By the way, here’s a fun fact that I ran across while researching this post:

The 148Apps Price Distribution page reports that I could buy a copy of all of the apps on the store for $137,262.00.

That’s a lot lower than I would have guessed, given the amount of energy and money flowing through the app store right now.  This appears to be an excellent demonstration of the power of lots of really cheap apps.

 
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Technorati Tags:  iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple, mobile, promo codes

My hesitation has been based on the fear of losing potential customers who haven’t upgraded to the newest version of the OS.  Fortunately, a number of apparently independent sources are suggesting that uptake of the new OS is much faster than I might have expected.  With this latest news, it’s starting to look like we’ll cut over completely to 3.0 much sooner than I’d originally planned.

Here’s some of what I’m looking at:

Paul, over at Tapbots is reporting (dated 2009.06.23) that:

“It’s pretty clear that at least our customers are upgrading to 3.0 at an incredibly fast pace.”

“… running at an overall 75% upgrade rate which is pretty insane considering the number of devices and the fact that its only been 5 days.”

“The iPhone upgrade rate is a bit higher then the overall rate, currently sitting at 79%.”

“… the iPod Touch has just passed 50%.”

The post also has some nice graphs of what they’re seeing.  They promise to update the post as new information comes in.  I’ll be checking back periodically.

In a similar vein, AdMob just published a report (Their graphs are dated 2009.06.20, so this covers just a few days after the iPhone OS 3.0 software was generally available) that also suggests strong, albeit somewhat lower uptake rates for the iPhone:

…44% of iPhone ad requests coming from the 3.0 OS

AdMob’s data suggests that just 1% of requests coming from iPod touches are originating with devices running 3.0.

For as long as they continue to be available, here are the charts from AdMob:

and

Of course, it’s always possible that we’re seeing sample bias in these two reports.  Perhaps customers of Tapbots and users of apps that present AdMob ads are not representative of the total population.  However, I’m inclined to believe the trend, if not the specific figures.  The 3.0 upgrades are too compelling (and free for iPhone users) to ignore.  I predict that we’ll see 80% adoption across the board by the end of July.

It will be fascinating to see how these numbers change over the next couple of weeks, but I’m now thinking that we’ll jump to 3.0 even sooner than I’d planned.  These trends suggest that we’ll be able to continue to address the mainstream iPhone market, while allowing our development team to be more focused on building good new stuff, rather than testing on permutations of OS versions.

What kind of conclusions are you reaching about this?  Please let us know.

 
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Technorati Tags:  iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple, mobile, iPhone OS 3.0

With this in mind, I’ve been experimenting with a number of different mechanisms for marketing the BluMtnWerx apps.  Today, we’ll focus on press releases.  In a past life, I had good success using the tier one services, including PRNewswire and BusinessWire .  Both provide excellent customer service and get great media coverage.  When I wrote good press releases, I was able to generate a fair bit of attention, and even attracted some journalists to follow-up and actually write stories about our efforts.  The only downside is that they are expensive.  Depending on the number of words, and the desired breadth of the distribution, these services cost somewhere between $300 (short release and U.S. distribution only) to well over $1000 (longer releases and/or global distribution).  With our apps selling for 99 cents, I can’t really rationalize that kind of up-front investment, so I’ve been looking at the other end of the spectrum.

I have not been a fan of the "free" press release distribution services, but the price was right for our current situation, so I decided to give them another try.  A bit of Google work led me to this article , which provides a bit of a filter.  I tried three of the services mentioned:  PR.com , i-Newswire (I’m not supplying a link – see below) and 1888 Press Release .  I’ll talk about each of these in the paragraphs below.

While I was submitting the release to PR.com , I was torn between my need to manage costs, and my desire to bring in some coverage.  After going back and forth with myself for longer than I should have, I decided to spring for their "$60 Visibility Level" (They provide free releases, with minimum visibility, along with $30, $50, $60 and $100 visibility levels) .  The release was distributed quickly.  I submitted it late at night and it was out the next day.  Our story was picked up on several news redistribution sites, so we were pretty excited by our daily Google search report.  Unfortunately, we didn’t notice an improvement in either site traffic, or sales.  Although we did receive some online coverage, the actual results were disappointing.  This was not $60 well spent.

I used 1888 Press Release for a different release.  This time, I let the cheapskate side win and went for the "Free Plan " (their paid plans run $15, $25 and $50) .  This release was also distributed quickly.  I submitted it in the afternoon, and it was out within a few hours.  We were picked up on a small number of news redistribution sites, fewer than with PR.com, but the price was right.  Sadly, this release also failed to move the needle in either traffic, or sales.  However, since I didn’t pay anything, I didn’t feel too bad.

My final test in this series was i-Newswire.  I’m not providing a link, because I wouldn’t want to inadvertently steer anyone to their site.  I decided to try their "Featured Press Release" distribution, which cost $25.  Unfortunately, I can’t report any results because they didn’t distribute the release.  They charged my credit card immediately, promised distribution within 48 hours, then did nothing.  I can’t say that they were completely unresponsive, however.  Although they ignored every attempt that I made to contact them about the billing and distribution, they did send a snotty, and completely unhelpful, reply to a question about using the service that I submitted to their Customer Service site.

Bottom Line:
Based on my admittedly limited tests, the short-term tactics are pretty apparent.  I’m planning to distribute future releases under the "Free Plan" at 1888 Press Release .  I’ll also distribute them using the free option at PR.com .  Since our press releases are primarily re-purposed content from announcements posted on our site, this approach requires a minimal investment of time and resources, and does help us build our profile on the Web.  At least that’s the plan.

Happy Marketing!

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Technorati Tags:  iPhone , iPod Touch , Apple , mobile