Driven by money, is Apple's App Store also going to use "pay-for-ranking"?

When it comes to paid search, the first company that comes to mind is probably Baidu. For this company, whose main business is search, one of its main sources of revenue is paid ranking - determining the position of advertisements in search results by judging the bid price.

Now, Apple may have also learned this "skill".

According to Sina Technology, Bloomberg reported that Apple has formed a secret team to explore reforms to the App Store, including charging developers of apps that are highlighted, in other words, paid rankings in the App Store .

People familiar with the matter said that about 100 employees are working on the project, including many engineers from Apple's iAd advertising team. The project is led by Todd Teresi, head of Apple's iAd. In addition to paid search, the team is trying to improve the way users browse in the App Store. The new team was formed not long ago, and it is unclear what specific changes they will implement.

Apple declined to comment on the matter.

How does the App Store currently rank apps?

The App Store has always been very strict in its review and ranking of apps. Since January 2015, the update time of the App Store list has changed from every three hours to irregular updates, resulting in frequent and disorderly fluctuations in the rankings of many apps.

Under the current rules, an app's keywords , download volume , and reviews will affect its ranking. After Apple changed its algorithm in November 2015, the keyword coverage of most apps increased exponentially, and the rankings of a small number of apps under certain keywords declined slightly, which may be related to Apple’s latest developments. Regarding ASO optimization , the founder of the rental app "Roomly" once gave three suggestions:

1. Highlight effective keywords in the app title, but don’t randomly pile them up;
2. Being closer to the target users’ language and expressions (language localization) can allow the app title to have more effective keywords and easily exceed the 100-character keyword domain;
3. Cleverly avoid popular categories (for example, sports and social applications are placed in the sports category) , but avoid placing applications in irrelevant categories.
   

When ranking apps, Apple not only considers the number of app downloads, but also measures factors such as activity and reviews. Therefore, apps with higher downloads and many positive reviews are more likely to achieve high rankings, and vice versa. Even if apps that perform poorly in terms of download volume and other aspects achieve high rankings in the short term through various means (such as manipulation of rankings ) , they are likely to see their rankings drop due to low activity, lack of appeal to users, too many negative reviews, etc.

Does paid ranking have any impact on App Store ranking manipulation?

The App Store has always been very aggressive in cracking down on chart manipulation, because it greatly affects the app rankings of developers who do not participate in chart manipulation, bringing serious unfairness.

The so-called ranking manipulation refers to some teams or companies increasing the number of app downloads, comments, and installations in order to make their apps rank very high in the app store in a short period of time to attract more people to download them.

If the App Store launches bidding ranking, it will inevitably have an impact on the teams that manipulate the rankings and the developers who want to manipulate the rankings. Currently, the price of manipulating the rankings ranges from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, and the pricing will vary depending on the paid, free, and best-selling rankings. However, due to the low retention rate and the repeated revisions of the App Store's rules, the costs for companies that manipulate the rankings have increased significantly, and prices have naturally risen as well.

If the App Store's paid ranking can be offered at a "highly cost-effective" price, then the number of people involved in ranking manipulation will be greatly lost to the bidding group. However, if the promotion cost of bidding is higher than ranking manipulation, it will instead encourage more people to engage in ranking manipulation, which will be very unfavorable to Apple's supervision.

Of course, regardless of whether Apple eventually launches paid ranking, Apple's revenue in the App Store also accounts for a large proportion. Apple currently takes a 30% cut of app sales, which formed part of the company's $20 billion in revenue last fiscal year.

Who else is playing paid ranking?

Of course, Apple isn’t the first company to try paid ranking in its app store.

The Google Play app store began using paid ranking last summer. In addition, it also launched the Universal App Campaign to make it easier for advertisers to promote apps in Google services such as the Play Store and Youtube.

Domestic app stores have long started to provide various bidding services. In addition to selling keywords, they also sell advertising space, download volume, search box text and other forms of "products" to exchange app store resources.

Therefore, we would not be surprised if Apple App Store launched paid ranking. As a company that controls more than 1.8 million apps, would Apple be stupid enough to waste so many money-making opportunities?

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