Four Years of Success and Failure on the App Store

Re:Four Years of Success and Failure on the App Store by limeyy on Thursday May 07, 2015 @03:54PM (#9507816)

There is alot of similarity between this story, making iOS apps and making AdSense websites 7-8 years ago. One could slap a website together in a week, and one would see the revenue slowly but surely coming in and going up. The strategy of "making a website every week", and the total will make up for it worked too, for a while. Nowadays, every niche is crowded, and often more professionalised with several persons working on it, Google taking drastic measures to penalise spam-techniques... and the 1-week effort websites (even if you have good, quality content -- but it's just little) will get you nowhere anymore. It is almost, exactly the same story.

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Re:Four Years of Success and Failure on the App Store by clarky07 on Thursday May 07, 2015 @04:20PM (#9507988)

Yeah, it's definitely similar. Now, I would like to think I didn't cross into the spam realm, but it's a very similar concept, and it's the same problem. Without upkeep and continuous improvement the sites didn't last, and there is a tipping point where you simply can't keep up with so many projects.

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Re:Four Years of Success and Failure on the App Store by limeyy on Thursday May 07, 2015 @04:45PM (#9508166)

Yeah, I didn't mean you were in the real of spam, neither was I. But you were addressing "Chomp" update, hurting your sales, no idea what "Chomp" was but with simple websites it happened the same, Google "improved" their search, but while also hurting bonafide smaller websites, just seeing them as collateral damage along the way to keep the real nasty stuff out.

Besides that, these days one needs to setup social media presence, monitor that, be active there as well. And the whole thing of coding, design, marketing... Is these days alot to handle as a one-man-band, doing this on several projects. So yeah, focus, and go for 1-2 projects and develop those really well, and hope for the best. But, I totally understand where you're coming from.

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Re:Four Years of Success and Failure on the App Store by clarky07 on Thursday May 07, 2015 @05:40PM (#9508490)

Yeah so Chomp was a small startup working on app store search that Apple bought. End of June 2012 they did a huge update to the search algorithm, that effected a lot of apps.

One of the biggest changes being that free app downloads were weighted much higher. Until that point, I had only paid apps, and things were going pretty well. Overnight, sales got hit really hard. One thing that I didn't really include in the article, but I'm pretty happy with my ability to deal with those changes as well as I was able to. I started adding free apps, and came back pretty well.

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Re:Four Years of Success and Failure on the App Store by icefox on Thursday May 07, 2015 @07:53PM (#9509189)

The only people I know that make money on AdSense are those that have sites that provide not very good information, but just enough to get you there and click on the ad which might have what they are looking for. Can anyone tell me of a site that doesn't use this technique that makes money with adsense?

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Re:Four Years of Success and Failure on the App Store by wdr1 on Saturday May 09, 2015 @03:38AM (#9515807)

You can find lots via Google Display Planner:

https://adwords.google.com/da/DisplayPlanner/Home

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