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
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