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Gaming the App Store
space_in_your_face writes "Want to boost the popularity of your latest iPhone app? Ask Reverb Communications! 'When it comes to winning in the App Store, this PR firm has discovered a dynamite strategy: throw ethics out the window. Reverb Communications, a PR firm that represents dozens of game publishers and developers, has managed to find astounding success on Apple's App Store for its clients. Among its various tactics? It hires a team of interns to trawl iTunes and other community forums posing as real users, and has them write positive reviews for their client's applications. ... Reverb claims that their clients have sold over $2 billion of product under their watch.'"
When in doubt, lie, cheat, and steal. Strong ethics and morales will get you nowhere in this world kids.
This will last.
We all know how Apple likes to have others in any sort of control over the App Store.
Companies have been doing this at other places, like Amazon.com, for years. Buyers beware.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
seriously, what the hell?
So, cheating and lying to get ahead is news how?
I think reverb are really great. you shodntt sey bad tings about them.
They "worked on" rockband... I wondered why it had so many good reviews.
Personally, I find the 0 - 3 star ratings more telling about an app than the 4 or 5 star (fanboy) ratings. In general, when I want to find out about a product, I like to read the negative to moderate reviews because they seem to be more honest about potential problems. What do you guys think/do?
Carl P. Corliss
"Among its various tactics? It hires a team of interns to trawl iTunes and other community forums posing as real users, and has them write positive reviews for their client's applications."
Just so we're all clear, this is already illegal. If they are engaging in this kind of activity, then it's just a law enforcement issue.
...I sense visits from the FTC and BBB in this company's future.
How is this new? This has been going on long before computers. The snake oil salesman used to do it all the time, they would have somone in the crowd claim fantastic results to sell something that was worthless. What you mean I can't believe every review posted about a product or application? Critical thinking.... what is that? Idiocracy is happening already, humankind is doomed!
and more kdawson FUD?
Why not use the method L. Ron Hubbard's Bridge Communications used to keep Dianetics on the bestseller lists, and simply buy millions of copies of your own product?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
App Store Optimization. If you pronounce the acronym right, it sounds like "asshole".
I put very little weight on either comments or ratings on the app store. I outright ignore 1 and 5 star ratings; the number of times I've seen comments raving about the app being the best in its category or whatever yet having a 1-star rating is ridiculous. Seriously how do you screw up understanding how a 5-star rating system works?
Then we have mmorpg trolls leaving tons of 5 star comments with their character codes for alliances and such; waste of space and tells me Jack about the app itself.
If a review is 2, 3, or 4 stars then I pay more attention to what they wrote.
At least they're not apping the game store. I'm still paying off my legal bills.
I don't know what the FTC would do in this case.
Obviously one of their interns is also a /. sumitter.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
Gaming the app store is no worse than apping the game store...
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
It's interesting that the idea of shills hasn't been better represented in the Internet business model. The psychology behind shills and mob motivation and mob behaviour is advanced compared to Barnum's dictum that "there's a sucker born every minute" and the barkers and shills who worked his midway freak shows. The ideas contained in the submission are child's play compared to the opportunities for exploitation the Internet offers. Corporations are legal entities that play hide and seek with morality, ethics and the law by Wizard of Oz advertising pyrotechnics and repeatedly playing off the tribal sentiments of group think individuals who turn a blind eye, (and lose an I), to the wrong doings of a hierarchically higher class entities. There's an anthropological idea about tribal guilt that manifests itself in victims found with inordinate numbers of wounds thought to have been inflected by multiple perpetrators with the idea of spreading the guilt of the crime over the tribe. Something similar functions in mobs and fanboi, product idolation. We hide in the tribe. We're secure in the tribe and we protect the image of the tribe to ensure our own protection. If you can speak for the tribe, or pretend to, and thus motivate the tribe groupthink then you're a winner, or, your product is.
ideopath @ play
Apple takes 30% so for someone to make $1.2m they need to sell $1.56m in games. For $1 apps that's one and a half million but for a $10 game that's only 150K - which is barely into 'hit' territory for box shelf games.
If you have a game that's good and garners decent amounts of attention then you'll make millions on the iPhone. Thus the PR firm - to make sure your product gets noticed.
Full disclosure I work for a game studio that's doing iPhone games. No we don't use a PR firm as our products are good enough we don't need to.
Whenever I am buying something online, I always research it. I read forums, sites with reviews, and blogs. Typically you will get everything from "this sucks, don't ever buy it, touch it, or think about it again" to "this thing is the best ever, it gave me true happiness!" The truth will lie somewhere between. Do your research, find that gem of truth that is common across all sources. But then again it is only $5.99
and it's an old hat with pretty much every professional marketing company. Either employees are asked to post things, or they hire some external people, like in this example.
I have seen it, I have even been asked to do it*, and from what I know, it's pretty much an expected standard.
Music, games, books, websites, other products, you name it...
The only difference is, that real professional companies have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy about it, and the only person asking is your direct boss, in private.
___
* and lied about actually doing it, like most people in the company at that time, because half the staff just got fired because of management incompetence
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Why do you think an iPhone game shouldn't be worth at least $1? What do you think it should be worth? Someone spent a couple of months of their time developing that application, I for one am very glad there's finally a platform where their creativity can be rewarded by cash going directly into their hands rather than the hands of some publisher or other 3rd party that did very little to produce the product. I think you're being a snob to state that spending $1 on a game that entertains you for hours is frivolous. Did you buy a coffee today? You could have just drank free water you wasteful spender. What a preposterous statement.
So what is the value of a dollar? A beer? Nope. A newspaper? Not the New York Times. A pack of gum? Not the fancy "winter-blast" chiclet kind. A comic book? Not in years. Paperback book? Sure, if you can get seven more dollars. Let's see... that leaves us with a can of Coke (but not a bottle), or maybe a candy bar (but not the king sized kind).
But let's raise the stakes a little bit... what's the value of a dollar when you're stuck in an airport? Anyone? Anyone..? So if you can kill a four hour layover in an airport by spending $1 to download a "trivial airport game," I'd say that sounds like a marker for market success, not failure.
Breakfast served all day!
One thing I've noticed at the App Store is that a lot of perfectly fine apps get a lot of 1 star reviews for ridiculous reasons. For instance, a review might state that the app does what it claimed to do flawlessly, that it is useful, and the best app in the category--but the reviewer also wish it had feature X (which no other app has), and the reviewer then gives it just 1 star, apparently for this "missing" feature.
This doesn't appear to be an isolated problem. Nearly every very good app I've downloaded has had a lot of these kind of negative reviews.
I wonder if anyone is purposefully trying to game the store by posting negative reviews on competitors, too?
Reverb would like to clarify a few items regarding the MobileCrunch story about our agency that ran this weekend. The article âoeCheating the App Storeâ is unfortunately full of emotion, logical holes and for the most part untrue. Here are the facts:
1. The writer forgot that Reverb Communications is not just a public relations agency, but is also a sales and marketing agency. Reverbâ(TM)s marketing department has interns that do social viral marketing.
2. Our interns do not post reviews on iTunes. Our employees donâ(TM)t post fake reviews. Itâ(TM)s common for Reverb team members to purchase the games and write a review in iTunes using their personal accounts AFTER they have played the game. In many cases Reverb has provided technical feedback and gameplay guidance to the app developer, long before these games hit the App Store, so we know these games extremely well. We also like these games or we wouldnâ(TM)t take them on as clients. The entire list of iTunes accounts in your story are from staff members who have played the games.
3. 1 person=1 iTunes account=1 credit card. We do not have hundreds of accounts to âoetrawlâ through iTunes â" itâ(TM)s simply untrue. We have 10 staff members who choose to post on the games when and if they have played the game. We have to buy and play the game in order to have an opinion.
4. This same writer contacted several of our app store developers wanting negative comments from them regarding Reverb. They all gave positive feedback, but the writer left this aspect out of the story.
Sigh. The question is, how is a trivial airport game worth $1.2 million.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Aside from all the "MMORPG" games that turn out to be nothing but graphic skins over the exact same stupid mafia game; the most annoying thing is the way people will take the free crApps that they are trying to give away and bump the price up to $0.99 and back down to free to get it to hit peoples "Newly free" filters.
There are decent apps that drop their price for a while, but seeing an app marked "Free" (which always means some weak broken version not worth downloading) as "On sale" is annoying.
I'm pretty sure it's just to get into apps like "PandoraBox" that have a "Newly discounted" category.
Reverb claims that their clients have sold over $2 billion of product under their watch.
I flatly don't believe them.
Why would anybody hire them? Why would you believe and have dealings with a company whose product is explicitly stated as lying and deception?
That's not really going to stop an unscrupulous publisher or author. Let's say you want to astroturf Amazon a hundred times... so you buy your book a hundred times. That costs what... $1000-$2000? That's dirt cheap advertising. And if you get your royalties on the book sale and you get a copy of the book, which you can then sell back through Amazon again.
Meanwhile, a bunch of people who have bought your book, and would like to write about how much it stinks, can't. Because they bought it at a normal book store.
It's not. It's worth $1.
The magic of the Information Age however allows removal of barriers to entry and nearly free ($0.30 per copy) publishing and distribution. This allows the $1 game to be bought by anyone who thinks it's worth $1 to them.
Because it's fun and 1.2 million + 30% people think it's worth $1? How is it not worth $1.2 million? If you think it's easy to pull off a Flight Control success on the App Store, you should do some more research. There's a lot more duds and guys making $3 - $4 a day than there are Flight Controls. Are you arguing for a cap on what any one person's couple of month's worth of effort can earn them?
1000's of new apps get added to the appStore every day. How do you think people distinguish the good the from bad? They don't look through each one checking if they have 3 star ratings or whatever. They just go to the top rated list and if you're app is not on that list you don't get noticed, then your app never gets on the other list, the top selling list. So, then there is no way that your app gets any publicity, so then you app dies. That's why people want to pay to have fake reviews.
I knew it was good idea to get a Android phone...
... crap, it seems this happens in the Android market too...
*checks*
If they are really naughty they would have those interns give competing apps a low rating, this is not something they would admit.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Man, there are sure a lot of dimwit iPhone users out there...
How is this not fraud? It is intentional deception for profit. They should go to jail. The execs, the boss and the interns.
Been seeing Apple astroturfing for years, especially to downplay any gripes people have with legitimate concerns or problems.
Computer did not feed my kitten.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
For every thousand people who read this and say "that's just wrong", there's one or two who says "Hmmm, interesting." And for every few dozen of those, there's an app developer that's saying "Maybe I should find out how much this costs."
On the other hand, if I find a game for the blackberry that I like, and that provides me hours of mindless escape -- surely that has value to me. And if I can reward the developer of this game with something as insignificant as a dollar in order to continue playing the game, how is that in any way a bad thing?
I'd further argue that this does not cause the companies to be overvalued. Unlike the recent trend of relying on advertising (literally becoming the middleman in a sale of the attention of other people), here you have a company that is producing something of value that cost actual time and effort. Assuming that they can do so in the future, the same question -- how is this a bad thing?
Well at least the out of work gold farmers and character levelers have a new career opportunity.
It's tricky. I'm sure there are a lot of people who are happy about this kind of astroturfing. I mean, it would be the ones who say that it's not their fault for missing a good video game because they weren't advertised to. If a company has the money to pay for this kind of advertising, they are likely the cream of the crop anyway. Amirite or amirite?
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Some other tactics I've noticed lately:
Release a undisclosed "bug fix" every few days to keep an app higher up in the listings. I've noticed a few developers who, like clockwork, release a new bug fix every week on the same app, with no info on what exactly was broken in the previous version.
Remove and relaunch the same app every couple of months. Not even a bad review can harm a clean slate.
"Theme" your apps and release dozens of variants into the same category. You might just get lucky and find a few idiots biting because one version of your app has a picture of a kitty in it!
8==8 Bones 8==8
Why is it that the higher the UID, the more likely it is that the poster is an idiot?
Love it. I get an error every time I try to review a worthless app purchased from the App Store (messages tells me I must buy the app first). Ironic that marketeers can do something I can't. Apple really needs to scrap iTunes and start over, maybe buy Facebook and use an interface like that, where you can have a network of trusted friends, and then look at their reviews of apps instead of all the bozo ones. U can almost tell the fake review from the real ones, but why bother? The comment section on iTunes is just a mess.
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
With 50K+ apps on the store, developers should think of it as their delivery mechanism, NOT as the way for the customers to hear about them. The time when the App store was an adequate source of publicity has been over for at least a year. Any competent PR firm will know that astrotufing the reviews is a waste of time.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So it would cost more per review than per app -- expensive advertising, I would think.
... Sure, if you want to look at it that way.
Or, you take the cost of the app out completely, and not count it as a sale, as you are getting $2 for each app that they buy, and also have to pay out $2 for each app they buy....
Where I went to school, 0 + 2 - 2 = 0 How is that expensive?
I heard Microsoft is releasing this new operating system, Windows 7. From what I tried on the beta release candidate, it seems like Microsoft really cleaned out the bloat - it's fast, it doesn't crash like Vista and it's way more secure. I'm normally a Linux fan but I'm going to get one for my desktop cause some of the features are just too good to miss.
As in, lying with intent to defraud.
and it's an old hat with pretty much every professional marketing company.
And pretty much every marketing company employee is scum because of it.
If only truth-in-advertising laws were actually enforced.
-30%, cost of doing business at the app store
>>>Where I went to school, 0 + 2 - 2 = 0
Yes but if you went to *business* school, or even just worked in a store sometime, you'd know that when a $2 item sells the business only gets about 50 cents of it, while the other $1.50 goes to rent/wages/et cetera. So the actual math is 0 + 0.50 (profit) - 2 (cost of purchase to review item) == negative $1.50
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Here is another example of why advertising is pure 100% lies and no sane person should believe anything that can be paid for. And an example of how it is OK to do anything as long as its for money. Tar and feather these guys.
The actual cost is even worse.
For a $2 app, the developer gets $1.40 gross (Apple takes 30%). So for 1 review of that app, the developer has to spend $0.60 (lost to Apple), PLUS the cost of the reviewe itself. Maybe $1/review?
Hell, wasn't there an article awhile ago about someone using the Amazon Mechanical Turk to do this? It was a $5 app or so, and the guy paid you $6. Of course, this screws the reviewer since the developer could just "reject" the review and you'd be out $5...
If you have to buy the app to review it and the astroturfers can bypass this requirement then it would appear that Apple is working in collusion with these fraudulent marketing practices. I wonder if a script can be built that would look at all the "reviews" (both positive and negative) and build up a view of the products and who is marketing them?
Tons of shills. Go say something bad about a Samsung product you are dissatisfied with and you will see what I mean.
I was about to say, well, they don't buy it. The advertising company buys it, and you pay the advertising company to buy it. However, since you're buying it from yourself, I guess you just basically end up paying the overheard that Apple charges, which someone just said is 30%. At any rate, I think I cede your point that it's not that expensive, because if you buy 200 apps from yourself and end up selling 66, you break even. I hate it when I'm wrong! LOL
Currently hooked on AMP
That's an interesting idea, and I think if the App store were a regular website it would be easier to do: dump all the userids into a db and then see what you could find out about reviewing habits. But being the iTunes Store, it's a closed area it seems. But still, someone should do it to see if there is any fraud involved within the "store."
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
I knew about shills, but I didn't know they were this organized. What's funny is my apps sell well even with an average of 3 stars on most of them. I'm not sure the typical app store shopper pays much attention to the reviews if they are feeling compelled to buy an app, or they understand that a 99c app is just an impulse buy and completely disposable in the first place.