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Comment by mdonahoe | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: if your app has a reasonable conversion rate, you can basically buy your spot on that list temporarily by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising.

It usually isn't sustainable, but can be helpful during launch of a new game to make sure it gets attention. I think it was easier than cracking the Top Free list, since fewer apps have IAP.

The ad team at my previous game company would do this and not tell the rest of the rank-and-file employees. We'd be psyched to see our app in the top grossing list... meanwhile the ad team would be spending more money than we were earning.

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years ago, the dollar amounts werent that large even. my game company bought us all gift cards and told us all to each buy a couple hundred dollars in our app to bump a couple spots.

another interesting thing, basically everyone on the top grossing chart knows roughly what the others are making - as you adjust ad spend you adjust your revenue, and when you pass someone you know how much they are making. (or just through word of mouth or multiple games)

even more crazy was buying tens or hundreds of thousands of downloads to get to the top of the free charts from bots, before apple claimed to be cracking down, which then triggered a couple percent of that in legitimate downloads. those 'organic' downloads from the charts ended up costing a fraction of what paid ads would have cost if you average the bot download cost over them. then marketing/coo lying about not using bots......dont know why they thinks they can hide stuff from the engineers

> my game company bought us all gift cards and told us all to each buy a couple hundred dollars in our app to bump a couple spots.

Is this allowed?

Sure why not?

It's like opening a restaurant and paying people to eat there for a while to generate fake social proof.

Fake it until you make it. It's natural conclusion of Doing Things That Don't Scale: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

First 100 people through the door get 15% off!

Beta testers get the full game half price!

And of course, authors do this on the NYT Best Seller list all the time... buy enough copies of your own book at enough book stores and you'll shoot right to the top: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Best_Seller...

The first two examples of discounts you cited are very different from just paying to directly inflate your ratings.

I'm trying to show a progression from "discounts" to "more discounts" to "we'll give it to you free just to get more 'sales'" That's why I called it a natural conclusion.

The only difference between giving someone a coupon to entice them to buy something from you and buying it yourself is how much money you're losing in the short term. It's on the same spectrum, just at different ends.

No, this is not a spectrum.

Offering a discount or giving copies away is marketing.

Buying copies yourself and pretending someone else did is fraud.

This only works ( and also for Appstores) if your expected LTV is high enough that the real users will bring in enough money to recoup the initial spent.

If your book/game is crap, the it will fall again, you lost your money and your spot in the charts.

Because Apple and Google are presumably trying to inform people searching for apps by providing them with useful information. If that information is gamed, then it's not useful. And since Apple and Google are the ones setting the terms of use, I think gberger's question is extremely valid and don't know why anyone would down-vote it (not claiming that you, koolba, did). Moreover, I'd hope that a response to it wouldn't have been dismissive and, ideally, would cite some reason to believe it.

New York Times would definitely care if they had reason to believe a book on their Best Sellers list was having its sales inflated. In fact, they mark those books specifically with a dagger next to them and the practice of price manipulation is a subject of on-going controversy which is presumably costing the list some prestige. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Best_Seller...

> >everyone on the top grossing chart knows roughly what the others are making

... or what they're spending on advertising :)

I know who you're talking about.

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