How are the App Store rankings determined? How to get on the top of the rankings

In the past two years, Xu Huaizhe and Liu Xiong have been running a business called App Ranking that seems quite mysterious to outsiders. By manipulating the rankings, they can make an App that was previously ignored rush to the top of the Apple App Store rankings within two or three hours, thereby giving the client company a greater chance of gaining the attention of Apple iPhone and iPad users, as well as the favor of investors.

For app development companies whose fate depends on the number of users, ranking manipulation is the most cost-effective and effective promotion channel. According to Liu Xiong, by manipulating the rankings, the cost for an app to gain a new user is only one-third of that through traditional promotion channels.

Brushing the charts has become the secret for some development companies to “stand out”. The company also earns more than 30% profit from its customers' constant ranking manipulation.

In the view of the ranking-manipulating companies, they are walking outside the foul line set by Apple and are engaging in "business activities in the sunshine." However, some app developers condemned the manipulation of rankings, believing that such behavior undermines the principle of fairness and squeezes the living space of those apps that "cannot afford to manipulate the rankings."

<>However, these condemnations did not affect Xu Huaizhe and Liu Xiong's business, and their chart-manipulating business grew bigger and bigger. Xu Huaizhe has begun contacting TV stations to customize programs or embed advertisements in clients' apps. Liu Xiong is planning to expand his chart-manipulating business overseas. He plans to manipulate the charts in the United States, Japan, and Germany.

Millions of apps cross the single-plank bridge

For an app, ranking in the App Store charts is crucial. Most of the apps that fail to make it onto the list are buried among millions of apps and remain unknown, becoming “zombie apps” with no downloads.

On the afternoon of January 18, in an office building on the North Fifth Ring Road in Beijing, Xiongwen Network CEO Liu Xiong sat in front of his computer in his office, accepting or rejecting clients' requests to brush up the rankings. If he accepts a business order, it means that in a few hours, the number of downloads of a certain app in the App Store will surge.

Currently, Xiongwen Network is already among the top three in the domestic ranking industry.

According to Liu Xiong, there are currently about ten large-scale ranking manipulation companies in China. This figure was recognized by Xu Huaizhe, CEO of Jiejie.com, who is also engaged in ranking manipulation.

Liu Xiong, who originally directed his internet army to do online voting and QQ number registration business, discovered the business opportunity of manipulating the rankings in 2010. In 2008, Apple launched the App Store. Through this "window", App applications developed by third-party developers can be exposed to iPhone and iPad users. According to Apple's Q1 2013 quarterly report, the App Store provides 775,000 applications to 500 million users in 155 countries.

"For an app, the ranking in the App Store list is crucial." Liu Xiong said that on the iPhone 4S screen, only four apps are displayed on one page of the list, and users have limited patience and energy. "For the same app, the actual number of user downloads will be 5 to 7 times different when it ranks 5th and 25th."

Those apps that fail to make it onto the list are mostly buried among hundreds of thousands of apps and become “zombie apps” with no downloads.

"Data such as download volume and ranking are the first aspects that investors pay attention to when developers are looking for investment," said Chai Ke, founder of the App "Dayaima".

According to the analysis of the technology website AppYING, there are ten factors that determine the ranking of an application in the list, including download volume, review ratings, same-day activation rate, download conversion rate, account status, etc. However, it is difficult for outsiders to guess the weight of each factor.

Is it a legend that the navy manipulates the rankings?

Liu Xiong said that he manipulated the rankings with the help of four to five thousand internet trolls. Another colleague told the Beijing News that currently most of the rankings are automatically adjusted by programs, and the term "manual" is just an external announcement.

After a period of experimentation, Liu Xiong's team "thoroughly studied the ranking algorithm" and "mastered the core technology of App ranking manipulation." In order to prove to customers who "neither believed he could inflate the rankings but were afraid that the app would be taken down", he specially launched an app developed by his own company and showed it to the customers.

According to Liu Xiong, he manipulated the rankings by relying on the 4,000 to 5,000 internet trolls he had accumulated from his previous online voting. When there is a task, Liu Xiong's company managers will assign the task through the QQ group and the backend management system. At a command, thousands of Internet trolls with Apple accounts across the country would use iTunes (a client and multimedia management software launched by Apple) on their computers to centrally download clients' applications, "almost without using iPhones."

"Generally speaking, it takes five to six thousand operations to reach the TOP25, and more than 10,000 operations to reach the TOP10." Liu Xiong is confident that within three to four hours, his team can make an application that ranks low in the rankings reach any position on the list.

According to Liu Xiong, he will pay the water army a few cents for each application download they complete. Combined with other services such as voting, a water army can earn between 1,000 yuan and 3,000 yuan a month. In order to encourage the water army to stay online, he also designed an online check-in system, which provides rewards such as increasing the amount of tasks for those with high online rates.

Liu Xiong said that currently the online rate of his navy can be maintained at around 80%. If the workload is particularly large, he will also look for colleagues to "connect people".

However, a person in charge of a ranking manipulation company who wishes to remain anonymous said that currently most ranking manipulation is done virtually and "it is unrealistic to rely solely on large-scale manual manipulation." He said that the ranking manipulation company would design a program on the computer that would automatically change the IP address, apply for Apple IDs and download apps an unlimited number of times; at the same time, employees would keep an eye on the computer and intervene in a timely manner according to changes in the situation.

The person said that his team of people only has a dozen employees, but their ability to manipulate the rankings is already among the best in the industry.

Regarding the fact that "some colleagues would claim that they relied on manual manipulation of the rankings", he explained that the manipulation of rankings "must not anger Apple", and Apple "is very averse to using machines to manipulate the rankings". "Although organizing water armies to manipulate the rankings is not the behavior of real users, it is still people, not machines, who are downloading."

The top 5 price is 25,000

A price list provided by a ranking manipulation company located in Chaoyang District shows that ranking manipulation is divided into two types: ranking promotion and ranking maintenance. In terms of ranking promotion, the price for reaching the TOP5 of the App Store's free overall ranking is 25,000 yuan.

According to Xu Huaizhe's description, there are several main ways to promote apps, such as ranking, forum promotion, word-of-mouth communication, and Weibo marketing. Compared with the latter, brushing the rankings "costs the least and has the fastest effect", so it is "the most cost-effective".

A reporter from the Beijing News posed as a "developer in urgent need of promotion" and consulted a ranking-boosting company located in Chaoyang District about prices. The price list provided by the company shows that there are two types of ranking manipulation: ranking for the top and ranking maintenance. For ranking for the top, the price for reaching the TOP5 of the App Store's free total list is 25,000 yuan, and the prices for TOP10, TOP25, TOP50, TOP100, and TOP200 are 17,000 yuan, 11,000 yuan, 6,000 yuan, 3,600 yuan, and 1,800 yuan respectively. In addition, a tax equivalent to 10% of the ranking price must be paid.

According to Liu Xiong, it usually only takes 3-4 hours to make it to the top of the list. After that, if the customer wants the app to continue to maintain its ranking and not plummet, he or she will need to pay additional maintenance fees to the ranking company. The price list of the above-mentioned ranking company shows that the cost of maintaining TOP5, TOP10, TOP25, TOP50 and TOP100 for one day is 28,000 yuan, 18,000 yuan, 13,000 yuan, 7,000 yuan and 3,800 yuan respectively.

"The real price is equivalent to 80% of the quoted price in the market." Liu Xiong said that the price of getting the TOP1 is more than 40,000 yuan. After all, many ranking companies are eyeing the "throne" of the first place, and it is "very difficult" to win the championship.

During holidays such as May Day, National Day, and Christmas, when user downloads are at their peak, Liu Xiong will increase the price of brushing the charts by 10 to 30%.

Before manipulating the rankings, customers need to pay the full amount in advance. “If the customer requires to be included in the TOP 10, then even if we finally get to the 11th place, we will refund the full amount.” In the more than two years of manipulating the rankings, Liu Xiong has “never had a case of refunding money because he could not meet the customer’s requirements.”

According to Liu Xiong's estimation, relying on traditional promotion methods, the cost of adding a new user to an App application is "around 10 yuan", while by brushing the rankings, the cost of each new user is equivalent to "between 1 yuan and 3 yuan."

On January 25, Xia Yongfeng, chief writer for Business Value, gave an example at an event themed "Things about App Ranking Brushing" that a friend of his who makes apps recently promoted his apps in a traditional way, spending 600,000 yuan to get 30,000 real users, with an average cost of 20 yuan per user; another game team of more than 20 people spends hundreds of thousands of yuan each month on ranking brushing, and with the increase in new users, its monthly profit remains at around 2 million yuan.

Xia Yongfeng quoted the founder of the game team as saying, "By using marketing methods such as ranking manipulation, the company has achieved good profits and achieved sustainable development."

Top 10 shared by peers

In July and August 2012, a round of price war broke out in the ranking market. Eventually the price war was settled after "peers sat down and talked", and the "division of the list" was also resolved in this way.

"When people working in the mobile Internet find themselves gaining a large number of users and data overnight, they will feel very excited, and even their adrenaline will rise." Xia Yongfeng said that ranking manipulation can easily make people "addicted."

The effect of "addiction" is that ranking manipulation has become an open "unspoken rule" in the mobile Internet industry. The Economic Voice once reported that as of December last year, 40% of the applications in the overall App China rankings were being or had been manipulated, of which more than 50% were games.

"Among the top 200, at least 70% have cheated on the list," said Liu Xiong.

At the event site of "App Ranking Tricks", an editor of a technology website presented a chart showing that on a certain day, five games developed by a game company occupied the top five positions in the game sub-chart; while a news app with a limited audience "quietly" climbed into the 9th place in the overall chart at 5 a.m. on Christmas Day.

As chart manipulation becomes more popular, competition in the industry has become increasingly fierce.

Liu Xiong said that with the increase in the number of latecomers, a round of price war broke out in the ranking market in July and August 2012.

"The battle was very fierce," Liu Xiong recalled. At the time, one ranking-inflating company offered a price 500 yuan lower than another. In retaliation, the other company offered a price 1,000 yuan lower. "Some even dared to lose money in order to retain customers."

In the end, the price war subsided quietly after "peers sat down and talked." "Everyone knows that if we continue to fight, we will be the ones who suffer," said Liu Xiong.

The "division of the list" was also resolved in the same way of "friendly negotiation". "Every company wants to get more apps into the TOP10, but there are only 10 spots." Liu Xiong said that originally 6,000 downloads are required to enter the TOP10, and if there is malicious competition among peers, even 7,000 downloads may not be enough. After some consultation, the consensus reached by colleagues was, "live in peace and take turns", "for example, this month you have 3, I have 2, and someone else has 1", and next month, the quotas will be allocated through negotiation among each company.

Major customers pay 500,000 or 600,000 yuan per month

Liu Xiong's big clients would spend 500,000 or 600,000 yuan a month on a "monthly subscription" to brush up the rankings for an app. Liu Xiong's ranking-manipulating company currently has monthly sales revenue of over several million yuan.

There are different ways of manipulating the rankings, and according to their different operating methods, the industry has classified them into "six major schools": those who use manipulating the rankings to rise rapidly in a short period of time are called "elevator flow"; those who choose to manipulate the rankings on Friday night in order to meet users first on the weekend morning are called "weekend effect flow"; those who face user pressure or are raising funds and do not want to "have problems" at this time and so briefly manipulate the rankings are called "rank protection flow."

In addition, those who over-tweet the rankings for the first time and cause a surge in the rankings are called the "explosive flow"; those who manipulate the rankings irregularly, or who cause a sudden rise or fall in the rankings for other reasons, are called the "mindless cycle flow"; those who promote openly and manipulate the rankings secretly, or manipulate the rankings before and after the release of a new version, are called the "new version flow".

According to the strength of different clients, Liu Xiong divides his clients into "big customers", "small customers" and "medium-sized customers". Among them, big customers refer to those companies that spend 500,000 or 600,000 yuan a month on a "monthly subscription" to brush the rankings for an app; medium-sized customers have a weekly ranking brushing cycle, while small customers often only brush it for one or two days.

Liu Xiong said that he mainly serves large customers and his company's sales revenue from ranking list reaches several million yuan per month. "In recent years, the profit margin of manipulating the rankings has declined to around 30%-40%." Liu Xiong said that at the beginning of last year he received an angel investment of 2 million yuan, and within a year the investor had made three or four times the profit.

Xu Huaizhe got involved in the chart-manipulating industry because he was attracted by the high profits. Prior to this, this top 12 contestant of the first season of the “Win ​​in China” Entrepreneurship Challenge had considered developing an app. After weighing the pros and cons, he believes that compared to applications that do not have a clear business model, ranking manipulation can make money in a "quick, flat and" way.

"The profits from manipulating the charts are indeed high." Xu Huaizhe revealed that among his company's sales staff who are responsible for promoting the chart-manipulating business, those with outstanding performance have monthly incomes far exceeding those of ordinary white-collar workers.

Desperate developers

After witnessing the manipulation of the charts, one developer expressed despair over the crude, money-driven practices of the App Store.

With the huge reward, sales staff attacked from all sides to expand the territory of this business.

On the second day after grassroots entrepreneur Zhang He promoted the sports app "Yidong GPS" he developed, several unfamiliar avatars called him on QQ and asked, "Do you want to help me with ranking?"

"This is an immoral behavior." Zhang Hong commented that ranking manipulation violates the rules of fair competition in the App Store.

Xia Yongfeng said that one of his friends planned to "calm down and make an excellent app" in 2011, but after seeing the chart manipulation, his friend "felt very desperate" about the simple and crude money-driven approach in the App Store.

"For those small developers, it is indeed unfair to manipulate the rankings." Liu Xiong has his own understanding of manipulation of the rankings: "Where there are rankings, there is a world of martial arts." Manipulating the rankings is nothing more than optimizing the ranking of the application to a higher level, which is the same principle as the bidding advertisements on Baidu.

"Generally speaking, the quality and ranking of apps launched by large companies are good, and ranking manipulation can be a great help to them. For small companies that are in urgent need of promoting their apps, ranking manipulation can be a timely help."

In Liu Xiong's view, what he was engaged in was completely a "business activity in the sun." While issuing invoices to clients who manipulate rankings in the name of advertising fees, information service fees, etc., he also tried to correct the clients' inherent terminology, "We can no longer say manipulation of rankings, we have to change it to App ranking optimization."

"We are engaged in a sunrise industry, why do we have to call it such a harsh name?" Liu Xiong even planned that if there are still customers who call it "rank manipulation" instead of "App ranking optimization" next year, he would terminate the cooperation.

Currently, Liu Xiong has two staff members who are responsible for collecting and analyzing information about Apple. "One of them used to work at Microsoft, and the other is a former Apple employee." Following Apple's dynamics and making timely adjustments has made Liu Xiong confident that his company's approach is in full compliance with Apple's rules. "If I am punished for violating the rules, I will accept the result."

Self-discipline of ranking manipulation companies

Several larger ranking-manipulating companies have planned to set up an industry association to strengthen industry self-discipline and maintain the App Store's ecological environment. At the same time, some ranking companies began to plan for the future.

In the first half of last year, Apple's App Store suddenly adjusted the ranking algorithm for the Chinese region's list, and punished some apps suspected of manipulating the rankings by issuing warnings or removing them from the shelves. Such a severe crackdown caused the ranking-manipulating companies to disappear within a short period of time.

Xu Huaizhe made a high-profile comeback after spending two months cracking the new algorithm. "Every time Apple strikes, the industry will be reshuffled. Those with backward technology will be eliminated, and the companies that can crack Apple's algorithm will become bigger and bigger."

In terms of maintaining the overall environment of the App Store, Liu Xiong and Apple share the same demands. He worries that if the crazy manipulation of the charts continues, users may no longer trust the charts, and for the companies that manipulate the charts, the disappearance of their survival ground "is probably the worst scenario."

Liu Xiong said that his company has a product team that is responsible for judging the quality of the applications it receives. "If the user experience is too poor, we refuse to brush the rankings for it." He also said that once a ranking-manipulating company boosts the ranking of a very bad app, that company will be jointly boycotted by several of its peers.

"The ecological environment of the App Store must be maintained well." Liu Xiong said that several larger ranking companies have even planned to set up an industry association to strengthen industry self-discipline.

Liu Xiong and Xu Huaizhe have completely different views on the prospects of the chart-topping industry. Xu Huaizhe believes that the technology of manipulating the rankings may be mastered by more people and companies in the future, and "developers themselves will be able to manipulate the rankings for their own products." By then, the current "market size of about 200 million yuan" of the ranking manipulation industry will go downhill.

Not long ago, the broadcast of an episode of "Day Day Up" on Hunan TV caused the download volume of the five apps that appeared in the program to instantly enter the TOP10. This gave Xu Huaizhe an inspiration, and he believed that this was the promotion method that could bring the most real and effective downloads. He has now organized a team to start contacting several satellite TV stations to customize programs or embed advertisements in clients' App applications.

According to Xu Huaizhe's vision, in the future TV program marketing will go hand in hand with chart manipulation and become his company's main promotion channel.

Liu Xiong plans to "expand overseas". After completing a new round of financing recently, he led his team to top the App charts in Japan, Germany and the United States.