11–20 of 48 posts
"In fact, in the past year, we paid more than $7 billion to developers distributing apps and games on Google Play." Do they mean when I buy someone's app and send them my money that they are taking the credit for "paying" the developer? If so then that's wrong. My bank doesn't pay my bills. I pay my bills using my bank's system.
Because if they improve discoverability for free, then who will buy their adverts? The worse the store is at pointing you at the correct apps, the more ads people will buy (so less work for them and more $$$, win/win).
It isn't helped by how large of a stranglehold Google has gained on the Android ecosystem. Amazon is the next largest, but still tiny by comparison. Piracy might outnumber Amazon frankly.
This is a huge change. I personally am very excited about it. At the moment if you want to drive installs to a mobile app, the primary channel is Facebook. It's hard to reach customers any other way. I have worked on apps with a relatively high customer LTV, and we could afford to pay for something like this, but there was no way to do it. Generally speaking I think it will be good for consumers in the long run as we…
"Advertisements are a good thing because they help surface the products that are making money (which is in some way a proxy for providing value, usually) faster than the products that are simply most popular."
If I think of any advertisement I see, ever, then value has absolutely nothing to do with it. Axe, Jack Daniel's, any laundry detergent, McDonald's, cars.
In fact, most advertisements themselves stopped trying to pretend to be "better". Of that list, only laundry detergents talk about how they are better than competitors. Which is still complete bollocks, of course.
Since when do ads have anything to do with the value of the product? How would that be any different for apps?
I'm not trying to be coy, I seriously don't understand what you said.
This is a huge change. I personally am very excited about it. At the moment if you want to drive installs to a mobile app, the primary channel is Facebook. It's hard to reach customers any other way. I have worked on apps with a relatively high customer LTV, and we could afford to pay for something like this, but there was no way to do it. Generally speaking I think it will be good for consumers in the long run as we…
I don't have a degree in economics and I never tried my hand at advertising, so please forgive my ignorance. To my uneducated ears, what you just said sounds like: "Advertisements are a good thing because they help surface the products that are making money (which is in some way a proxy for providing value, usually) faster than the products that are simply most popular." If I think of any advertisement I see, ever, t…
If you agree with that, then my argument is that over the long term, the amount of money a company can spend on marketing is related to the amount of money they make per customer. If you sell a $1 product, you can not afford ads that cost $3 per conversion. If you sell a $30,000 product, you can afford pretty expensive ads. Of course n the short term this can get skewed. A company can dump money into ads in an unsustainable way, but that always seems to correct itself (see: Fab).
Given that a product is generally priced to some extent related to its value, the higher value products will have higher revenue per user, which will allow them to bid more for advertising.
That means we are more likely to see these ads bought by companies that make decent money on their apps. I'd love to see more high quality apps at the top of the listings, and I'd also love to be able to promote my (hopefully) high LTV apps at the top of the listings.
While I don't care either way if this exists or not, I do worry that this will further result in Google ignoring the "discoverability" problem in the Google Play app store. Because if they improve discoverability for free, then who will buy their adverts? The worse the store is at pointing you at the correct apps, the more ads people will buy (so less work for them and more $$$, win/win). It isn't helped by how large…
However, before we start booing Google...
Facebook already holds unarguably the biggest part of this already, and Google heading closer to the center of that particular arena will likely result in a net positive for publishers.
My guess for would be that this will push Facebook little by little to specialize in iOS ad-mongering.
This is obviously Google trying to grab a piece of advertising budgets of apps and impact of this on "discoverability* will remain to be seen as emergent property later on. Definitely not the primary driver behind this feature. However, before we start booing Google... Facebook already holds unarguably the biggest part of this already, and Google heading closer to the center of that particular arena will likely resul…
How so? Pay to Play (the marketing slogan for this initiative practically writes itself) seems a net negative to me. Searching for a particular game? Prepare to see nothing but Zynga, King and whatever other well capitalized companies can afford to dominate the top of the lists. Google will have even less incentive to fix natural discoverability.
Comparing Facebook's mobile ad channel (in content) to Google's mobile ad channel (in SERPs) is like more akin to comparing AdSense to AdWords. We won't see Google take a share of the pie from Facebook, we'll probably just see the pie get bigger as Google makes more ad inventory available.
I'm not quite sure how much I like this. I can see my search results getting populated with a bunch of apps that I don't want, like "Game of War". This will be interesting to see how this plays out.
I'm personally hoping they target more generic keywords like genres of game or coupon or hotels or stuff like that. I'd be very annoyed if they let advertisers target specific app names like "Facebook", "Twitter", or my own app's very specific name (as long as it isn't generic)
While I don't care either way if this exists or not, I do worry that this will further result in Google ignoring the "discoverability" problem in the Google Play app store. Because if they improve discoverability for free, then who will buy their adverts? The worse the store is at pointing you at the correct apps, the more ads people will buy (so less work for them and more $$$, win/win). It isn't helped by how large…
I don't own an Android phone, but I'm surprised that Google Play has lousy search. I expect the Apple App Store to have useless search, because Apple isn't a search company, but I'd figure Google had that part solved. This sounds like at least perverse incentives, and possibly a plain old shake-down: making their search worse, and/or burying specific results, directly makes them money. It reminds me of the bad old da…
Back then, iOS search was purely utter crap, finding totally unrelated things (including notoriously if you searched google maps, you would not find it... apple hardcoded the search for google maps to return google maps after all the internet poking fun at them).
And Android search was awesome, some keyword tweaking and we would soar in searches that were relevant to us (ie: people really looking for the sort of product we offer).
Then iOS made the first "discoverability improvement" change that pissed us off... they changed the interface so that instead of showing a list of results, it started to show more detailed results, but much less per page (back then some devices showed only 2 results per page depending on the orientation)
meaning that for us that were in position 50 in searches, we went from being on the fifth "finger slide" of the user, to be on the 200, 300... meaning our users on iOS sunk, fast.
Still, Android was our saviour then... so we stuck with Android (we still make iOS stuff ,but don't expect much from it).
Then it was google turn do do things, they started to "improve" their search, they "improved" so much, that now searching our company name (that is very unique), sometimes show competitors apps in first place instead.
Searching the exact name of our apps frequently don't work anymore either (back "then", 2 years ago, it searching for another app name of yours was a API usage example when you wanted to link from one app to another).
So... yep, both Google and Apple stealthly make discoverability worse, instead of better.
Now most of our income comes from third-party stores, not iTunes or Google Play