Google market vs Amazon store

[Curious]

What do you think about these two?

I read somewhere that the the profit from google is like x10 compared to amazon!
Do you guys confirm this?

Thanks in advance

[Dreamora]

clearly Android Market

Amazon has recently been scolded broadly and devs are fleeing as amazon is missuing the apps for their marketing but not reasonably paying people.
I recently retweeted an interesting blog on that matter, you can find the article at http://wp.me/prgDQ-9Y

[Curious]

Hmm, interesting! Thank you

[ezone]

Based on our experience we have no plans to submit more apps to Amazon. Google Market is the only one you need.

[anon_59165972]

@ezone

Based on our experience we have no plans to submit more apps to Amazon. Google Market is the only one you need.

Ezone what happened? I thought all of your games were free on Android so what problem was there with Amazon? I thought the recent issues had to do with the free app discount on paid apps.

[legion]

We will most likely never publish anything on Amazon after what i read.

[anon_99758631]

@Dreamora

clearly Android Market

Amazon has recently been scolded broadly and devs are fleeing as amazon is missuing the apps for their marketing but not reasonably paying people.
I recently retweeted an interesting blog on that matter, you can find the article at http://t.co/GukV06y

Here is some info on how you get paid, according the the FAQs that Amazon has:
https://developer.amazon.com/help/faq.html

Amazon pays developers 70% of the sale price of the app or 20% of the list price, whichever is greater.

Royalties paid to a foreign entity or person are subject to tax withholding in the U.S. A foreign entity or person is someone who is not a resident or citizen of the U.S. or a green card holder. The general rate of tax withholding is set by U.S. tax rules and regulations and is currently 30% of the gross amount of royalties paid. This withholding rate may be reduced if the foreign recipient of the royalties (“you”) is resident in a jurisdiction that has a tax treaty with the U.S. that is currently in force.

I couldn’t find anything about Amazon’s agreement about whether or not they paid developers the day the app was up for free. I like this little excerpt from Business Week though

"In Amazon, Shifty Jelly’s Pocket Caster has 233 reviews, averaging 3.5 stars out of a possible five. Yet, according to the company, app sales are right back where they were before the free promotion. Essentially, the company is no better off than before the promo."

IMO, the app was not really that popular. I have spent several hundred dollars on apps and games, but I’m also someone who gets the free app of the day from Amazon. I’d say at least 75% of those I didn’t use once, about 22% of the apps I’ve used once, and the remaining 3% I use on occasion (Sound Hound being the main one).

When Apple puts up a free app for iOS, they don’t pay the developers either. I think the people complaining are those who think they’ll suddenly hit it big just because they got a nice advertising spot. There are hundreds of thousands of apps, not all of them are going to be the next Angry Birds, let alone be very popular at all. IMO, putting an app up for free is definately a risk to the developer, but if it’s not that great of an app to begin with, it’s not like you will lose much if the public doesn’t like it too much, and this Podcast app “Shifty Jelly” made is an example of that.

If he really wanted to prove a point he’d post sales of what he was making off of the Android Market and the Apple Appstore to go along with it.

To make the point more valid, there are quite a few posts to this guys blog that have a similar stance, and make valid points, like this one:

" hate to say it but 99% of those people that downloaded your app for free were never going to buy it in the first place. As a result, you now have people using your app that never would have in the first place and they are now likely to support you in the future if they enjoy your app. If they like your app, they will probably purchase it if they switch to or use another platform.

That sucks that they didn’t pay you but you still got something valuable out of the situation. It’s similar to the argument for giving away free music online and why that works.

Don’t mourn the loss of revenue you were likely to never receive in the first place and focus on the positive promotion and information you were able to get from the situation."

And…

Thanks for sharing this.
I strongly disagree with your point of view but it’s great to have this type of information first hand.

In the end you ran an advertising campaign that got you 100,000 downloads.

If you cannot monetize the downloads, probably your app wasn’t a good fit for this type of promotion. The takeaway should not be that Amazon is evil for developers but that you have to be careful with the marketing you run. This just was an unprofitable campaign, something that happens all the time and it’s not fair to blame it on the publisher only.

You are as much responsible as an advertiser.

The way the earnings are reported by Amazon accounting is actually annoying but you should investigate if there is a chance to discount them from taxes as mktg/sales expenses.

Or…

I believe the success of the free app of the day is highly dependent on the app. If its a game (and a cheap game at that), which has a broad audience, you should see greater success vs an app that has a limited audience like pocket casts i.e. my mom doesn’t listen to podcasts but she does play games on her phone.
Real world example of how its suppose to work (and did work). I downloaded a game (Airportmania) as part of the free app of the day program. Loved the game, played it every chance I got for about 3 weeks. During the three weeks, I raved about it my friends who ended up buying the game. By my rough estimate they got another 17 downloads @ $.99 from me alone and that is only at the top of the pyramid (scheme).

Another good one to look at:

The focus of your post is on something a little misleading. Amazon didn’t give away 101K downloads of an app that people would have paid for. Had Amazon not featured you that day, you would have gotten probably 20 sales, like every other day. Since that’s what your downloads returned to afterwards, your “lost revenue” was 20 * $2 = $40. (Your costs are a different story, which makes free giveaways untenable for a company like yours – many apps don’t have server side costs).

The more balanced critique of Amazon is that the spot is worthless as marketing to “traditional apps” (social apps that can jumpstart a userbase are perhaps different).
However, if you have no costs, given your own statement, it looks like the lost sales of people having it for free is offset by the promotions given that you settled at the same level of sales after the promotion. If you didn’t have support server costs, it would have been 0 cost and 0 benefit.

That still sucks, but that would have been titled “My Amazon marketing experiment that failed and what you can learn from it” rather than this intimation that Amazon is stealing things from you.

Amazon clearly can’t pay for the spot – they’d have to allocate $18M a year if they were giving away $50K every day.

And another:

As a developer, I have been avoiding the Amazon app store for several of the reasons the you mentioned. The fact that they have the authority to set the price for developer’s apps is a deal killer for me. The incentives don’t line up, since they are interested in maximizing profit for the store as a whole, even it it is at your expense.

That said, the free app promotion doesn’t sound like a horrible deal.
I have run similar promotions for my iPhone apps with a site called Free App A day. You change the price of your app to free for a period of time, and then pay them to feature it on their site as the free app for the day. The promotion did a bunch to increase exposure for our app, but it cost several thousand dollars in addition to the lost revenue from making the app free for a time. My point is that other sites actually charge money to participate in a free app promotion, and in this case Amazon gave the developer the option to participate or not.

Some people on the blog were calling others who “agreed” with Amazon’s approach as their fanboys. To make my stance clear, I am no way an Amazon “fanboy” as I prefer to use eBay for material purchases (though I always look around to see who has the better price). The point of my post is that you have to look at every angle of the story, and not just the one from the person with the experience since “facts” tend to change.

IMO, put your app in both stores. Someone should do an experiment with this. Publish an app in both stores and see which one brings in the most revenue. Give each one 6 months from the date they were released and see which gave the most money in the end.

[Curious]

Wow, great, tnx guys

[system]

I was initially turned off the Amazon appstore after reading the IGDA advisory:

http://www.igda.org/updated-important-advisory-about-amazon’s-appstore-distribution-terms

Important Advisory about Amazon’s Appstore Distribution Terms

I just took a closer look (after talking to a developer who said he had some success with an Amazon promotion), but after reading the developer license agreement, I’m still turned off. The agreement is labelled “confidential”, so I’ll just say, check out sections 3a and 5i. You have to register for the developer portal to see that, but there’s a public FAQ - https://developer.amazon.com/help/faq.html

[ezone]

@anon_59165972

Ezone what happened? I thought all of your games were free on Android so what problem was there with Amazon? I thought the recent issues had to do with the free app discount on paid apps.

Nothing bad happened - just the download numbers for us are so low that it isn’t worth the effort uploading to the Amazon store.

[anon_93762419]

The Amazon store might see a lot more traffic when the Kindle tablets start selling. I’d think that in terms of sales the Amazon store would pretty much transition to a completely “tablet” app store. What do you think?

[ezone]

For those of you that like hard figures, here are the numbers for “Crazy Snowboard” (free ad-supported Android game):

Amazon Appstore: 4,351 downloads
Google Marketplace: 3,335,738 downloads

That’s why we aren’t adding more apps to the Amazon store.