Owen Goss is the developer of Dapple, a cute color matching puzzle game for the iPhone (you may also remember his memory leaks tutorial here on Mobile Orchard). Despite having a slick site, good gameplay videos, and so forth, it hasn’t sold too well. So Owen’s written The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty) where he reveals how it has sold so far and what effect a review on Kotaku had.
Owen had a development budget of $32,000 for the game but in the first month made $535 in revenue, despite a glowing review from major gaming site Kotaku.
http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2009/03/09/the-numbers-post-aka-brutal-honesty/
Todd Bernhard points out that Owen didn’t spend any money on advertising and had no free “Lite” version for people to try, whereas he’s spending $1000 in advertising and his own app has entered the top 100 on the store. Others complain that $4.99 is a bad price point for a “simple” game.
Scott iPhones
As part of Apple’s one billion app countdown for their iTunes App Store, they have also compiled a list of the all-time top 20 apps [App Store] for both Paid and Free apps.
Perhaps most interesting is what the potential market for a very successful paid iPhone app might be. A few numbers have been released for some of the top iPhone apps that gives us an idea of the numbers involved. Here is a collection of the known sales numbers for some of the top 20 paid apps. App titles link directly to App Store.
#2. Koi Pond – The New York Times published just a few days ago reveals that Blimp Pilots’ virtual pond app has been downloaded an estimated 900,000 times giving the developers about $623,000 after Apple’s cut.
#3. Enigmo – Pangea’s puzzle game appeared early in the App Store. Pangea’s Brian Greenstone recently revealed in a YouTube video that Enigmo sold 810,000 units between July 2008 and January 2009 (likely the bulk of sales). The price of this app has bounced between $9.99 and $0.99 making it difficult to estimate earnings.
#12. Pocket God – This recent hit is another entertainment app that puts you in control of a small island of inhabitants. Bolt Creative’s Dave Castelnuovo revealed in a TouchArcade forum post that their app had sold about 500,000 copies as of late March. An impressive feat since it has only been around since January, earning the developers about $350,000 so far.
#19. iShoot – An artillery game by one-man company Ethan Nicholas who is the latest rags-to-riches App Store story. Nicholas revealed to the New York Times that he had made $800,000 in five months. His app has held mostly at a $2.99 pricepoint, which estimates his total sales at over 380,000 downloads.
Scott iPhones
Mixology, a drink recipe and bartending iPhone app by Digital Outcrop, recently ran a very successful campaign on the ADMOB network to increase downloads of their free app. With their goal of boosting its ranking in the App Store in mind, AdMob worked with them to create a burst campaign designed to push Mixology into the Top 5 of the Lifestyle category and the Top 100 overall ranking within the App Store.
The campaign drove more than 23,000+ downloads of the Mixology app; an 845% growth in downloads from the day before the campaign started to the second day the campaign. After running the campaign, Digital Outcrop used AdMob’s House ads to push downloads of their paid version of the Mixology app, Mixologist; it successfully moved the paid app into the Top 100 overall paid app list and came in as #1 in Lifestyle category.
http://blog.admob.com/2009/12/14/847-increase-in-downloads-for-digital-outcrop%E2%80%99s-mixology-iphone-app/
Scott iPhones
Last December was the coming out party for the iPod touch and early data from mobile analytics companies, app developers, Amazon.com, and anecdotal evidence all suggests another hugely successful holiday season for this device.
AdMob’s usage data suggests that new iPod touch devices were responsible for a majority of the increase in App Store activity the day after Christmas. Ad requests from iPod touches increased 96% on December 26 compared to the average from the week prior, while requests from iPhones only increased 12% over the same time frame.
In terms of actual devices, there was a 57% increase in the number of iPod touch devices used on December 26th compared to average daily usage of the week before Christmas. Device growth was strong across the top markets, particularly in the UK.
http://blog.admob.com/2009/12/30/another-huge-christmas-for-the-ipod-touch/
Scott iPhones
Google has confirmed it has seen 50 times more searches from the iPhone than from any other mobile handset.
“We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again,” Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations told the Financial Times at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The Google executive observed that if other mobile manufacturers begin to implement full web browsing capabilities in their devices then that should drive mobile search to overtake search activity from computers within the next few years – driving the company’s success in the mobile ads market.
AT&T recently confirmed that the average revenue it sees from iPhone users is double that of average users because the of top up data packages.
And in the UK O2 recently confirmed the iPhone to be driving “unheard of data traffic” on the mobile network.
Scott iPhones
