Survey of 500 app creators claims two-thirds have lost money from promotion ban
Hundreds of App Store game developers say their revenues have fallen by a fifth due to Apple’s recent ban on controversial promotion methods.
Apple has not officially announced its new App Store policy, though a vast body of developers say it no longer allows a certain type of in-game promotion.
The policy believed to be banned is known as the ‘pay per install incentives’.
The process is where one App Store game offers virtual currency if users download or buy another, otherwise unrelated, app.
Behind that simple process is a vast network of App Store developers who promote each other’s games in return for a cut on certain revenues or other benefits.
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Apple appears to have taken exception to this process when certain apps began to enter the App Store charts, due to heightened popularity fuelled by ‘pay per install incentives’.
One major beneficiary of pay per install incentives is mobile group Tapjoy, and since Apple’s ban last month the company has kept busy analysing the damage.
Tapjoy interviewed 500 hand-picked game developers and claims that “two-thirds” of respondents made about 20 per cent of their money from ‘pay per install incentives’ – money they now don’t generate.
It is unknown which developers Tapjoy had surveyed, though the firm has a personal interest in overturning Apple’s ban.
The number of surveyed developers who suffered game usage decrease was eight times higher than those who saw an increase, Tapjoy said.
And the ratio was 15-to-1 for those who experienced a revenue decline versus an increase, according to a Venturebeat report on the statistics.
There were developers surveyed who said that the pay-per-install business generated over 60 per cent of revenues.
Executives at Tapjoy have met with Apple several times to resolve the matter.
Apple is not publicly commenting.
I'm personally sick of buying apps and games that are nothing more than advertising platforms. So my message to app/game developers is quite simple...
If you want to advertise, then don't do it in an app I have purchased, because that part of the functionality WAS NOT disclosed at the time of purchase. If you want to run adverts in your apps, then do it in the free versions.
Tap joy handpicked 500 developers. Tap joy runs a service that dos what has been banned. Would I be being cynical to suggest of the 500 devs they asked, a good number of them were Tapjoy clients?
I got an e-mail from tapjoy asking to participate in the survey, so I'd argue the survey was fair... A large majority of apps rely on PPI installs to generate exposure... I'd argue it has a posotive effect... It gives users a means of gaining virtual currency without necessairly paying for it in cash (as many of the apps are free that reward virtual currency), developers a new means of monetizing and helps ensure new high quality games are being seen in the charts and not lost in the sea of 300,000 apps... Apps still sink or swim based on their quality/ if a developer pays $20,000 to get an app high in the charts through PPI then needless to say, if it's a poor app then it will drop just as quickly/ and the reviews will reflect the quality within minuites/hours of the PPI campaign starting.
Similarly however if a developer spends $20,000 highlighting a quality app up the charts then it gives some re-assurance of generating a return based on the quality of their product, rather than having the quite high risk without PPI of it being lost in a sea of 300,000 apps no matter how good the game may be... I think it gave developers and publishers much greater confidence in the viability of what has become a vastly over-saturated market...
