At a very order-of-magnitude level, your stats are exactly in line with my 1.5yrs of experience in the paid-app biz category. 3 of my apps have spent large amounts of time b/w #17 and #300. In the biz category, you can get into the top-25 with about 70+ downloads per day. 30-50 will get you into the top-50. My apps are priced 1.99-4.99
All the comments about spending $$ to get into the charts is bs. I know competitors who have released their first apps in the last few weeks. And reached the top-10 very quickly. Fantastic UI, rock-solid services and solving a real problem took them there. They charge $10...yup. Thats right-10 bucks!! All that bs about 99 cent apps only selling is debunked too.
DONT buy ads; dont spend $$ on anything other than solving the primary problem the app addresses. Just narrow your problem domain. User will pay you $$ for it.
There's this lingering myth about app store charts. The myth pertains to a magical "line", some sort of tipping point, over which all your download problems go away.
This myth is patently false.
From what I've seen with apps ranked anywhere from #1 to #5000, the organic download boost from being in the Top 50 is minuscule. It's not self sustaining. It's not magical. And it certainly doesn't make your problems go away.
As this article points out, the number of downloads you need to rank higher in the app store grows exponentially. What it doesn't point out is that organic download growth from ranking higher grows linearly. That means it gets harder and harder to keep your position in the app store unless you support those downloads somehow.
How can apps maintain their app store ranking? All the big co's do the following (starting with the most effective):
* Big ad spend
* Aggressive cross promotion
* Purchasing incentivized installs
* App store search optimization
* App Store features
Now, the story is a little different when you look at the top grossing chart. The reason for this should be obvious - the more money you make, the more you can dump in to ads. More ads means more users means more revenue. None of this is by accident - these companies understand their user acquisition channels extremely well and are constantly looking for new opportunities to spend.
Interesting point about linear growth from organic downloads.
Do you have any advice about which of those methods would be most effective for increasing downloads of a side project (no money for big ad spend, not a large network to do cross promotion, etc)?
Regarding your footnote...Is top 50 really the inflection point? My experience has been top 25, then top 10.
I don't have the exact figures, but I had an app (finance category) get in the top 25 on around 30 daily downloads, but bounced between 11 and 13 with 100-150 daily downloads. It never did get into the top 10, or I suspect I may have been posting this from my private jet :)
On the graph is looks like top 50 is where it started moving from "under 10" downloads to hitting the "exponential" part of the curve. But yes, I imagine that top 25 would show a similar jump, and top 10 even more so, as the top 10 in category list is what shows on the "Top Paid" list on iTunes.
It got just 20 downloads (USA) and it went to the Top 75 in the Utilities category. I guess I missed the inflection point by just little bit.
The surprising part here is, all except 75 apps in the category gets less than 20 downloads? Whoa! Very little people on the top can make a living out of app development.
I think the mac app store is a much much MUCH smaller market than the iOS app store. It's a new way for people to get apps on a desktop and my guess is the adoption is slower, so it isn't really surprising to me that 20 downloads puts you into the top of your category.
I have no data to back this up, btw. I'd be interested in seeing some mac vs. ios store numbers. Anyone?
Even in the iOS store, I'm often surprised at how few downloads it takes to chart in the top 1000. So there may be 80,000+ apps in a category, but clearly the vast majority of them receive very few downloads.
An app I worked on was briefly in the top 10 best selling on the day it launched. We made it above some pretty notable games like Plants vs. Zombies. The app definitely sold well that day, but it was surprising how low the sales needed to be to make it that high in the rankings. It would have been a good living making those sales every day, but it wasn't going to make anyone millionaires.
It's great to see those charts. You're conflating iPhone and iPad rankings though.
~10 sales/day won't get you into the US Music top 100 for iPhone since iPhone is a bigger market than iPad. Yet that 80 sales/day number is for iPhone. That's making the extrapolated bit of your chart steeper than it should be.
Unfortunately, I don't. I have two paid music apps but like yourself, only have good data for lower portions of the charts. Plus it's tough to pick apart iPad vs iPhone sales for universal apps.
If I had to guess, it's probably about half of iPhone, but don't rely on that!
I'm surprised that it took you only 80 downloads to reach top 25 in Music category. The education category needs many many times more downloads to be even close to top 25.
Is that paid, or free? The source used for numbers [1] shows 3,900 free downloads needed for top 25 in Music, which might be more in line with what you're seeing?
Oh, sorry! Sometimes when you've spent too much time in your free app, you forget about the 'paid' world. Even if the author specifies it right there in the post. :)
All the comments about spending $$ to get into the charts is bs. I know competitors who have released their first apps in the last few weeks. And reached the top-10 very quickly. Fantastic UI, rock-solid services and solving a real problem took them there. They charge $10...yup. Thats right-10 bucks!! All that bs about 99 cent apps only selling is debunked too.
DONT buy ads; dont spend $$ on anything other than solving the primary problem the app addresses. Just narrow your problem domain. User will pay you $$ for it.