As an iPhone developer or a publisher you are eager to know the sales stats for a certain applications on Apple AppStore.
We noticed that it’s possible to guess the sales of a particular app by looking at the number of reviews of application in the AppStore. Sure, this is very relative guess and can give the results which differ up to several times but still it’s good for a guess. Knowing if an app made 1.000, 10.000, 50.000, 100.000 or 500.000 sales can really help with understanding the preferences of iPhone users. Please note – we talk about paid Apps with no specific geo-targeting placed in USA AppStore since it’s the biggest one. Generally this is the case for 95% of Apps out there.
Let’s compare the sales numbers published online vs number of reviews those Applications have and come up with the ratio:
- Ocarina, reports $1MLM in revenue on Dec 13th, 2008 with price changing from $1.99 to $0.99. Rough guess: 700.000 units sold by now with 1255 reviews. Ratio: 550:1
- iFart Mobile. Is at 300.000 units right now based their twitter post and on the sales data they published when the app was in TOP1 of all categories. Has 769 reviews. Ratio: 400:1
- Trism reported 250k in sales with the price being $4.99 and ultimetly dropping to $2.99. Our guess the guy made 200.000 unit sales. There 545 reviews now. Ratio: 350:1
- Wooble sold about 10.000 units for one week and has 50 reviews. Ratio: 200:1
As you can see the ratio varies from 200 to 550 sales per review with the medium figure being 350. So if you multiply the number of reviews on 350 you would get a rough idea of the sales figures. You can also multiply it by 200 and 500 to see the possible limits.
And the last piece of info: calculate sales of the apps which have at lest 30 reviews. Smaller number of reviews could get irrelevant sales figures for many reasons, e.g. the first reviews could be made by friends and family of the Application Developer.
We welcome you to post sales data vs number of reviews other applications in comments and will be updating this post accordingly.
Tags: iphone application development, iphone development, iphone sales data, iphone sales figures
Posted in iphone development, management | 13 Comments »
[...] Smaller number of reviews could get irrelevant sales figures for many reasons, e.g. the first reviews could be made by friends and family of the Application Developer. We welcome you to post sales data vs number of reviews other … Read more [...]
Wow! That’s a fresh way to predict the sales. I will be interested to see the stats on other applications if anyone shares it here
Interesting way of estimating unit sales! Nice one!
Predicting an app’s unit sales…
Peter Melnikov over at MoveYourWeb has posted a simple but elegant way of predicting an app’s sales figures. Short and sweet, just follow the link. Read more.
……
Should also be able to use an estimated power law distribution to fill in gaps in the numbers. I’ve been expecting someone to put together a Google docs public spreadsheet with these kinds of estimates any day now.
Hmm, it’s pretty rough (and I think will be an overestimate on apps with significantly negative feedback). I also see there being a bit of a skew toward more comments/sale as the price goes up (since users have more “invested” in it and are more likely to care about that “investment”)
But, for what it’s worth, my app (ooTunes Radio) is around 1800 downloads, with something like 33 reviews).
I’d guess that number of comments/sale correlates pretty well with frequency of use or time spent using the app. That’s just a hunch from my own experience though.
Carlos – not sure what you mean – please elaborate
This was fairly accurate for our US reviews number. I guess the assumption would be that the US market is everyones dominant market.
Although unscientific it’s quite accurate for 80% of our apps. We have 8 applications in the store right now and I can tell you the 350 Rule would apply to most of them. However he have noticed a huge difference between each category, for example our iHistory App doesn’t not fall into the 350 rule but iJobs, iAuto and iPets certainly do. Thanks for sharing.
iphone downloads…
I looked through your previous posts on Mobile Application Usenet Newsgroup Newsreaders For iPhone, Android and …. Nice work there….
Is there any way to calculate, what percent of apps get under 100 reviews? under 1000 reviews? etc
Are you talking about the number of “Reviews” (the page you get to after clicking the Ratings) or number of Ratings? How does this compare versus “Ratings”? I noticed iPhone recently started asking for Rating when uninstalling so this probably changes Ratings statistics a lot. Are these tied to particular versions or all versions?
[...] do. There’s a method to questimate the number of sales from the number of reviews. See Guess sales figures. This method suggests a review to sales ratio of 350:1, that is 1 review would equal 350 [...]