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AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

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Re: AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

#11

Post by windsurfer »

alxbrun wrote: post #9
jacquesm wrote: post #8

AppGratis simply served a need, both on the consumer side (App discovery) as well as on the corporate side (app promotion). What ratio paid apps to free apps they were running is guesswork but I'd imagine if they would fail at the mix they would fail in the marketplace. The bigger problem is that they were simply too good at what they were doing and were competing with Apple on Apple's turf. Apple would like to contr…

"AppGratis simply served a need, both on the consumer side (App discovery) [...]" How can you call "discovery" a process where users receive everyday a push for the app that paid the highest bid to AppGratis ?

How can you twist words like that? You get paid by a marketing company to steer discussions on social networks in favour of your brand.

Re: AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

#12

Post by alekseyk »

So they promoted applications that users (that liked what they saw) downloaded. And that impacted numbers of downloads in the application store.

That's his whole beef and the reason for calling them a 'black hat' marketing company?

Using that logic, if application is featured on a popular web site where company paid PR to advertise makes the company in question a black hat marketing company who is fucking everything up for everybody else?

Bullshit.

Re: AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

#13

Post by LinaLauneBaer »

I am the developer of Store News ( http://store-news-app.com ) a iOS/OS X app that shows the best deals in the Mac/iOS app store. Several ad companies contacted me and offered money for a good position in my app. I always declined because thinking about it made me feel bad.

When this whole AppGratis thing came up a few days ago I had an interesting discussion about that with a friend of mine who is a lawyer. He told me that according to German law it would have been illegal to what the ad companies wanted me to do: To falsify the apps my own app is displaying for taking money.

I don't want to judge AppGratis for what they are doing but to me it feels not right. They may not break any US/... law but still… I think it also depends on how exactly they promote apps inside their own app. If they clearly mark it as a promotion/ad then I think it is fine. The comparison the author of the blog post makes only holds water if they did mark their promotions as ads because Google is clearly highlighting/declaring paid links as such…

Re: AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

#14

Post by 2pasc »

I am ashamed by some of the reactions here (appart from jacquesm which offers a balanced one)

AppGratis is a media, and like all media, it runs on advertising. The quality of apps promoted is shown in the fact that many apps stayed high in the ranking after the promotion and most apps (95%+) never paid to be featured by AppGratis. There was a cost - the cost of giving away an app with in App purchase credits or what have you. Do you know many black hat marketing Companies with 20,000 - 5 stars ratings from consumers all over the world? I doubt eHow would have 5 star ratings...

Maybe AppGratis became too big for its own good, but still. But we are not talking about scams like offer walls and shady newsfeed hacks.

What I see is a bunch of jealous people that are now coming out of the hood to kick the CEO on the floor - and he is obviously hurting.

Re: AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

#16

Post by danielweber »

nugget wrote: post #3

Well said. An ecosystem where paid promotion is the only path to reach the top of the charts incentivizes (even requires) the developers to become as aggressive as possible in terms of monetization, which often sucks for users and user experience.

Well, the problem is that reaching the top of the charts matters, because being at the top of the charts is where sales come from.

If there were something about the app market that really led itself to a winner-take-all tournament-style compensation, then I could shrug and think that AppGratis is merely the manifestation of another problem, and if it weren't them it would be someone else.

I'm not sure the app market really needs to be that way. Rate people based on average rankings, for example, giving new entrants a grace period before competitors can bomb them into 0-star region. Quality will eventually out.

Re: AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

#18

Post by austenallred »

I never used AppGratis, so I need some help understanding here.

Were 100% of the app recommendations "sponsored"? Were those that were "sponsored" marked as such?

The comparison is made to black-hat SEO, but having a list of apps as well as some sponsored apps is fine if they are marked as such. The article makes the comparison to black-hat links, but including "sponsored" links is what Google does with AdWords/PPC and is completely legitimate. So what did it look like with AppGratis? It's all about organization and transparency.

Re: AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

#19

Post by ultimoo »

I still find it strange at times to wrap my head around the fact that for decades we championed a distributed and an open world-scale system - The Internet.

And now, we are going back to policies controlled by 'guidelines' and rules and terms and conditions of large corporations -- Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Blackberry. Either we as a developer community got lost somewhere; or this was a careful, well thought-out move by the said corporations. And it is only getting stronger as people are replacing laptops with tablets and so on.

I'm not commenting on the AppGratis fiasco, I couldn't care less about it. Sorry for ranting.

Re: AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

#20

Post by recoiledsnake »

>as a user I want to be able to find the best apps for my task. Quality apps. Apps that will help me achieve whatever it is I'm doing. And I want Apple to decide that

Why?

Anyway it's abundantly clear that Apple is failing at that task, especially with new changes to the way search results are displayed.

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