And do not trust greatapps.com. And it far from surprises me that a review site will big up your game, getting you to like them will give them a higher chance of a sale... as I learned to regret myself. In response to Mackdavi_studios, where you said that it might be worth paying $100 for a review site that had 10000 weekly visitors, great apps boasted 40,000 visitors a week. This is what the MD of greatapps.com wrote to me to entice $400 out of me for absolutely 0 return. ----------------- Dear x Needless to say, we are different then most people out there, as our prices are for 1 year of app marketing and not a quick "1 hitter" scenario. Regarding apps overall, I tell people it takes patience and persistence. With over 2,000 apps being released per day (on multiple platforms) it is easy to get lost in the shuffle. The Diamond Package (http://www.GreatApps.com/sales) would be a one-time payment of $475 (usd) which would cover you for a full year of app marketing. In terms of data, we have approx 80k uniques/150k vistiors/800k page views a month. This is a direct audience of app users, hence the name GreatApps.com We also enjoy a healthy Alexa ranking as well: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/greatapps.com# SmokinApps.com's traffic is here: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/smokinapps.com# If you are not familiar with Alexa, the lower the #'s the better. SmokingApps.com is ranking 407k in the US, GreatApps.com is ranked 23k. Our US traffic alone is 17 times of theirs (as a comparison since you mentioned it). If you have not looked at our news-press mentions, feel free to do so: http://www.GreatApps.com/news I am also a consultant in mobile and was a judge for the past 12 months for Mobile Apps Showdown: http://ceweek.mobileappsshowdown.com/author/ricksinger/ In terms of case studies it would be very easy for me to give you information on many apps that have done well on our platform. In the spirit of being honest (which is the way business should be done) we both know there are various factors that determine if an app will be successful (for a fair case study). Price point of the app, the quality, the functionality, free or paid and category. Some apps are simply going to do better than others - as not all apps are going to appeal to everyone. However, we continue to bring in as broad of an audience as possible so everyone has the best possible chance of success. Therefore, while I want to share with you data, in all fairness, you cannot get an accurate assessment of how one app does versus another. One of my clients is: http://greatapps.com/simplydeclare since joining our site they have seen an increase in downloads by 10 x's what they were getting before. As you can read, CNN picked up on their app and wrote about it. I also helped them with other app related efforts. This is a paid app Another client: http://greatapps.com/iprioritymail after joining our site, he contact us with such excitement because he said "I have had a huge increase in my traffic and downloads, Thank you" This is a free app. Another client: http://greatapps.com/myfoodfight after joining, they went from 100 downloads to 700 very quickly, then to 6000 thereafter (in a short period of time. His written testimonial is in the office on file). This is a free app. Again, in all fairness, every app is different and so is the concept. I can also mention other apps that looked to do well and have been slow out of the gate because it was not perceived well. This has nothing to do with our marketing efforts, we know the public can be fickle. So while I would love to give you a "fancy" PDF of growth statistics, numbers and data I would hope you understand my point and appreciate the candor (or even in part agree). I also tell clients, that you should be marketing your app using various mediums such as social networks (twitter/FB, etc.). I also encourage clients to try to get app reviews on their own as well. The more people that see and know about your app, the better success rate you will have. In closing, I think our press mentions and traffic rankings speaks volumes about our business. ----------------
I was going to stay out of this thread after industry veterans decided to remind me I had no place to comment until I had launched my first app (coming Early Dec) or had 100 comments of 'welcome' or 'like!' but after that last post from suppoman, felt I had defend myself alittle here instead of becoming a whipping post for providing debate instead of listening to same old rhetoric from people that tell you what's bad, instead of saying, try. My point was, that due to an overcrowded market, that after doing homework maybe paid app reviews are not too bad if researched correctly if you are after quotes to use, or even just driving a few people your way, hoping for genuine sales that rate your game. Suppoman's post is an example of bad home work, sorry man, but read it again, you got sold a lemon and if you can't see why/how in that letter, stay away from paid reviews, as you will fall victim. That letter is so full of grey holes and promising without promises it made me smirk. I have read contracts similar to this with too much frequency. Sorry for speaking out of turn, but always question the way people say never, conform, and shut up......and do your homework.
Nothing is gained if they review your sites for paid. Paid reviews well when your game is also not free.
Again i would try and talk to actual users themselves. Many users try and look through the marketing 'gumpf' which is useless to many of us If i see some fake 'this games great' on some paid website i'll stay away from that game whatever. Good honest reviews is what helps me buy a game, so often you can see a fake review a mile off. Or there'll be a thread for a game here for example and then comes along a user and with their first post they praise this game ! So fake. Theres plenty of iOS sites out there which dont want money for reviews, just a free copy of your game. People trust those sites, not the fake ones where its obvious you've paid for a review as every review on that sites 4 or 5 stars. Same for App store reviews, way too many fake ones but thankfully you can spot most of those
Paid reviews aren't cool for a number of reasons. It boils down to the sites that are worth your time building a relationship with don't ask for you to pay for coverage. Those paid review sites also usually have abysmal traffic so you might as well burn your money in a fire (or better yet, put it towards actual paid marketing ads to bring in new players). Stay away from paid review sites. It cheapens the review sites/process, it cheapens the already difficult app discovery process, it cheapens your game.
To Suppoman and Others Hi guys & gals: I stumbled upon this post by Suppoman and his/her comments on GreatApps.com and as a fellow developer felt it was appropriate to chime in for a moment. I would encourage all to review this (and it relates to mobile and app marketing as a whole). I have been in mobile for many years and I know a lot of the top app developers. I also know people that have working with GreatApps.com and many many of them are very happy. Does that mean that there are people that are not happy? Probably as you cannot please everyone in this world. I have 'interviewed them' and in fact I will be using them in Q1 for many apps hitting the market. Supponman, you say that you received 0 downloads from them, correct? So it is fair to say that you were not marketing your app anywhere else? How else would you know that you then received 0 downloads? iTunes is not telling you where your downloads (if any) are coming from. What it possible tells is as follows: 1. You may not be doing anything else to market your app which is a recipe for disaster. You need to market your app in a lot of places to have any real success. 2. You do not know how biz/marketing works. Maybe you have 10 apps and only 5 are successful. How can you tell a success by 1 app when there are millions out there? 3. Maybe your app is not as good as you think or simply put the public is not crazy about your app? (chances are no one knows about your app - or not a large audience). I am not 'calling you out' but as a fellow dev in mobile, it pisses me off that people do know and understand how this business works. If we work together we can have great success in mobile. There are large app developers that spend well over $100k in marketing their apps and guess what?? Sometimes the app takes off and other times it does not. This is the business we are in. Here is a great quote from a Wall Street Journal Article: "On average, we only focus on about eight apps at a time. And we use these apps more than you might think: The average smartphone user spends two hours a day with apps, more than double the time spent two years earlier, according to Flurry Analytics." Think about that, the average user focuses on approx 8 apps at a time. So we all need to think how do we make our apps one of those 8. Its a jungle out there to get noticed guys/gals !!!!!!!!!!! Online marketing is a 50 billion dollars plus business. Do you think that everyone that is spending that money is 100% happy with their results? No they are not. I spent $899 for 30 days on a banner on a top app review site - I would say its a top 3 site in terms of traffic. We received very little business from this top review site. Instead of crying about it, I said to the team 'not happy with the results we had' and we moved on. We did not bash the company, we just said it did not work out on the campaign. When you bash/trash a company such as you are in GreatApps.com you are potentially hurting us fellow developers. You are hurting mobile because you may have not had success there, but others have in the past and others will in the future. If a developer does not use GreatApps.com because of your comment, then you may be stopping their success. Its like going to a restaurant you may have had a bad meal but your other 5 friends at the table enjoyed their meal. Are you going to tell them never to eat that restaurant ? I can relate as I have had other sites where the success was not there as I mentioned above. But we are all adults and have to understand that when we market and advertise we are taking a gamble. There are no assurances of success wherever we market. We all spend time on Twitter and social networks trying to get followers and being active. Does this mean it will help? No and we are spending time doing so. Time is money and its a gamble. We are seeing a flood of apps every day hitting the market. We have to be proactive and pound the pavement everyday single day to get noticed. Suppoman: I see you mention GreatApps.com which give them more exposure for their brand but I did not see the name of your app? If you want to market your app, why didn't you say "my app is ________ and I did not get any traffic"? At least this way maybe some learns about your app. Maybe some of us can give friendly advice to make suggestions to help you with your app. As I said before, I am a big supporter of mobile and the future of mobile. I spent a good amount of time researching GreatApps.com and talking to them. I like the fact they put their phone number on the bottom of every page. There are smaller companies out there that have email only and you can never get anyone on the phone or they never reply. I know people that have had some great success and other apps that have not done as good. I have read their testimonials and know they have traffic to the site which only increases my changes of getting my apps noticed. That is simple logic, the more people see my app the better the chances. We cannot force anyone to download our apps. Take out a page in the New York Times for $100k - does that mean you are going to have success?? Nope - it does not. We need to be out there so people can learn about our apps. That is what will make our apps successful. C'mon guys, not every app is going to do well on any site. I am willing to gamble $300, $400, $500 per app for 1 year of exposure? Sure I will. That is a better gamble for me then spending $1000 for 30 days to get possibly minimal results. Ask yourselves this question; how much exposure could I get for my app for $500 and would it last 1 year? In other words if someone said "here is $500 how would you market your app?" Many people would try to do a press release or a few banner and then they are done. The moral of the story here is very simple: Its is up to us if we want to do business with a company or not. I am sure that people who have advertised on sites like Facebook may have not been happy with the results -- this is marketing and sometimes the nature of the beast. The mobile space and app discovery as a whole is becoming harder and harder. Apple has more than 1 million apps and the same with Android. Plus windows is starting to get traction, etc. So why is someone going to discover your app? Rest assured they are not looking for it - we have to bring our apps to the public so they know about it. Do you think that someone is waking up today and saying to themselves "gee I want to download an app that does ABC"........... NO NO NO, they are not. If they happen to see if then, they will say "This looks cook, let me check it out". Good luck to all - Happy Holidays. Life it to short to get upset over small things. I would like to see more people shedding a better light on things even if its a negative and turning it into a plus. Lets help each other in a positive fashion!!!!!!!! God Bless.
Your whole post comes across as a desperate attempt to plug GreatApps.com. Spouting marketing BS and Wall Street journal quotes is just the kind of language marketing websites use in just about every unsolicited promotion site email I get. If you don't work for GreatApps.com then !PLEASE! consider rewriting your post as you are doing them absolutely no favours as like me my fellow developers will simply assume you do work for them.
reply to Threecubes & Destined Hi Guys: Wow, what a surprise, comments from people without any 'leg to stand on in terms of information'. You would like me to re-write a post? Sure: 1. In order for any app to be successful you need to market it. 2. If you think your app is going to jump out from everyone else's better be able to explain why in 30 seconds or less. 3. From the $25 Billion plus in app revenue who much did you actually see of that? 4. If the answer to #3 was very little then see #1. 5. It does not matter where you go to get noticed just get noticed What I can leave this forum with is simple: Here is a link to app review sites of which many we know. http://maniacdev.com/2012/05/ios-app-review-sites I have spend thousands of dollars at some of these sites. A few in the top 5, their traffic is not nearly what is reported as places as BuySellAds.com reports. I would never trash a site or company and pay attention. EVERY APP DEV that I know (including myself) gets mad when someone leaves a bad review (in the ratings) true or not?? Be honest people!!!!! So my point of my original post is just because it was not good for one person does not mean it was good for someone else. So believe what you want - I felt it was important to simply make a point that app marketing overall is not an easy thing. It does not matter who is doing it, where it is done, what banners are purchasing. I am sure if anyone of you had the perfect recipe you would not be share with others. Then again it seems right off the bad, the maturity level, the experience level and most importance the success level, is probably low of some people that are posting in this forum. Try reading this: http://www.amazon.com/App-Marketing-least-downloads-Kingpin-ebook/dp/B00COR96YS/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1385155912&sr=1-1&keywords=app+marketing or this: http://www.amazon.com/Best-Book-iOS-App-Marketing-ebook/dp/B007TBFNZU/ref=sr_1_5?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1385155944&sr=1-5&keywords=app+marketing Or this - business for dummies: http://www.amazon.com/iPhone-Application-Development-Dummies-Goldstein-ebook/dp/B0077FD9GS/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1385155998&sr=1-2&keywords=apps+for+dummies And if anyone reading this has a better understand and comprehension, I did not mention the company in question from before - although I am sure they will love the coverage. Talking about people keeps them relevant - time to keep the apps relevant. Must be hard for anyone to comprehend there are good people in this world that like talking to intelligent developers (and people who make donates to help charities and such). I hope these posted have actually educated at least one person to show there are good people out there and more important there are negative people who will never have success with poor attitudes. Bye for now all - Have a happy thanksgiving and try not to think about a app forum when with family.
Ok so clearly English is not your first language. I've seen louis vitton spam posts make more sense. I'm also sure that you don't work for greatapps.com as they would never write that poorly. I feel any further discussion will just be lost in translation. Good luck with your apps/thanksgiving.
Speaking to the original question of are paid reviews worth it... imo not even close! In fact, while having great reviews certainly makes you feel good, I am a firm believer that reviews don't even matter in terms of a game's success. First of all, I've seen way too many games chart like crazy with a 2-3 star average, that are either horrible clones of big name games, or sometimes even completely broken altogether. Clearly, their ratings and reviews were not enough to sway the majority of buyers, despite 95% of the reviews warning prospective buyers. Second, we've seen no change in sales with our own games based on their ratings. We have games with 4.5-5 star averages that sell almost nothing per day. Admittedly, we also have games that traditionally have 4.5 star averages, but have had buggy updates result in temporary 2.5-3 star averages. During those periods, there were no change in sales despite barrages of 1-star reviews. Imo, use reviews for informational purposes only. We love to see positive reviews of course, but we also make sure to look at all negative reviews to see what players are looking for, and what they want changed (as well as a form of bug report). But as far as having an actual impact in sales - imo at least - there isn't one.
I would vote no... not worth it. I had a similar experience. Almost without exception the sites that were asking for an Expedite Fee had fairly poor Alexa scores (web ranking by traffic). So it would seem their web traffic would not support decent advertising revenue and so they are forced I've had several excellent reviews (unpaid). Unscientifically I saw the minimal impact of an excellent free review from a moderately ranked Alexa site, and I rationalized that any site with a lower Alexa scale would have no positive impact on my downloads. All the paid sites fell into this category.
Good review sites don't charge for reviews, unless there is a rogue shoddy employee who accepts cash under the table. You just send a promo code, if the company likes the look of your game, they'll play and review it, if not, they won't, or if they're super busy, etc. You have to mail a lot of review sites just to get a small amount of reviews! Don't give up!
Paid App Reviews.. Not really worth it if not done right!! We recently launched an app and based on the reviews we received in the first week, we were getting higher rankings in the respective countries. So we decided to get some paid reviews via fiverr.com. There are we managed to get 25+25 reviews in the UK and US stores respectively. But this did not result in any higher ranking in the next week. But rather our ranks started to fall really badly until finally we were out of all stores. To make matters worse the Apple Review Team got in touch with us because they had noticed the sudden increase in reviews. So what went wrong? We think that the people that gave us the reviews only downloaded the apps once and then used different iTunes ID's and gave a review over and over. We were lucky that Apple didn't cancel our developer account. https://itunes.apple.com/app/id722772595
Hi a almost posted in your other posting how fake your reviews looked now i know why. Thanks for being so honest its good to know the point at which apple get suspicious of reviews. So i guess paying for reviews is a no no!
