Developer sales data reveals logarithmic Marketplace, 70,000 downloads

Sigurd Snørteland has made public the performance of his 4 free applications in Marketplace, and as it is typical of most application stores, it reveals the top 10 applications benefiting from the bulk of the downloads, and a very long tail indeed.

Sigurd has 4 applications in Marketplace, with various levels of success, and it is his most recent app which has seen the most attention, garnering more than 50,000 downloads in 23 days, and reaching a Marketplace rank of 8, with an average of 2274 downloads per day.

The other apps have not fared as well, but what is interesting is the rapid drop-off when going from position 8 with 2300 downloads per day, to position 49 with only 330 downloads per day.

The rapid drop-off is demonstrated in this graph, which is clearly exponential, showing clearly the very large benefit of being in the top 10, and suggesting developers should not expect much, at least at this point, if their app does not make it into 100.

As mentioned at the start, this behaviour of marketplace is typical for most app stores, but it does also appear to be a pretty severe example of the problem.

The good news is of course that Sigurd accumulated around 70,000 total downloads, which should of course not be sneezed at, and if ad-enabled could earn him a good mint.

Thanks Sigurd for making the data public. More can be read at his blog here. Tetris7 can be found in Marketplace here.