Thans for the info slipster. Yeah quite a price for ads ..

Splat... technology will find itself in new games? Kewl!

When I looked, the lowest price ad was around $250, with the upper banners running $800 or more per week. Given the click through rates these ads get, that just doesn't make sense for anything but a top tier game, and if you have that type of game you're already getting reviewed there. So you either have to go big/original/polished enough to hopefully garner mainsteam attention from those sites, then hope to god that parlays into a feature from apple, or accept that your app will probably sit in lackluster sales.

As for updates, between 8-10 days is pretty typical, but it seems to be longer on apps with more updates. To be honest, I'm don't think the average app store buyer pays attention to developer names and such. Hell, the average user doesn't do this in big box games either. That's a hardcore dynamic, limited to less than 0.1% of the audience. And often I put some small feature in out of guilt, but I'm probably wasting my time doing so. This is the only thing I've found to affect sales in any major way. I created a lite version of one game, which has pushed my sales up by maybe a few units a week. Getting bumped into the new list is just more effective.

It's unfortunate, because I'd love to really pour time into a single application; but the chances are it won't hit and I feel I'm better off playing a lot of smaller bets than one large one. That might be different if I had a lot more free time to burn though, but I mostly code at night after the kids have gone to bed, and often after coding all day I don't want to work on a long slog, favoring something I can ship in a week or so.

My latest kick is to modularize a large game into a bunch of small apps which can be shipped as their own projects. For instance, right now I'm working on a paint app that will ship as the core of at least two different apps, but will also be a major component of a game I'm working on.

>if toucharcade features you, that will make a difference - but given the cost of advertising there

Just out of curiosity .. how much are the costs for advertising in TA?

"prop a new build as soon as the last one goes live, even if I haven't made any changes"
Yes it's pretty dirty :) actually it's not a valid long term strategy as the people who bought the previous version of your game will be invited to update again and again, with no improvement at all. They will not be recommend your apps and will not buy your other apps again.

I'm surprised Apple can't detect fake upates like this. But myabe you just have to change add a "int fake=0" line to change the binary. This can be one of the reasons the delays are so long to get an update on the store.

By the way, you must have good statistics about update delays :) How long it is on average ?

My experience is that ads and reviews on smaller sites have had no visible effect on sales. For instance, AppSmile.com gave me 2 months of free adds at the top of their page, and as far as I can tell it's led to maybe 2 or 3 sales. CrazyMikesApps.com did the same with the same result. Sure, if toucharcade features you, that will make a difference - but given the cost of advertising there I can't imagine it's worth the money if you're trying to get your game known.

In fact, the only thing I've noticed that I can do to make a difference to my sales is to prop a new build as soon as the last one goes live, even if I haven't made any changes. I feel pretty dirty doing it, but I can't argue with the results. I'll go from 0-2 sales a day to 20-30 on the day it goes live with another 20-30 coming from the days after that. I have 3 paid apps out now, so doing that as fast as apple allows is worth a few thousand over the year.

Now, one downside is that the first review someone posts of your new version becomes the only review listed (1 review instead of say, 40). However, until someone posts a review, all of your reviews are listed. So once you start propping every week, you're actually compelled to keep doing it so your app is listed with all of it's reviews.

Hopefully they'll fix the app store one day, but somehow I doubt they're going to since they didn't do it with 3.0. In truth, it's not really that much of a gain for them to do it - just for us.

The only time I click on admob is by mistake. I also a post on linkedin where the guy broke down how many purchases he would need via admob to break even and said he wasn't even close to that number. I would try free viral marketing first.

Most of the comments I heard said that their ad spend was gone quickly and they didnt think they had anything to show for it. Im trying to think of which ads have gotten me to buy something in the app store and I cant think of any!

That would be interesting to know... I've been wondering if it's worth putting advertisements out for my game. I've heard it both ways, with some people praising ads, while others think it's a waste of money.

arian487 said in an earlier thread "I used some ads from admob and had 100k impressions very quickly, of that 100k, 400 clicks and 0 buys."

What are you using to track sales? I realize that admob, or an ad network can tell you how many impressions vs click-throughs, but how do you track how many of those click-throughs go on to make a sale? LinkShare?

Also, how much does 100k impressions cost from in-game ad networks like admob? Do you pay for the impressions or the clicks? Does anyone know the cost and effectiveness of banner ads on the iphone blogs like toucharcade, slidetoplay, etc...

thanks, Codemattic