Apple’s App Discovery Lead On Google Is Shrinking, But Mobile Publishers Shouldn’t Be Too Worried. Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Matthäus Krzykowski is a co-founder of Xyologic, a mobile app search engine.
The number of iPhone apps that hit the Top Free 100 rankings in the U.S. Apple App Store has decreased by 35%, according to a study we’ve completed at app search startup Xyologic. In April 2011, 422 apps got into the Top 100 Free iPhone apps, while in April 2012, just 277 apps made the cut. The number of new apps that hit this ranking sank from 58 to 33. This compares with 6,497 new free iPhone apps in April 2011 and 11,545 new free iPhone apps in April 2012. The table below shows the summary of the study – the number of apps within the top 100 free apps and their respective ages year over year (April 2011 vs April 2012) for both the Apple App Store as well as Google Play U.S.
Quixey raises $3.8 million for smart app discovery. With the explosion of apps, the app discovery game has also turned into a competitive market, and a number of services are now looking to be the place where users find quality apps.
And these start-ups are pulling in big funding to make sure they’re the go-to resource in this expanding market. Quixey, an app search engine with $400,000 in initial seed funding from Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, has just announced $3.8 million in new funding. The Series A funding comes from US Venture Partners, WI Harper Group, Web Investment Network along with additional funding from Innovation Endeavors.
The money will go toward the expansion of Quixey, which tries to partner with websites, app stores, search engines and carriers to offer its services. As app user acquisition challenges loom, Fiksu offers a fix. Finding new users for apps has grown increasingly complicated with the number of apps exploding and app store owners like Apple cracking down on some download tools like pay-per-install campaigns.
That has forced some publishers and developers to look at third-party companies such as Fiksu, a Boston startup, in order to wrangle new users. Fiksu for Mobile Apps, which got underway in April, works for iOS and Android and optimizes user acquisition by selecting the most effective way at any given moment to reach users across more than 20 ad networks, real-time bidding systems, and incentivized download networks.
Who are all the providers of incentivized installs in the App Store. Advertising and Monetization Platform for iPhone and mobile web apps. Surikate (Appsteur), spécialiste du marketing mobile, lève 1 million d’euros. Surikate, la start-up spécialisée dans les services de marketing mobile, annonce une levée de fonds d’1 M€ auprès de Covent Partners.
Créée en 2010 par Jules Minvielle sous le nom d’Appsteur, Surikate propose différents services sur le marché des applications mobiles comme un service de référencement dans l’Appstore (Appsteur), une régie publicitaire utilisant des formats innovants, ainsi que différents outils et services pour les annonceurs et les éditeurs d’applications mobiles. Cette levée de fonds permettra également à Surikate de renforcer son développement à travers de nouveaux recrutements et la création de nouveaux partenariats stratégiques via des prises de participation dans le capital d’acteurs clés ayant des activités complémentaires. Loss of Incentivized Installs Crimps Profit Margins for Developers, Tapjoy Argues.
It looks like Apple may not budge on its decision to clamp down on offer walls where gamers can earn virtual currency for downloading apps.
Tapjoy, the biggest driver of such incentivized downloads, is taking a very public strategy in touting the benefits of this practice, as it says Apple is continuing to reject apps that contain these offer walls. Tapjoy argues that this is jeopardizing the freemium monetization model and is crimping profit margins for developers. “The effect is so severe that more than half of our developers report that both their daily active users and revenues are down sharply,” said Matt McAllister, a spokesperson for the company. The company is sharing results of a survey with 496 iOS developers to show the impact of losing incentivized installs — a sign that private negotiations with Apple may be stalling. The company has to act fast as many of its earliest partners are sending updates to the app store that have stripped out incentivized offer walls. Tapjoy says Apple’s ban on promos is killing mobile game profits.
Not all players are the same!
Join GamesBeat's Dean Takahashi for a free webinar on April 29th that will explore why players leave Free to Play games and how you can change this. Sign up here. Tapjoy said tonight that Apple’s ban of a popular kind of promotion on the iPhone is hurting mobile game developers. Tapjoy and Apple held talks on the ban in the past few weeks, but Apple’s hard-and-fast ban on “pay per install” incentive promotions remains in place. Apple was concerned that game developers were paying Tapjoy to rocket their games to the top 25 ranks of the App Store, unfairly gaming the system and hurting the quality of the game rankings. Glu Boosts Second-Quarter Earnings Guidance, Stops Accounting for Incentivized Install Revenue. Glu Mobile, a publicly-traded mobile gaming company that specializes in freemium games, raised its second-quarter earnings guidance by a range of $500,000 to $1 million and said going forward, it’s not accounting for revenue from incentivized installs.
The company said that smartphone gaming revenue will come in at between $8.25 and $8.75 million this quarter, up from the $7.25 to $8.25 million range it forecasted in its earnings call a few weeks ago. It says $2.9 million of that will come from incentivized installs, where users download apps from an offer wall in exchange for virtual currency inside a game. This revenue has already been transacted, and the company isn’t counting incentivized install revenue going forward. Glu said it will probably be able to make up for 50 to 75 percent of the revenue lost from offer walls through other kinds of incentivized actions in games — like getting users to watch video ads in exchange for virtual currency. With a Focus on Monetizing Mobile Apps, Tapjoy Leaves Its Scamville Past Behind.
It’s hard to forget the shouting match that put an end to Offerpal’s heady days more than a year ago.
Zwapp’s app makes iPhone app discovery more social. Sharing what mobile apps you have in a social network has been tried various ways.
Appsfire hit on the idea of socialising apps. Zwapp is coming at it from a slightly different angle. Appia Announces Pay-Per-Downloads for Developers. Apple recently took actions to dissuade developers from participating in incentivized install programs, meaning programs that encouraged consumers to download new apps in return for virtual goods and other bonuses which could be used in mobile gaming and other apps.
But while those changes may have negatively affected some companies' programs, for example, Tapjoy, it has led to opportunities for others. Today, one of those hoping to benefit from the increasingly important marketing needs of app developers is Appia. It's launching a pay-per-install ad network that it says offers guaranteed ROI to developers. The service launched today at the 2011 AppNation conference in San Francisco. Appia Launches Pay Per Download The new ad network supports Android, iOS, Java, Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Palm, and developers will only have to pay for the actual downloads of their apps. Targeting Capabilities and More Details Other interested developers can sign up here: www.appia.com/ppd. Not_available. Chomp May Have Just Solved The Nightmare That Is Android App Search. Regardless of what you think about the Android platform, there’s no denying that the Market experience for finding apps is pretty poor.
And that’s putting it nicely. Google has evolved the experience over the years, and the web-based Market helps a lot. But on the phone, even with Gingerbread, it’s far from great. Chomp Now Live And Ready To Bite Into iPhone App Recommendations. Last week, we previewed Chomp, a new service that aims to offer a better review and recommendation system for iPhone apps. Today, the service, which is an app itself, has gone live, with its app now available in the App Store.
As we noted, the service is sort of like a Yelp for iPhone apps.