Apple’s App Discovery Problem

App discovery is a long-festering problem that Apple has failed to address with the explosion of apps that run on its devices. The simple fact is the way people find new apps often boils down to the top app lists, which are easily manipulated by all manner of unscrupulous means. Digiday recently detailed this in an article, “Confessions of an App Store Manipulator.” Bloomberg BusinessWeek is on the case, too. It concludes Apple lets “anarchy” reign in its app store because of inadequate policing and, most importantly, terrible discovery and promotion tools. Like all digital media vacuums, sketchy ad networks have stepped into the breach.

GTekna exemplifies Apple’s struggle. Run by Chang-Min Pak, a soft-spoken former Adobe Systems (ADBE)engineer who works out of his Palo Alto home, GTekna offers to get any app onto the list of the App Store’s most popular programs. This is beachfront real estate: About 63 percent of App Store downloads come from customers browsing Apple’s leader board, according to market researcher Nielsen (NLSN), and the top apps get about 100,000 downloads a day, says marketing firm Fiksu. To get into this digital store window, Pak charges $9,000 to $13,000. “We are very good at pushing rankings in a short period of time,” he says. SGN, a game-maker led by Myspace.com co-founder Chris DeWolfe, and Seattle-based Big Fish Games are among the companies that have used the service. (Big Fish spokeswoman Susan Lusty says her company no longer does. SGN did not respond to requests for comment.) Pak says he made more than $2 million last year and used it to buy a house in Palo Alto and a Mercedes for his wife.

Read the full story on Bloomberg Businessweek’s site.

https://digiday.com/?p=8697

More in Media

Media Briefing: Publishers search for new ways to grow (and authenticate) audiences, overheard at the Digiday Publishing Summit

“[Advertisers] already pay data providers for data. So why not pay the publisher?”

Research Briefing: Publishers’ revenue sources are top of mind at Digiday Publishing Summit

In this week’s Digiday+ Research Briefing, we examine which revenue streams were top of mind for publishers at the Digiday Publishing Summit, how TikTok is getting even more marketing spend from brands and retailers despite facing a potential U.S. ban, and how Disney is rolling out DRAX Direct, a direct integration with the industry’s largest DSPs, as seen in recent data from Digiday+ Research.

How Forbes is testing its SSPs to improve programmatic ad revenue

Forbes has been running tests with its SSPs to improve the ad tech firms’ contributions to the publisher’s revenue.