Sterling work Owen! Some great insights and figures in that report. Using the median really does make the figures lower than what we might imagine. I hope every iOS website out there and every iOS blogger covers your findings. My impression is that despite the fairly small sample this is pretty representative of the App Store as a whole. Hopefully one day we'll get something similar from Apple directly so we'll know for sure. I think if you were to run another survey (with the extra publicity from this one) then you'd get thousands of replies next time.
Maybe you could write a press release on prmac, so more bloggers can see your survey results and spread the word about it.
Excellent summary, thanks! I'll admit I was one of the dummies who confused revenues for all apps in the last 12 months and not just apps released in the last 12 months. Perhaps the wording could have been clearer if there were lots of others who misunderstood the question as well. I'm looking forward to another survey with more targeted questions and more respondents. Now that you can point to the value of the results from this survey, I think it will be easier to convince devs to spend a bit more time filling out a more detailed survey.
Thanks, everyone! I'm glad you're finding it useful. I agree 100%. It was completely my fault that the questions were misinterpreted, and I'm really annoyed with myself for that. I don't blame the respondents at all. Like I said, I'm not a statistician...maybe I should have enlisted one to help me word the survey. That could cool. If it's me who does it, it'll have to wait a while, as this one has taken up way more of my time than I anticipated. I'd really like to keep working on my game now. Owen
Just to echo what everyone else has been saying, thanks for putting this together (and thanks to all the developers who who took the survey as well!)
Thanks a lot for the results, it's all very interesting and congrats, i see tuaw.com has posted an article about it!
Slashdotted http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/09/30/0730251/top-1-of-ios-game-developers-make-a-third-of-all-revenue
I was a statistics major (since changed) and the first thing you would be judged on is that the sample was taken from a community who chose to take it. That in itself creates instant bias and possibly skewed results. As thats neither here nor there (and you included a disclaimer, ) I must say that the data is interesting enough. I hear equal stories about developers who make tons of money and those who make none. I was just glad to see something like this done. Thank you Owen!
Just wanted to say "Thanks!" for putting this survey together and crunching the data! There is definitely some interesting data there and hopefully in the future we can continue to have more surveys that allow us to look further into app store.
