Amazon's "App of the Day" Hurting Developers
On a personal note, I plead guilty of lurking on Amazon's Appstore each morning so that I can download the latest "Free App of the Day." I may not need some of them, but they're stored on my account nevertheless just in case sometime in the near future I’ll perhaps need a new recipe for grilling in the back yard or setting a reminder for changing the car's oil.
And as much as a free app per day benefits my overall Android app library, apparently it's hurting the developers even if I download just one specific title from Amazon's daily special. App developer Shifty Jelly reports that, despite Amazon publicly claiming that it pays developers 20-percent of the asking price even when it's sitting in the Free App of the Day chair, developers don't receive a dime. Not even a penny, for that matter.
Tuesday the developer said in a blog that Amazon offered to place a specific app in the promotional seat, but the company's email also stated that it would receive zero-percent rev share during that day. Naturally Shifty Jelly wasn't keen on the idea despite the traffic the promotion could possibly bring during the following days.
"Thanks for emailing us," the developer responded in an email. "If I read this correctly, you’d like to give away our application for free, and pay us nothing? That’s very generous of you, but we like being paid for our work. I appreciate that Amazon is trying to build up its store, and get more users, but the problem is at the moment you have the reputation of being ‘The place where I get my free apps’ and for a developer like us who doesn’t put advertising into our applications, that can only be a bad thing."
"We’d be happy to reconsider if you decided to pay us the 20-percent that we agreed to in our original developer agreement, but this new one seems to favor only you, at the expense of us?" Shifty Jelly added.
Amazon thus responded, claiming that it won't receive any revenue from the free app either, and that the Free App of the Day promotion is the "most valuable and visible spot in the store." Additionally, the app would remain on the front page for an additional 14 days. "All these highly valuable placements are at no cost to you," the company said. "We want to promote your app and in exchange of the placements, at the 0-percent rev share for one day only."
Eventually Shifty Jelly caved in and tested the free app waters. The app became available on June 27 and "sold" 101,491 copies in twenty-four hours - that previously would have raked in a nice $54,805.14 USD. But because Amazon essentially gave the app away for free, Shifty Jelly didn't get any of it.
"Did the exposure count for much in the days afterwards?" the blog reads. "That’s also a big no, the day after saw a blip in sales, followed by things going back to exactly where we started, selling a few apps a day. In fact Amazon decided to rub salt in the wounds a little further by discounting our app to 99 cents for a few days after the free promotion. All we got was about 300 emails a day to answer over the space of a few weeks, that left us tired and burnt out. For all we know most of the people who wanted our application, now have it."
"What makes us mad though is the public perception that Amazon pays developers to be featured," the blog continues. "Every single person we asked on Twitter or via email thought they were helping developers out, and getting a free application. Amazon does nothing to dispel these rumors, in fact they put really restrictive clauses at the bottom of their emails, saying that no one is even allowed to discuss these back door deals they are doing. But that’s not our only beef with Amazon."
The developer claims that it can't remove any of its apps from Amazon's store. Even more, there's a lengthy review time up to two weeks, and then the online retailer reserves the right to set the price despite what the developer wants. Amazon will re-write the product description and it won't even provide error reports. The list goes on, but towards the end of the blog, Shifty Jelly said that it's removing itself from Amazon's Appstore.
Head here to read the whole blog, and then head here to see why Bithack is also doing the same thing.
I´m not exacly sure if this doesn´t fall into the software piracy level.
Terms of the appstore could be that you opt-in to be on the app of the day, if you don't agree you never get the exposure but also don't lose sales.
dud you are dumb--- , there is no assuming there , it's simple math
give away this many copies free = this much revenue potential lost
if amazon didn't have the free app of the day , and those 50,000 users bought the app then there certainly would have been that much money made , again there is no assumption here simpel calculation.
also it's a simple fact that many users don't buy apps at all and just grab the free apps as they come. This very mentality underlines the economic problems in US today , people getting shit they arnt paying for , or folks giving away stuff they cant afford to give away.
i think these guys should sue the ass off amazon over this. Things like this are making me like amazon less and less
no my good sir, you are the dumb one here.
the assumption here is that the app would have gotten those many downloads even if it wasn't free. that is obviously wrong.
it's not math, it's logic.
you don't calculate using the number of downloads you got when offering something for free. that number is obviously several orders of magnitude above what you would normally get if the app was paid. If the developer lost any money AT ALL that would have been the money he would have made on any other day, which he claims himself to be a rather meager sum.
Of course the free advertising he gets from this market maneuver should far outweigh whatever that meager sum is. In fact, it's a well known strategy to release something for free for a week or two in the apple appstore to gain notoriety. Advertising is EVERYTHING.
Of course if your app was already sub-par and you don't know what to do with the promotional campaigns, well, you know where I'm going with this...
Take valve and steam for example. A few years ago they gave portal away for free. I wasnt a steam user at the time but i became one just for that. Fast forward and ive bought about 20 other valve games through steam now. Those are sales they would not have had without giving me portal for free. In addition to that ive bought numorous other games from other developers through steam as well. Most of them were bought when they had their specials(not for free but highly reduced). Even tho i bought them all on specials, those are all sales they would not have had without offering me just 1 game for free, or those specials.
On topic: I'm not a big app fan and won't pay for them. Even a buck or two they don't really do much for me. They should place a timer on the free app so that people can use them for a month and if they really like the app they can buy them later. Giving them away for free saturates the market and screws the developers over.
No, no, my good good sir, he isn't the dumb one. However, you are now definitely one for not paying attention to the article in the slightest. Good job bro.
It isn't an "assumption" that they would have actually got that many downloads. They did get that many downloads. The 54.8k total is what they would have gotten had they received the 20% cut that they agreed to in their Developer Agreement. Now, my math shows a slightly different number ($1.78 per download x 101,491 x .2 = $36,130.80), but regardless, they would have made that money, if Amazon had honored their original agreement, but instead Amazon didn't(through the backdoor deal), and Amazon received plenty of free advertising for their app store(which would have cost them 36k in the original deal), and Shifty Jelly was basically drop kicked in the nuts. Way to go Amazon.
The problem with these pricing estimates is that it assumes that people would pay for the regular price, the 'big news' is that if you weren't getting sales before, the situation wouldn't change without proper alteration to a marketing or price strategy. I might dislike pancakes, but if someone were to offer free pancakes I would probably wait in line. As well free 'tiny' samples of lemonade might convince me on a full purchase.
If a developer doesn't offer a demo then there is no way of knowing if the software performs as advertised. Many developers don't offer refunds for buggy software, usually passing blame, or "working on a fix". If most projects on sourceforge worked "as advertised" people wouldn't actually buy software.
I'll admit that I've downloaded dozens of free apps "just in case" I want them in the future. I've downloaded even more free games, many of which I haven't played. Now I feel bad for cheating those developers. Although to be honest, I only purchased 3 apps for my phone before Amazon's app store came around, everything else was a free app.
So basically, I'm treating Amazon's free app of the day with the same mind set that music and video game pirates treat their actions, which is: "Hey, the developer isn't really losing out on anything, because I wouldn't be buying their product anyway", although, at least Amazon's free app is legit, unlike a ripped copy on bittorrent.