Hey, this is the daily overpass, my name is Eric and i make apps!
Now today, I wanna talk about why we removed our free apps from the app store!
Ok so a few days ago, I mentioned that we started removing all our free apps from the
app store, from the apple app store.
Not for all of them, some of them actually do pretty well through in-app purchases, or
through ads, so we've kept a few of the free ones, but most of them - we've got rid of
them.
And I wanna talk a little bit more about that today.
So I got a comment a few days ago on episode 331 from Kirill who said "Eric, didn't quite
get why you remove free apps from the app store?
If they aren't making any money from ads they still don't require any time or efforts to
maintain them.
Why not just forgetting them?"
And this is a really good question.
In fact, this was a question we asked a few weeks ago saying, is it even worth removing
something from the app store, why not just keep them there because they don't take any
maintenance, they're there, people might download them and purchase them at any point, you might
as well leave them on the shelf if you can.
So the answer to that question is because apple started rejecting some of my apps.
And I've talked about this so much in the past couple of weeks, I don't wanna keep belabouring
the point, but 4.3 has been a real issue with me for the past 6 months or so.
So I released an app a couple of weeks ago and it was rejected, even though it wasn't
like any of the other ones on my account.
So I peeled that, it was back and forth a little bit, and they approved it.
The reason that they rejected it I don't think had a lot to do with my other apps in the
app store, because they obviously weren't looking at any of the other ones, it had to
do with the fact that I had too many apps!
And I've talked to other app developers who have the same kind of thing.
I have some clients, and I don't know if I should say this, I have some clients who do
events and stuff like that, so we'll release an app and we'll use the same framework and
everything to release it, and I kept thinking "I don't know if this is gonna go through
anymore because they're getting really bad with 4.3 and this might get rejected".
But then we put it out there and it just gets approved and I'm like, surprise!
Wow, I didn't think this would go through, I put it through the app store and thought,
let's just see if this goes through, although we are working on container apps for them
and everything.
But no problem because they only have a handful of apps and I had a hundred or something,
I don't even know how many it is!
So I started thinking about it, I started thinking, because I was talking to somebody
else who had to go through and delete half of their apps because they were having all
this problem with 4.3.
And so I thought the same thing - maybe I just have to go through and remove some, but
I really don't want to, because...some of them are making money, some of them don't
make as much money as they could, but they do make some.
So I started looking at how I could reduce that, and I stared realising that for every
app that we do, we do a free version and a paid version.
So we have a free version with in-app purchases and ads, and we have the paid version.
So I started looking at the apple side in terms of which one makes more money from me,
and as for me, it's always the paid apps make more money than the in-app purchases do.
And I think having the free apps, maybe that's causing less people to actually purchase the
full version anyway because they have time to try it out, maybe they never get around
to upgrading even if they do like it.
So, as an experiment we went through and I just said "let's just go through and remove
from sale all of the free ones, except for the big ones that make the money".
And then the next day, we had one of the biggest sales days that we've had in ages.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you the stats here.
The answer to the question, and I answered it in the reply to the comment, is I didn't
wanna do that.
I would rather just leave all the apps.
I want anyone to download one of our apps and not have to pay for it if they don't want
to so they can try it out, and everything first, but this is Apple.
Have a look at my screen, I'll show you what the stats are like.
I thought everything would go down, I thought sales would either go up or they would go
down, but they wouldn't stay the same.
So have a look at my screen, here's the last month.
So basically I went to the 1st of April to the 2nd of May which was a week after we made
this change.
You can see here the units where we had - some of you guys get a lot of downloads and a lot
of revenue, for me on the apple side, not so much so what I'm showing you here is not
to show off, I'm just showing you how we do.
So we've got all these downloads, it was around 700-800 pretty much consistently, and then
once we made that change here we dropped to about 500-600 each day.
So we saw a drop in downloads, which is expected because we got rid of the free ones.
Now, we have a few free ones that get most of the downloads, and those are still there.
If I go over here to sales, by the way we have sales and proceeds, I only ever look
at proceeds because one is 30% less than the other one but let's go to sales here.
So you can see that while we had a few days here, this was a day right here, that was
the next day after we made the change.
It was such a big leap that I thought, oh my god, everything's gonna get so much better
now because we removed the free apps, and I couldn't wait to tell you guys about it!
I couldn't wait to tell you that this was a secret to all of it!
And then, sure enough, just a couple days later it drops down to twenty dollars in sales.
Let me just go to proceeds because it shows how much money is actually made.
So here you can see that one day we made 53 dollars - by the way, when I say I'm not an
app millionaire, I am not an app millionaire, but I make a good living with this, and admob
and the ad networks and google wallet, all that kind of stuff, it all goes into the same
pot.
By here it had dropped down to 14 dollars, 14 dollars!
I made 14 dollars on that day!
And then it jumped back up again, it seems to be the same cyclical nature.
So getting rid of the free apps did not have a lot of impact on the paid apps here.
Let me just show you here, going down.
So you see my top purchases here are in-app purchases.
So these two are still there, this one is not, so that's gonna drop off.
But a lot of what we do is ad bundles.
I talked a lot about this once before, I probably should do another video on it because if you
do apple applications, if you do apps on the app store and you have a lot of them that
are similar to each other, you should sell them as a bundle as well, because some people
just wanna purchase the bundle.
However, if you have a lot of apps that are similar to each other, you might not get them
approved, so it's a chicken and egg.
But, if you do have this kind of situation, so we started putting a lot of them into bundles
and started making purchases that way.
Anyway, not to go on about this too much, just to answer it, yeah we did remove most
of the free apps from the app store, so if anybody wants to try one of the apps they
have to make the purchases.
It was either that, or just go with free apps with the in-app purchases, but we're trying
this first.
So we can always go back through.
We removed it from sale.
The nice thing is that if we put it back on sale, then we don't have to go through the
review process again.
But it's an experiment, I think I'll let you guys know.
If this really takes off, like I notice on a monthly basis that the revenue goes up,
I'm definitely gonna tell you guys about it, but this is why we're doing it now.
So anyway, that's it for today, I'll talk to you guys tomorrow!