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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.'"
"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.
What, you don't think they game 0 - 3-star ratings? That's delusional. They already caught on - you'll notice this a lot at Amazon, pay attention when you just sold yourself the book based on a low review. There are several tactics used, like "I bought it for (random-reason X) so IF you are in (really-small-niche X), DON'T BUY, it's meant for (as-written-on-label purpose Y)"
I never got why amazon didn't limit reviews to people who had bought the book, (while it doesn't stop this it makes it a more costly business, I find it particularly surprising that a company with as much control over their system as apple don't limit reviews to app purchasers.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
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.
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.
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?
Some reviews are of a sort that you know the reviewer is simply happy to now own a program that does something in particular. They'll say something like: I LOVE Poker Player 2010 because I am now REALLY PLAYING POKER!!! These are generally useless. They offer no detail except the enthusiasm of the user for being able to actually use the program to get basic functionality out of it.
There's other reviews that you know are AstroTurf. You can usually tell that they are "on-message" and scripted. The features that they "love" are the same features that are bullet points in the literature released by the developer. Sometimes they even put in some "warnings" but these "caveats" aren't really caveats, but rather rephrases of the disclaimers that you could have read in the Terms of Service or EULA anyway. For example:
"This app is excellent in all possible ways, but in the interest of fairness I need to point out that, operating a vehicle while texting is bad!"
On the other hand, there are idiots out there who will cut down a perfectly functional app simply because they had expectations for the app that were completely out of scale with what was even advertised, or even supported. This often happens also when the users demand features that there was really no reason to expect there to be in the first place.
To get to the heart of the matter. Some people also feel the need to say something negative because they feel that they have to be "balanced". This sort of "balance" is not what you are looking for. You are looking for an approximation of the truth of people's experiences, not the image they are trying to present of their own fairness and sophistication.
Do NOT ignore the 5 star ratings, just because of enthusiasm and turfers out there. A good app is going to get 5 star ratings and it will deserve it. The idea that a middling rating implies a better quality review means you' are generally too lazy to read all the reviews and think about them. If you apply the right criteria and your own skepticism to all reviews, you will get the right balance out of them, no matter what the rating. Ignoring good reviews in favor of middling ones means that you are letting the star level rate your expectations just as much as if you blindly accepted the 5-star ratings.
In general, discard the astroturfers and perpetually angry fringe, and look for reviews that cover the functionality that you find important to you. Look for reviews that tell you what they did to get a certain result. I know of more than one cheap-ass app I have used in my life where if I used some obscure feature, it would crash, but as long as I never cared about that feature, the app worked beautifully for all I needed it to do. That app would certainly not be a 5-star, but it certainly might rate a 4-star from me if the rest of it was truly useful. More importantly, it was worth getting as long as I was aware of its Achilles' Heel.
Yes they do. My own app Sudoku Grab got a review from someone saying that a competing app was much better. Out of interest I checked to see what other apps this reviewer had reviewed.
He'd reviewed 6 other competing apps, all of the reviews suggested that customers should buy this other app instead.
There's not much you can do about it, just have to hope that customers are savvy enough to see through these marketing tricks.
"Some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help."
You only have to do that if you have a low-quality product. My app, Virtual Cricket, competes in a reasonably crowded segment (cricket scores, push alerts etc) and competes against some pretty heavy competition (ESPN, BSkyB etc).
However, I have a quality product and it was recognised as such by Apple who selected the app as the featured app in the App Store. This did more for my sales than spamming online forums etc.
Lesson: quality wins in the end.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."