2015 Domestic APP Ranking Price List, What You Don’t Know About the App Store’s Underground “Black” Industry Chain with a Flow of Over 100 Million
| App Promotion With the hot sales of Apple mobile phones, the value of the App Store has also risen. If the App Store is regarded as a standalone Internet company, what should its valuation be? The answer is hundreds of billions of dollars. It has to be said that App Store occupies an absolutely important position in Apple's ecological chain. According to Apple's Q4 2014 financial report, the App Store was downloaded over 85 billion times, and developers earned more than $10 billion in revenue. So the question is, the App Store currently covers more than 100 countries. In addition to Apple’s normal income, are there so many underground people making money around the App Store? 1. Ranking manipulation workers There are reports that Apple’s iOS App Store is continuing to grow, with the total number of its applications worldwide now exceeding 1.42 million. At least tens of thousands of developers upload their applications every day. Currently, the only resource position in the App Store except for the official recommendation position is the list, which is easier to break into than the recommendation position. Thus, an industry ranking company was born around the App Store. In the early days, ranking companies mainly used machines to manipulate the rankings, as the App Store algorithm continued to change. More and more companies that manipulate the rankings use the “water army” method to manipulate the rankings. At the same time, the rankings are divided into free list, paid list and best-selling list. For a newly launched free game in China, the free list is usually attacked first. However, after Apple launched the 1 yuan paid download in China, the paid list is now also attacked. The ranking companies have different prices depending on the position you want. At the same time, after successfully ranking, if the developer wants to continue to be on the list, he must maintain the list. Sometimes the price of maintaining the list is higher than the price of ranking. According to an industry insider, some domestic Internet giants have participated in product ranking manipulation. The author believes that ranking manipulation is a ruthless harm to both Apple and developers, and this harm seriously disrupts the balance and fairness of the market. Although Apple is constantly updating its algorithms and severely punishing companies that manipulate rankings. For many developers, the phenomenon of ranking manipulation has not been fundamentally solved. Some developers even made suggestions to Apple, suggesting that Apple should establish an internal monitoring department to analyze in real time the ranking changes of some abnormal products. 2. Recharge workers In Apple's App Store in various countries, virtual goods have a relatively fixed tiered pricing, but the exchange rates between different countries vary. For example, in countries such as the United States, China, South Africa, Russia, and Japan, exchange rates often fluctuate, but the pricing system in the App Store will not change due to actual exchange rate changes. The recharge agency work can make profits by taking advantage of the exchange rate difference of a certain country. For example, for a virtual product worth 200 yuan, the recharge agency store only needs to pay 50 yuan due to the exchange rate difference. It may be sold to the user for 100 yuan, which is half the price of buying through normal channels. Contemporary recharge workers will go to other countries for gift cards, and if the country’s currency plummets or the exchange rate is poor, they will buy a large number of them. These recharge agents generally sell through mobile game trading platforms or Taobao. The author searched for mobile game recharge on Taobao and found more than 500 Taobao stores. Currently, the recharge agents on Taobao are mainly concentrated in the mobile game industry. According to Taobao’s sales data, the top 30 Taobao stores have annual sales of at least over one million. It can be concluded that the annual sales of more than 500 Apple recharge sellers on Taobao are at least over 10 million. 3. Due to the huge user demand for peripheral service workers and recharge agents, there are also real-life intermediary service companies in the App Store. These companies mainly serve some novice App Store users or developers. The services provided to novice users include registering App Store accounts in other countries, transferring accounts to other countries, sharing App Store accounts, etc. The intermediary services provided to developers include application listing, developer account application, expedited App Store application review, etc. Although the value of peripheral services on the App Store is not as high as the single amount or single sales volume of ranking manipulation or recharge, the unit price of some intermediary services is not cheap because the area covered by intermediary services is relatively wide. Therefore, the overall estimate of the App Store for the whole year is about 10 million. Conclusion: When it comes to ranking manipulation, many developers told me that because of ranking manipulation, our products cannot face users, let alone make any profits. When it comes to recharge on behalf of others, many developers said that Apple's policy has allowed some speculators to exploit "loopholes". Sometimes users recharge 100 yuan on their behalf, and then maliciously refund the money, and we have to pay 30 yuan out of pocket. The author believes that Apple, as the founder and order-maker of the industry, faces the demands and helplessness of developers. We should come up with corresponding measures and solutions instead of excessive indulgence. The inevitable result is destruction. |
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