Sales of my paid app "Reader for Gmail™" were going nowhere last week. After about a month in the App Store, I had amassed a grand total of 8 downloads @ $2.00 each, less Apple's 30%. And really, it should have only been 5 downloads, since my dad bought one copy, I bought one, and my daughter bought another by mistake. I publicized the app a bit on Twitter and Facebook, so I suspect that most of those 5 downloads came from my Facebook friends, who probably felt sorry for me.
The small bit of online marketing research that I had done showed that I might do better to offer a free app with ads and an in app purchase option for people who wanted to get rid of the ads. From My previous app project ("Arithmetic Basics") I was already familiar with banner ads, so I added those, even though the evidence to date seems to suggest that people are very skilled at ignoring them completely. Then I got a bit creative and decided to have the voice synthesizer read ads for the in app purchase itself after every third email. Here are a few of the better ones I came up with:
1. If you find these periodic interruptions between emails annoying, you should press the Upgrade Now button to upgrade this program to the full version.
2. I hope you are enjoying this application! If so, please tell a friend about it!
3. Hey I think you still have two dollars left on that iTunes gift card you got last year. Why not use it to buy the upgraded version of Reader for Gmail?
So with the ads and in-app purchase button, I uploaded it and am now waiting for the review process to happen. As far as reviews go, I think I'm batting about .400 so far. That would be excellent in baseball, but not so great for pretty much everything else. While waiting for the review, I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if the app were made free. Would there be more downloads? Basically there was nothing to lose, the app wasn't selling anyway. And perhaps some of the people who got it for free would be automatically updated to the version with the in-app purchase later on.
Here are the download stats after going free:
Mar. 12: 2020 downloads (Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, I'm going to live the dream and develop apps full-time in my basement and wear my bathrobe all day long!)
Mar. 13: 1060 downloads (OK, must just be the weekend... not as many downloads).
Mar. 14: 243 downloads (Crap, it's still the weekend though, so maybe people just don't care much about email on the weekend.)
Mar. 15: 120 downloads (Double-crap, something bad is happening here.)
Mar. 16: 59 downloads (Yup, definitely something bad.)
Mar. 17: 26 downloads (Bottom? Is this the bottom?)
I'm putting money on 12 downloads for today :-(.
No idea what is responsible for the exponential decay. Clearly once the app became free it suddenly became much more discover-able than it is now... possibly it was listed somewhere on a list of new free apps, but now has been eclipsed by other new free apps. Possibly it is a negative feedback loop in the app store ranking system... start off at a high rank as a new free app, but if downloads are less than peers, then rank is reduced, which lowers visibility, which reduces downloads, and so on.
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