The change in Apple’s rating mechanism has raised the cost of an American user to a record high over the past two years.
The other day, Fiksu published a traditional report on the state of the American App Store for the last month. According to him, the number of free downloads of the top 200 iPhone apps in it increased slightly in July.
If 5.6 million apps were downloaded per day in the United States in June, then the next month the figure rose to 5.8 million.
At the same time, the price of a loyal user (the one who logged into the app at least three times) suddenly jumped to a two-year high of $1.80.
The last time the average cost of a user in the United States rose to a similar level was in December 2011, when it was $1.81. After that, the figure did not rise above $ 1.67 (the maximum of 2012).
According to Fiksu, two factors influenced the radical price increase. Firstly, the consistently high ROI of the Facebook advertising platform. Secondly, the change in the rating mechanism of Apple itself.
Two words about the latter: now applications with low and average user ratings are penalized, and those with high ratings are displayed in the tops. That is, it is now much more expensive to promote a poor quality application.
Based on this, it can be assumed that the main driver in the growth of prices was precisely the changes in the rating mechanism. Those sums that used to be brought to the top of the “average” have stopped working. And advertisers started spending more.
A source: fiksu.com