App rankings are public for all the world to see, but not the associated daily downloads. Would any developer care if their actual sales figures were public knowledge? What would be the downside?
Those kinds of figures should always be private in my opinion unless the devs themselves wish to reveal it themselves. Mike
It would probably be embarrassing for Apple to show just how few sales it takes to get to the top of the games sub categories in most countries.
Would you like to post up all your earnings, W2's, 1040's, and the content of all your bank accounts for the past few years?
Hell no, but I don't buy that analogy. If you look at top-charts for music, they've traditionally always included the associated sales figures. It's not like sales data (for apps) is all that hard to estimate. If you have two ranked apps in a particular category, you can extraploate how many copies the stuff in-between is selling. But why should developers have to guess? Knowing how much money is being made (on average) for the top app in any given category, or on the flip side how many sales is sufficient to break into the lower (but still visible) ranks of each category is information that I think most developers would find useful.
Most app developers are individuals who may not even have incorporated a company. In the UK at least, the earnings of private individuals are private. Incorporated companies are required to file accounts which can then be accessed by the public. If Apple published all download numbers, I guess they would be breaching the rights of those private individuals.
The difference with music charts is that Apple isn't the exclusive provider of music, so a musician/songwriter isn't releasing their entire income figures by having that information available, as they'll have numerous other sources of income. If a developer creates apps for iPhone, iTunes is the sole route of distribution, so publishing their sales figures is giving away the whole picture. In some countries, private individuals, and some privately owned companies, are not required to publish their accounts, so by releasing the information, Apple would breach that. Isn't it better that companies willingly release the information they want to?
Companies like Nielsen SoundScan track sales for music industry groups like the RIAA. This is more than just an analogy, these guys are branching into the mobile entertainment business. It's already been mentioned that these numbers aren't hard to estimate; I'm sure that some third party will make them available before the business matures very much more. In my case, someone would also have to estimate my ad revenue before they knew my income. I'm not convinced that even my ad provider has a good handle on that
Out of curiosity how long a time do the top-selling charts reflect. Like if a game is currently 17th, does that mean its sold the 17th most copies in the last day, hour, or week?
It's a calculated average, based on several days of data, with the most recent day being weighted heavier. Nobody knows the exact algorithm, but several people have come up with a reasonable guess. Knowing the number of downloads an app has really won't tell you how much it's made, as prices change all the time. Plus, many of the downloads could be from going free for a day. The actual download count is fairly meaningless, except for bragging rights.
@lilwhitebear It looks like he wants to see the daily downloads, which is quite different. @Stroffolino Many private companies and individuals, myself included, get most of their income from the App Store. Displaying daily downloads for the public to see is effectively the same thing as you showing everyone your W2's. If Apple displays daily downloads, someone will immediately make a tool to aggregate and graph that over time, and now you and everyone else in the world knows my personal finances. So, no thanks. There are enough developers out there kindly sharing their stats of their own will to be able to extrapolate just about everything you need to know.