Strange as it might seem there's a lesson from Iron Maiden's "Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter" for those who would sell applications (or apps) through Apples' iTunes store. It applies more generally across other platforms as well, certainly in the Google store for Android apps and quite possibly at Amazon as well.
It's a combination of information overload and variable sales figures that does it. Think first about the variable sales part of it:
Getting into the top ten apps on iTunes is something developers aspire to, but figures from Distimo show the huge disparity between iTunes markets around the world and across the week.
Distimo styles itself as an app store consultancy, and so it set out to establish how many applications one needs to sell through iTunes in order to get a top 10 hit. As the lists are generated by country the numbers vary widely: eight thousand downloads will get one into the top ten in Australia and Italy, but ten times that number are needed to get into the American top ten.
Now there are several reasons why you might like to get your app into the Top Ten at any one time. There's certainly bragging rights available. It'll look good on a CV, make raising money for the next adventure easier. That it means that you've sold some appreciable number of copies is also good but it really doesn't quite stop there.
For getting into the top ten will mean that you sell more apps. For we're all under huge information overload, there are who knows how many apps released each week and absolutely none of us look at all of them. So, being listed in the top ten apps at any point will increase sales of that app again. Simply because being listed is good advertising.
Here's where the Iron Maiden lesson comes in. In the UK the huge fight is to be the "Christmas Number 1" and believe me we've had some true stinkers over the years. This is because it's the time when everyone's granny tries to think up what to buy Little Jimmy for Christmas and oooh, gosh, that's one of those pop records, isn't it? Which is how 15 year old punks have, at times over the years, ended up with Cliff Richard singles and 16 year olds wistfully hoping for a third summer of love got "Mr. Blobby". Grannies tend not to know that all newly popular beat combos are not the same.
A result of which is that all of that effort put into getting the number one selling single over Christmas stops the moment Christmas arrives. Thus Iron Maiden released "Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter" immediately after the great day. That tiny minority of spotty youths who actually liked the band bought it in exactly the week that no one else in the country was buying records at all and so the band got their one and only No. 1 hit single.
Now, agreed, it's better to have the sales of the real hit single, even now having the festive number 1 will, at least if you've a good lawyer it will, make you enough to retire on. But if you can't do that, at least get a number 1: which brings us back to the App Store listings.
Pay attention to how many have to be sold to get into the top ten listings, in which markets, on what days of the week.
According to The Register, launch in Italy on a Wednesday.
