bottom rank and in app purchase

[Rajiv Garg]

I found your article very interesting and had a couple of follow-up questions which I would be most grateful if you could answer. Firstly, you suggested the Pareto distribution for the top 200 ranked apps. I was wondering what distributions would you suggest for apps that are not ranked in the top list, e.g. apps that would be ranked 100,000? Regarding in-app purchases, your article suggested $0.16 per download. Does this vary with different types of app? For instance, intuitively a gaming app would generally have higher IAP revenue as its addictive nature makes it easier to sell in-game products?

 

LP, lse.ac.uk

[Rajiv Garg]

I am glad you find our paper interesting and useful.

1.  No the model cannot be extended to app ranked at 100,000 unless all of those ranks were publicly published.

2. .16 is the average income made per app sale for apps that have in app purchase. I would agree that game apps might drive this price up but the volume of sales of games are high and IAP on average might be low.

3. You can rerun the model for IAP interacted with app categories and can get separate estimates for games and other categories.

 

RG

[Rajiv Garg]

If I could just follow up on your answers, what sort of distributions do you think could be relevant for apps that are ranked at around 100,000? I'm thinking something like an uniform distribution would be appropriate as those apps will probably have very, very low (<100) lifetime downloads.

 

Also, in terms of actual revenues, from your experience which sources would you say is most reliable to acquire accurate and vast data on revenues? I've found various sites which offer some revenue data for individual apps but they're all in different formats.

 

LP, lse.ac.uk

[Rajiv Garg]

 I too would assume that long-tail apps follow almost a uniform distribution. 

 The best bet to get data is contact some of the top app developers locally as they are more likely to respond. I don’t know of any publicly available source to get revenue data.

 

RG