As of the afternoon of January 5, the App Store had locked the rankings for more than 80 hours, leaving many promoters at a loss.
In order to explore this topic in more depth, we first need to review the past year’s Apple ranking locks. Throughout 2016, Apple’s intervention in rankings increased significantly, with no less than five major and minor ranking locks (mainly referring to search rankings, and the following times are all Beijing time). The main ones are:
From the morning of March 3 to the afternoon of March 5, 2016, it lasted for more than 50 hours
From the evening of May 17 to the afternoon of May 18, 2016, lasting 16 hours
From the morning of August 25 to the afternoon of August 30, 2016, it lasted for more than 130 hours
It started on the morning of January 2, 2017 and has continued to this day, and is expected to surpass that of August last year.
Except for the abnormal lock in May (irregular time and shortest duration), we can summarize some rules.
The list is usually locked between 6 and 7 in the morning.
The general unlocking time is around 12-13 noon
Locking the rankings is likely to become a regular practice for Apple
So the question is: What does Apple want to achieve by locking the rankings? What did you do during the ranking process? How should the entire industry respond?Today we will discuss these three aspects.What is the purpose of locking the rankings?There are rumors in the industry that this is a signal that bidding advertising is about to land in China, but I personally don’t think that is the case. Because if this is the case, Apple should have tested it in the United States before launching bidding ads in the United States. However, it did not do so. And such frequent locking of the rankings, could it be related to bidding ads?In fact, there is no need to go around in so many detours. The two most direct reasons are: to purify the environment in the Chinese region and to test new algorithms! The preparation for the launch of bidding advertising may be an indirect driving force.What did Apple do in the process of locking the rankings?Looking back at the three times of locking the list last year, we looked for clues from a series of actions taken by Apple before and after.On May 5 last year, there was a massive earthquake in the App Store that affected the entire world. During this process, I found evidence that Apple extracted keywords from the description, which can be easily linked to paid advertising. Therefore, the lock-up of the rankings in March and May can be seen as a test of a new algorithm.The lock of the rankings in August last year was fundamentally different from the previous two times. In addition to setting a record for the duration of the lock, it was also accompanied by a large-scale deletion of comments, and the popularity of the keywords subsequently dropped significantly. Before and after the ranking was locked, the App Store had already been in turmoil. All products under Toutiao were removed from the shelves (August 5), Xiaohongshu was removed from the shelves (August 17), Longzhu Live was removed from the shelves (August 16), products under Thunder were removed from the shelves (September 4), etc. Big-name products were affected one after another, so the locking of the ranking was a direct action to purify the environment.Why can the environment be purified through this method? Simply put, when the tide goes out, you will know who is swimming naked. Once the list is locked, promotional activities targeting the rankings will be greatly inhibited. Then, by comparing before and after, Apple can more easily discover problems and improve the system's anti-cheating capabilities. The general drop in the popularity of keywords after unlocking is also a proof that Apple has a clearer understanding of the real search volume of keywords through the locked list.Here I would like to make a guess that deep learning will play an increasingly important role in the App Store. In the past few years, Apple has been quietly increasing its investment in the field of artificial intelligence. A direct evidence is that last year, by improving the intelligence level of the automatic review system, the review time was greatly shortened (please refer to the Constellation Apple series "Developer Account, Review Acceleration Revealed" ). Its image recognition capability was also announced at WWDC.In the field of deep learning, supervised learning is more mature, that is, giving the system some data samples, telling the system the results manually, and then letting the system draw inferences. In machine learning, there are algorithms specifically designed for classification topics, which can be applied to anti-cheating. By locking the list to remove water, and then using some manual help to identify cheating, and feeding it to the system as training samples, it will eventually become more and more powerful. Don’t underestimate the capabilities of machines. Since losing a game to Lee Sedol, Alpha Go has recently swept all the top human players with a record of 60 wins and 0 losses. It is definitely an extremely terrifying opponent that is no match for humans. If you want to fight it, you can only train another machine and feed it with more powerful algorithms and more data, but who has as much data as Apple?All the evidence indicates that Apple is going to fight back in the field of artificial intelligence. So, after locking the top spot for the first time in 2017, is Apple feeding the beast again? Let's wait and see!How should the industry respond?If you are about to face an extremely powerful opponent, then the choice will be simpler: familiarize yourself with all of Apple's rules, improve ASO in multiple dimensions, be careful to avoid risky actions in promotion, and protecting your developer account becomes more important than ever!Let’s take a look at some painful lessons. One is Lagou. After being removed from the list on July 29, it took Lagou nearly three months to come back, but the impact on the developer account was already irreversible.There is another one that is even worse, Thunder! Since more than a dozen of its products were removed from the shelves on September 4, the original developer's account was hit hard and abandoned. Although Xunlei registered several new accounts and transferred some of the original products to the new accounts, the losses are doomed to be irreversible. It is a pity that the former download overlord has suffered such a fate!Finally, at the beginning of 2017, I wish there will be less haze and more blue skies in China, and I also wish everyone a lucky Year of the Rooster!
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This article was compiled and published by @沙铭 (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!
