In the few days since Normalize was on Gizmodo/LifeHacker, Huffington Post, Mashable, the Verge, and many, many others (you should see my pending pingbacks queue), the story has been liked hundreds of times, tweeted thousands of times, and viewed tens of thousands of times. It peaked at 250 and 350 in the overall paid downloads for iPhone and iPad respectively. For those keeping score at home, that’s higher than Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, Sonic CD, Dark Sky, and Instapaper (on the iPhone front anyway).
So, I should be set for life right? During a Free promotion of Auto Adjust that thing had 22K downloads and it was only in the Photography charts.
It was less than a thousand – and before you tell me that $365K is a good salary know that it has already fallen by half with each subsequent day. Needless to say, the revenue is not sustaining.
So what went wrong? Well, as we already know, if you aren’t in the top 10 of something in the app store, people won’t find your app. Since the highest it got on any chart was 13 in iPad Photography, it didn’t “stick”.
Second, being on the Apps page of the Verge or on the Tech page of a “real” news site isn’t worth much as these stories don’t enter into the front page rotation.
Although I wasn’t the featured story, Gizmodo at least doesn’t make you subnavigate for stories, so I was less than a scroll away at some point… the only problem there was that it was 2:00pm Eastern on a Sunday… not the biggest time for technology blogs. That story had 20 thousand views on it on Sunday, which was pretty high for a Sunday, but still didn’t lead to sales.
I’m not blaming the press for maybe not linking hard enough. I’m not blaming them for sensationalizing a so-called “War on Instagramming”. I’m blaming you, everyone who tweeted and retweeted about the app without actually buying it. There are thousands of you. It’s $0.99, or whatever Tier 1 is in your country. You’re cheap. No really, if you haven’t put your money where your mouth is why do you expect your followers do it for you? Redeem Yourself
In case you can’t tell, this is all in jest. I’m happy with the attention it’s been getting, and although it looks like I won’t be quitting my day job just yet, I hope a future version (perhaps an Android version?) convinces you to buy it.