Hi! This is "A Minute of Overpass". My name is Eric, and I make apps. Now, this week I
wanna talk about "Fake Reviews".
Okay, so this week I wanna talk about Fake Reviews. Now, if you see a lot of the
videos I've done over the past few years, and you look at the comments,
occasionally, you'll see people posting their... posting links to websites "We can
go and buy fake reviews for Google Play or for iTunes", and apparently there's big
server farms out there where people with, you know, hundreds of devices and they
can go through and hundreds of accounts and they could go through and give you
hundreds of reviews for like, I don't know, hundreds of dollars. I am not quite sure how much, how
much it costs, but so I tried to remove those links from the comments
as much as I can. I think they're really pretty sleazy. They're pretty
spammy. You know, there's no way, well given the subtleties of which they
approached that link and "Click here to buy 500 fake reviews!" Makes me think
there's no way that you would leave fake reviews suddenly anyway. Why would I
even do that? Why would I give you my money?, but anyway, I just kinda wanna
talk about this, this week. So, if I show you my my Google Play page here for
Ear Spy which is my biggest app. It's the one that I have the least problems with.
You can see that we get a fair amount of ratings every day. We get about
between 30 and 40, nearby enlarge each week. I think that's what helps it in
the rankings. That's why it comes up, you know, so prominently when you type on certain
key words, which is good. If I show you here, you can see that
over the past 3 years, we've had 28,873 reviews...or ratings rather, and then
only 6,879 people left a review, because you know, it's hard to leave a review.
So, and one of the things I've spoken about and pass videos is how we've
tried to encourage more reviews by the pop up, and we... you know, we all hate that
pop up. Every app you use, it comes up "hey, do you like our app?, would you please leave a
review?". and if you click No, it goes to you know, email or something, and if you
click Yes then it takes you to the play page or iTunes and we've done the similar thing.
However, we try to be a bit more playful with it, where we had a little girl saying
"Please would you leave a review?". However, a few years ago, I was in this group with other app
developers and we were talking about
and this came up, one of the guys who was kinda just going over to the dark side, I
guess you could say, it was. You know, we've tried everything, it just wasn't
doing it, and he said, you know, I just hired this company, they're gonna do some fake
reviews for me, and yeah they must tell me all the way, they cover their tracks
and how they can make it look any different app markets and all this stuff,
or you know, there's a couple in this country, a couple in that country and
all this kind of stuff and... and I told him straight out I said "Hey man! Don't do
that, that's wrong!".
Alright, I didn't say that. I wish I'd said that, but what I actually said was "Oh
let me know if that works". You know, 'cause we're all kind of trying to
think of ways to get our apps up there, and as much as I like to say I was above it, at that
time I was thinking. Yeah, you know, if it's .....if the playing field is unlevel
then I'll play on the unlevel playing field. However, I didn't do it. I'm really
glad I didn't, 'cause they're always cracking down on this kind of stuff. I mean,
if there's one way to get your account banned, and to lose everything is to get
caught doing something like that. So..so I'm glad I've never done that. Now, this
guy, basically he pay for reviews. He got the reviews, but never really saw any
benefit from it, and I don't.. haven't spoken to him recently, so I don't know if he's... you
know, if that's caught up with them, but I do know that Google is cracking down on
it all the time. So anyway, I apologize for all the people leaving those those
links to fake reviews sites and everything on the comment, and I just
wanna say, when it comes to fake reviews, I've never done it. I would say
never do it, but I know what a temptation it is. you know, it's when
you're trying to get people to review your app, you know, when I showed you this Ear Spy
here, where it's 30 to 40 each day, I can show you others where it's like 1 every 2
weeks and it's like when you get that..."Oh, somebody left a review for a
Mandarin Flash Quiz!" Yey! which is just as common, and on iTunes it's much more rare
I mean, I get far more reviews on Google Play than I do on..on iTunes, but yeah
fake reviews...What can you say? Don't do it, and you know, " Don't go to the dark
side". That's it for this week. I'll talk to you next week.
Hey! I really hope you like that video. Now, I do this once a week, so if you if
you wanna hear more, or you wanna hear more about our experiences with the App
Store, either Google Play or iTunes, please go ahead and subscribe to the channel and
please like this video and leave a comment. I love reading the comments. I
love hearing what you have to say. Even if it's just Hello or...or whatever and
like I say before, if you... if you're not sure what to say in a comment, like I
never know what to say in a comment, I'll make it easier for you, like if you like
it, just go ahead and say "Gnarley" which is an 80's term, or if you didn't like it
just say "Bogus", and and if you don't think any of it just say "Eh", so that would
be a big big big help, and another thing you could do, which I'd really appreciate
it, if you're on the App Store and you wanna try one of our apps, look up some
of the Overpass Apps. Applications either on iTunes or Google Play, and leave a
review and let us know what you think about it, either good or bad, but you know
we're all trying to build up in the market so, so that would be a big help. So
that's it. I'll talk to you next week