Macworld 2009: Spawn 2 and the economics of the App Store

Imagine if Apple had released the appstore where the ranking was based on revenue, and the apps that sold the most revenue (units times price) were the highest ranked.

What would be happening today? Everyone would be complaining and wishing that Apple would switch to just ranking apps by unit sales, claiming the current system is unfair.

The reason they would be doing is that the top 50-100 apps would be dominated by the large companies who sell full priced apps and have a marketing budget to make sure those apps are hits. Well known games like spore, simcity, monopoly, etc, would dominate the rankings.

I think Apple chose this method to give independent developers a fairer shot-- and apps with no marketing budget have been in the number one spot as a result.

A better solution would be for Apple to provide multiple types of rankings, other than just "top paid" and "top free". Highest rated would be a good list, or pair of lists for free and paid, and best selling would be another list (which would be by revenue-- not replacing the "top" list, but adding to it.)

More ways of featuring apps will allow more apps to be featured, and spread the users over more lists, resulting in adoption of a broader number of apps, rather than most sales being garnered by just a few apps.

>> If you call this 'mediocre success' your definition of mediocrity is off

I think my words were "an ok amount of money to keep going" which I think is appropriate. My experience is that most the the successful apps have a good run for a month or two and then drop off the top 100. Of course there are exceptions, but for the majority of apps that's true. Depending on your business size, If you make it to the top 50 for a month it is likely that you can keep going for a few more months either doing updates or writing a new app with the money you've made, even if sales are low after the initial burst.

The idea of ranking based on revenue rather than units sold isn't new; I think a lot of developers are in agreement with it. It certainly seems like a win-win for Apple and developers both. I'll actually be surprised if Apple *doesn't* make this change... so far they've been pretty responsive to developer concerns (such as when they restricted app reviews to only those people who actually *purchased* the app).