One of the most interesting and forward-thinking musical artists of the past few years is Gregg Gillis aka Girl Talk, a former biomedical engineer turned DJ, who has established a cult following due to his masterful mashups of disparate artists, resulting in music that bridges the gap between genres and brings people together. He has recently devoted himself to making music full-time, and is one of the most in-demand artists of the year.

It is our pleasure to extend an invitation to two winners to join the Medialets team at Girl Talk’s show in NYC on Sunday, November 16th.  Instructions for entering the contest are on the image below, and the two winners will be picked at random at 4:00pm EST on 11/16/08.  You must be in NYC to be eligible to win.

To those who are cutting-edge and forward-thinking, we salute you, and here’s hoping that you will join us tomorrow at Terminal 5 to see Girl Talk work the crowd.

Good Luck!
Rana and the Medialets team

Highlights

(1) 167 Apps have been downloaded between between 667,000 and 2.9 Million times.

(2) Downloads are being driven by 41 apps, which account for between 73% and 83% of all possible downloads.

(3) Two applications, Pac-Man by Namco and The Weather channel generated the most downloads (50,000 - 250,000).

(4) Although download ranges can be very large, growth on the low-end was still nearly 80% during the first week.

(5) 5 Categories account for 61% of all apps.

(6) The number of apps has nearly tripled since launch, led by the Games, Tools and Productivity categories.

Applications By Category

Android Market applications totaled 167 as of 10/29.  The top 5 Categories with the most apps accounted for 61% of all titles: Tools, Games, Lifestyle, Multimedia, and Productivity.

Title growth has nearly tripled since launch, as the chart below shows.  Three categories - Tools, Games and Productivity led the growth, representing just over 50% of the 105 apps added since last week.

Downloads

Android Market provides download data in ranges or “bins.”  While it’s better than having no information at all (e.g. Apple’s App Store) it gets a bit unwieldy within the top 2 bins, 10,000 - 50,000, and 50,000 - 250,000, where the top end is 5x larger than the bottom end, and the variance can be up to 200,000.  In the chart above, we’ve looked at the trend of total downloads from both ends of the ranges given, and growth seems pretty healthy on both ends.  Apps downloaded from the end of the Market’s first day until 10/29 grew at a rate anywhere between 80% on the low end to potentially 97% on the upside.

The table below gives detail on the distribution of downloads, which are driven by 41 apps in the two highest bins. Taking the low/high ranges into consideration, these 41 apps comprise anywhere between 73% and 83% of all possible downloads

Within these 41 apps, two of them, Pac-Man by Namco and The Weather Channel generated the highest number of downloads (50,000 - 250,000).  The remaining 39 are in the 10,000 - 50,000 range - we displayed the “Top 5″ in the table below, which were determined by  the most recent average of user ratings.  

We’ll keep you posted as data continues to roll in.  In the meantime, we’d love to hear your comments and ideas as our ecosystem continues to evolve.  Reach out to us at connect at medialets dot com and add us on Twitter at @medialets.

Google’s Android Market has been officially live for 24 hours. Here are some early observations and comparisons with the iPhone App Store’s first 24 hours.

There are myriad similarities between iPhone and Android users:

• They like to play games, shop, and know what music they are listening to,
• They are curious about the weather, and
• They generally share the same interests as iPhone users 

During the first 24 hours of Android Market, 62 apps were available to consumers, all free.  This is less than 10% of the number of apps we saw at the launch of Apple’s App Store. Although Apple allowed both free and paid applications to be distributed when the App Store launched, paid downloads for Android will not be available until Q1 2009.

Observation #1 - The average application has 7,800+ downloads.

Android Market is providing some detail on downloads per application -  in contrast to Apple’s embargo of this information after the first 15 hours of launching their App Store.  Rather than displaying exact figures, Android phones show download ranges for a given application, with the smallest range we observed being 100-500 and the largest 10,000-50,000. Given those ranges, roughly 206,000 to 770,000 downloads occurred within the first 24 hours of launch. The weighted average of midpoints is 7,850 downloads/app, just north of the middle of the 5,000 - 10,000 range.

Observation #2  - Nine apps made it to the 10,000 - 50,000 downloads range.

If we use ratings and number of reviews to differentiate, unlike the iPhone platform, games are not in the top three.  Of the nine apps in this range, only three are games.  ShopSavvy is at the top of the list factoring in ratings and number of reviews, followed by The Weather Channel, and Shazam, an app that helps people identify a song they are listening to.  During the early hours of the iPhone App Store, while Apple was still publishing download data, only two apps broke the 10,000 download mark - Remote and AIM.  Remote, the leading app, was downloaded ~16,000 times. Although the ranges for the top Android apps are similar, it is still too early  to assert with confidence that a trajectory similar to Apple’s App Store is occurring.  Other factors over time need to be considered, including the total number of apps in the market.

Observation #3 - 24 hours into the launch, it appears that either Android users are generally interested in the same types of application functionality as iPhone users, or possibly, that Android developers are generally interested in creating the same types of apps as iPhone developers.

We compared our observations of the iPhone App Store 24 hours after launch with Android Market, and found that once we normalized the names of categories between the two platforms, the categories have similar distributions of applications. We had to make some assumptions and groupings to make our best apples-to-androids comparison and noted those in the table below the chart.

As always, we love hearing from anyone who is interested in learning more about, or sharing their experiences about this new platform. Feel free to contact us at connect at www.medialets.com or follow us on twitter at @medialets.

We would love to see you there! We’ve heard from our friends Matt Drance and Michael Jurewitz at Apple that the event in our hometown of New York is already at capacity, but you can sign up to be on the waitlist.  Here’s the complete list of their destinations: 

Be sure to sign up ASAP, and leave us a comment if you’re planning on attending!

Prior to today, the NDA, which must be agreed to before the SDK can be downloaded, had prevented programmers from discussing the finer points of their code and had forbidden developers from discussing the SDK and the applications that are built upon it.

Apple’s Nondisclosure Agreement, which has caused plenty of heartache for iPhone developers, also has prevented many experts from sharing their experiences, asking questions, and providing guidance.  

Here at Medialets, we pride ourselves on being a hub for innovation and insights into this new platform, but have not been allowed to share much of the data and learnings we have accumulated over the past 81 days.

Over the next few days, we will be compiling some of our best practices and code examples onto developer.medialets.com/forum.  We are also organizing some workshops for developers in NYC and SF who are looking to create great apps and successful businesses around the platform.

Please feel free to reach out to us at any time with your ideas, comments, suggestions and questions. Reach us at  connect at medialets dot com or follow us on Twitter at @medialets.  Happy coding!

As the leading analytics provider for the iPhone, we, more than anyone else deeply understand how to help developers make the most of their audience. We’re passionate about user experience, understand both the needs of developers and the needs of advertisers, and bridge the gap between the market and marketers in a way that allows developers stay focused on writing great applications. The market has clearly shown that to consumers free is better (http://metrics.medialets.com/charts/apps-by-price) and through the insights our analytics provide to our ad platform, we make it easy and sustainable for developers to continue to innovate and give their apps away.

The world of mobile changed when Apple introduced the App Store. Historically, developers have had to contend with lengthy, often expensive negotiations and certification procedures with carriers to bring their applications to market, and more often than not, the challenges of working in that environment have limited the number and quality of developers willing to undertake the effort.  With the App Store, the process has been reduced to a simple submission and review cycle. Combining that with centralized discovery, distribution and payments for applications has led to a new model for mobile app developers that significantly opens up the possibility of building sustainable - even venture scale - businesses around mobile applications.  But the App Store is just the beginning. Google was quick to recognize the power of this distribution model and earlier this year announced their own App Marketplace, which like Apple’s App Store, bypasses carriers and lets developers market directly to consumers through the Marketplace.

We’ve built the leading solution for analytics on the iPhone and now we’re bringing it to Android because we believe in Android as a platform and our customers have asked us to support it. The opportunity for mobile developers just grew significantly today as the addressable base of users expanded to include the entire future Android subscriber base.

Why does this matter to the market?:

We believe that the emerging opportunity for mobile developers today is nothing less than the early opportunity for developers of desktop software. The key differences today are that users are more demanding, the platforms are more sophisticated and the market is significantly more competitive. Developers who factor our analytics into their applications have a dramatic, competitive advantage over other developers working without the deep insights our platform can provide. Nobody launches a significant Web property today without a solid analytics package, and neither should mobile application developers.

Our mission is to provide the best possible experience for three major groups: developers, their customers, and advertisers. The more that developers and advertisers know about the types of things users want out of mobile applications, the more effective an ad can be.

We work every day to help developers make the right decisions about where and how to spend their time and money. The better a developer understands their audience, the better an app they will write. Better applications mean stronger connections with customers and stronger connections lead to more opportunities to create maximum revenue potential for their application .

We’ve presented a single view for developers to monitor their applications across both the iPhone and Android platforms. This allows them to track relative performance in either and both markets, gives insights on where and how to spend marketing dollars and significantly simplifies the process of managing their release cycles. Combining our analytics with the update notifications provided by the App Store and App Marketplace gives our developers a key advantage over others in the market and enables them to get onto tighter, more focused release cycles to specifically meet the needs of their current and future users.

Android is the second platform in the new world of carrier-free mobile application distribution, and it also happens to support the development of highly engaging and useful applications. It’s not only valuable to consumers as a standalone offering, it also continues to raise the bar for every other mobile platform vendor to deliver more compelling offerings. Consumers, whether or not they buy an Android phone, will benefit from this competition.

Mobile operators not selling the iPhone today need strong, competitive offerings to convince consumers to buy something other than the iPhone. Much like we’ve seen historically on game consoles, many future mobile phone purchases will likely be influenced by the applications available for the platform. Android and the App Marketplace give carriers a potentially viable alternative to the explosive application market for the iPhone, and with the might of Google behind the platform, we may see development activity that equals or even surpasses that of iPhone developers.

We invite you to sign up for the beta at www.medialets.com/android and always, please reach out to us at any time at connect @ medialets dot com.  We look forward to hearing about the apps you’re building!

As a company, we believe that the advertisers and developers who work with us have a significant strategic advantage over their competitors because we offer an integrated and comprehensive solution, spanning analytics, monetization and distribution across the Medialets ad network.  Medialets and Medialytics empowers our customers to have a deep understanding of user behavior and activity, what is popular in their apps, what campaigns have the most traction with end users in order to make informed decisions and take action accordingly based on this information.  The Medialytics dashboard is the central point for customization of event tracking, reporting and campaign configuration, so we wanted to unify the look and feel across our entire range of web products including Medialytics and App Store Metrics to reflect the experience of working with Medialytics.

More importantly, it was very clear to us based on our discussions with you that many of our customers and fans were not aware of the full extent of our product range and offerings.  We are thrilled about the response to our App Store Metrics application, and every day, we hear from top developers, brand marketers, and iPhone users alike that they visit our site many times a day to observe the changes in ranking and check out the newest applications added to the App Store.  These users, however, may not have known about our industry leading native app advertising capabilities.  Similarly, many of our current customers were not aware of the rich features of our App Store Metrics, such as searching by app developer/company, and our RSS feeds providing real time updates of the top free apps, top paid apps, new apps and updated apps.

We’ve added a few sections to Medialets.com to help you find the information you’re looking for.  We’ve broken down the For App Developers and For Advertisers/Agencies into discreet sections encompassing our offerings for each based on your feedback, and created a section called Ecosystem to provide a holistic overview of the industry at large.  We’ve also added an easy-to-navigate Media Relations section displaying our latest media coverage and press releases and providing a snapshot of the current state of Medialets in general.

We’re anxiously awaiting your thoughts on our new site!  You know how to reach us - connect [at] medialets [dot] com and on Twitter (@medialets).  Thanks so much for your ongoing support and kind words.  We can’t wait to start working with you.

Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research last week published some interesting statistics on the sale of the first 1 Million 3G iPhones.  We took a quick look and made some observations.

It’s a typical power curve, with 4 of the 22 countries capturing 81% of unit sales. The US leads with 600,000 units sold followed by Japan, Germany and France each with about 70,000 units.  

If you look at the percentage of each carrier’s contract subscriber base in each country, with the exception of the US, it looks as if all countries have a very consistent penetration rate of ~ 0.4% except Canada, whose anemic penetration rate and units sold are most likely a result of the systems issues that Apple and many carriers were having during registration of the handsets.

From a global carrier perspective, removing AT&T from the pack, it looks like T-Mobile is the leader for overseas unit sales, reporting 89,000 units sold in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. Orange is next with combined unit sales of 77,000 from France, Belgium and Switzerland. Japan’s Softbank is third with 70,000 units sold.

Of course this data only spans the very frothy first three days.  We are looking forward to learning more about results over the last 2+ weeks and will keep you posted as more data comes in.  Let us know if you hear anything else, and a big thanks to our developer community for continuing to keep the quest for transparency a top commercial priority.

Right now the Top Paid app is Units Convertor - available for $0.99 as a Paid download.  However at some point after July 28th, the app made the jump from being a free app to paid-for, and apparently took its App Store calculated popularity with it.  On July 28th, Unit Converter was the 48th most popular free app, yet today, as a paid app is #1.

While it’s possible that Units Convertor built up a huge fan base as a free app, then garnered enough support to become the Top Paid app, but it’s more likely that in changing the price, Units Converter changed the peers it was being compared to, and the number of times Units Converter was downloaded for free dwarfed the competition of competing paid apps.  Of course, this is all conjecture, seeing as download data is not made publicly available, and Units Convertor may have risen to the top of the paid downloads list legitimately due to its rapid emergence and growing number of supporters.

So what’s the aftermath of this going to be?  Some opportunistic developers are likely to try exploiting this, using their relatively overwhelming volume of downloads as free apps to boost a paid rating, at least until Apple changes its policy for converting free to paid apps.  And for Units Convertor, this switch has garnered a decline in reviews.

On the other hand it also highlights the unique window of opportunity developers can take to profit from their code.  By offering two versions - one free and ad-supported, and one paid and ad free - it offers developers the opportunity to profit from the mass distribution advantages of a free app, while offering a way to reward the most loyal users with a paid app that gives users the benefit of an ad-free app and the knowledge that they are directly supporting the developer.

Idea:  If you’re going to provide a free and paid version of your application, consider how your users will migrate their data from free to paid.  You might want to offer a WebDav sever to migrate data between versions (though you’ll want to tell your users before they upgrade that you’ll be moving the data off the device, only to put it back on a few moments later).

• RSS feeds of new apps, top free apps, top paid apps, and updated apps
• Enhanced graphics on the main metrics page, making it easier to spot trends in total ratings and average ratings
• Chart counting iPhone applications at each price point
• Display of more company data about the developer of each app on the individual app view
• Screenshots now included for each app
• Developer pages, showing what apps each developer has built, and a URL to the developer’s website

Let us know what you think in the comments and tell us what else you would like to see.

There’s a lot more to come so stay tuned!

So, let’s get the basic stats out of the way first.  As of Sunday night at 11PM, there are 977 apps available at the store. Of those, 254, or just over one quarter, are free.  The two categories with more than one half of their apps in the free bucket are Social Networking (93.9% free) and News (73.3% free).  The $0.99 category is the second most popular, accounting for 226 apps, or 23.1%.  The fact that almost half of the apps at the store can be had for less than a buck certainly could help account for the staggering download statistics that Apple is quoting!  The 99 cent-ers are dominated by a wealth of books by AppEngines, LLC, which accounts for 111 of the 226, or about 50%.  Entertainment, Games and Utilities make up the lion’s share of the remaining portion of this $0.99 group.

The $1.99, $4.99 and $9.99 price points are each holding about 10% of the market.  Games dominates all three of these, making up 48.5%, 42.9% and 27.5%, respectively. The other big category for the $9.99 apps is Travel, with the iLingo & Lonely Planet foreign language phrase books being the big offerings there.  However, given that most of the Lonely Planet printed guides are available at their website for the reduced price of $6.29, we may be seeing their prices coming down in the near future.  The joy is that since Apple has left pricing completely at the discretion of the developers, they can each determine what level of downloads justify what price point.    

The average price across all apps is $4.96 and the average price of a paid app is $6.70.  However, we have recently seen some higher priced apps enter the market, such as the two MyAccountsToGo apps coming in at $449.99 a pop, released on the 15th, and iChart EMR at $139.99, released last week.  However, as one would expect, these six apps in the over $50 range are all have very specialized target users.  If we ignore these six apps, the average price for a paid app drops back to $4.96.    

The largest single category by far is still Games, with 256 apps and an average user rating of 3.90, compared with a store-wide average user rating of 3.60, and a store-wide average user rating of 3.46 when Games are ignored in this calculation.  This single category, of the 19 categories currently available, is accounting for just over 25% of the total store offering!  This particular segment is breaking from some other overall trends to boot.  Only 11.7% of the Games are free; way below the total app store average.  The average price in this category is $3.75, which is also well below the overall average for the store.  The average price for a paid game is $4.18, again below the store average as a whole.  To further this point, if we exclude Games from our store average app price calculations entirely, we find out that the average price for all apps climbs 47 cents to $5.43, the average price for a paid app is up $1.89 to $7.85 and the average price for a paid app excluding the six big dollar apps is up $0.36 to $5.32.  Obviously, Games is skewing the overall picture on pricing in the store.  They are more plentiful than anything else, and on the whole, cheaper, and better received based on the ratings.

The real kicker is that Games are dominating the leader board, with 53 of the top 100 paid apps coming from this category - that’s 23.5% of the available paid Games apps out there.  The average rating for these 53 is 3.84, compared with the overall paid Game rating average of 3.75.  Ignoring Games, the average rating for the remaining 47 apps drops to 3.21.  In terms of pricing, the average price for Games in the top 100 is $5.52 versus $4.61 for the other 47 apps.  If we narrow that list down to the top 25 paid apps, Games make up 16 of those, with an average rating of 3.88.  Granted, Music and Navigation have a greater percentage of their paid apps in the top 100, but combined they only represent 12 apps.  And no other category in the top 25 paid list has average user ratings anywhere near as high!  In fact, if we ignore games from the top 25 paid apps, the average rating for the remaining 9 apps drops all the way down to 2.79.  The average price for these 16 apps is $6.30 versus $1.99 for other 9.  The average rating for all paid apps store-wide is 3.37, for the top 100 paid apps, it is 3.63, and for the top 25 paid apps, its 3.67.  So, it looks like Games are doing pretty well compared to the other categories in both the paid download rankings and paid apps ratings.

On the free side, there are 24 in the top 100, which is 80.0% of the total free Games available.  They hold spots number one, two and three here.  By comparison, the second highest on the free leader board in terms of percentages is Entertainment, with 18, or 62.1% of its 29 free apps, ranking in the top 100.  The average rating for the 21 free apps is 4.18.  For top 100 free Entertainment apps, the average rating is 4.12.  Looking at the top free 25 only, Games have 7 of these, with an impressive average rating of 4.47.  For Entertainment’s 6 in the top 25, the average rating is 4.37.  The overall average user rating for free Games is 4.15, for all free apps store-wide is 3.76, for the top 100 free apps, it is 3.85 and for the top 25 free apps, its 4.06.  So, it looks like Games is doing better than average here but its a little tighter than on the paid side.

So, the free apps, be they fewer, are contributing to the overall higher ratings of this category.  One could ask, how much does pricing seem to really matter?  Let’s take a look at the pricing breakdown in detail and see if we can learn anything:

Within Games, there have been 22 price changes from July 15 to July 25 and 35 new apps hitting the store.  Twelve days ago we had 31 Games apps at a price of $9.99.  Today there are only 25.  Where did they go and does it seem to have paid off?  

Looking at the details, I see there are 7 games that have dropped their price from $9.99, in all cases going to $4.99, which accounts for the majority of the increases we see there.  None of these apps are in the top 100 paid apps list and it doesn’t appear to have greatly affected their ratings, dropping from 3.48 to 3.35, over a total of 73 and 122 ratings.  So maybe these games need to either rethink their pricing strategy further, or possibly they need to retool their apps a bit.  

There is one new app at $9.99 that was released on 7/18, and its getting an average rating of 4.50 from 68 reviewers so far.  The weighted average rating for the 25 $9.99 apps is only 3.65, so this one seems to be doing okay.  Of these 25 apps, 13 of them hit the top 100 download board.  Only 5 other apps priced at $9.99 hit the top 100 (3 Productivity & 2 Music).  

For the other 10 apps that have dropped their prices, 5 dropped a dollar and five others dropped anywhere from 2 to 4 bucks.  For the one dollar drop, we see an increase in average rating from 3.56 to 3.66.  For the greater than one dollar drop, the ratings actually drop from 3.89 to 3.74.

Four games have actually raised their prices in the past 10 days, in all cases by $1.00.  Three were increased from $1.99 to $2.99 with apparently little effect in their ratings.  Of these, only the app now at $7.99 has enough reviews to see if this change has had an impact.  The ratings here have gone up from 4.1 to 4.2.

Okay, now that your head and mine are swimming with numbers (which in the absence of actual download numbers only mean so much), lets see if we can come up with some take-aways.  The relative mix of apps by category hasn’t changed much and we can probably expect to see this continue in this fashion.  The percentage of free vs. paid is staying relatively stable across the store, although the average price seems to be increasing slightly.   The overall ratings for free apps seems to be higher than paid apps, whether we look at the store as a whole, the top 100 or just the top 25.  People love their Games!  The user ratings are higher here and people are willing to pay for good Games and seem to be sampling far and wide.  Further, a drop in a Game’s price doesn’t equate into an increase in user satisfaction, so it appears that at least for Games, our user community is looking for quality at whatever price (13 of those 54 on the top 100 paid download’s board are priced at $9.99, and 5 are at $7.99, while only 12 are at $1.99 & $0.99 price points combined).

Okay, maybe that isn’t clearly indicated in the chart, but a few points do jump out, and most of it turns out to be what we all expected.  First, the majority of the apps in the store right now are in the Games and Entertainment categories.  Combined, they account for 393 apps or 49% of the total current store offering. Second, the biggest single item on the chart is Entertainment apps at the 99 cent price point.  A whopping 122 apps fall into this bucket, representing 15.2% of the total apps.  The competition in this area is going to be fierce.  The second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth longest colored bars in this chart are all in the Games category, representing the $1.99, $4.99, $9.99, $2.99 and $0.99 price points, respectively.  

Other things that jump out at us on the chart…  Travel apps seem to be most concentrated around the $9.99 mark, over half the Utilities apps are under a buck and just under half of the Productivity apps are free.  Social Networking apps are almost all free.  That little yellow at the end of their line is the $9.99 versions of Twitterific Premium and Exposure Premium.  Both of those apps are available for free in scaled down version.

Personally, I like to look at my data in tables.  Ahh… raw numbers.  Makes my heart feel warm and fuzzy.  

As we see a trend away from free in the app store, it will be interesting to see how the price points trend within the individual categories.

It’s been on my mind all day (which people have told me says something…I guess) so I went ahead and did it.  But there is a “health warning” regarding the consumption of this information.  Its not revenue - its really a price * volume proxy - lots of assumptions, but again, done in the spirit of transparency.

We start with our earlier premise that in the absence of download volume, we would use the number of reviews written for an app as a proxy for relative volume comparisons.  As of 7/13, written reviews for paid-for apps outnumbered those for free apps by about 25% (that’s about a 55/45 ratio). So:

If there were 10 Million downloads, then using the ratio above, we’re left with about  4,450,000 for paid-for apps.

Next, we know that there were 2,623 reviews written for paid-for apps. Dividing this into the number of reviews that an app received gives us the “share” of reviews for an app - which translates to our proxy for share of volume.  Multiply this by 4,450,000, and again by the price to get an estimate of relative financial position vs. other apps (I don’t feel it’s qualified enough to be called revenue yet).

So, if Super Monkey Ball has 290 reviews, the following happens:

290 = 11.1% of paid-for reviews.  11.1% * 4,450,000 * $9.99 = $4.9M.

There, I did it.

But remember, this is not revenue!  It’s a way to gain more insight into how pricing and demand affect the relative financial performance of an app.  Here is a table of a few I’ve done for you.

We’d love to hear your feedback on this.

Did I make any money?

That’s the question on everyone’s mind. How did my app perform? How has it done vs. others overall? In my category? How about with others of the same price or vs. free apps? What’s the big picture?
We’ve been gathering and crunching away at data all weekend long, and here are some of our observations and analysis.

Yes. It’s behaving like a market.

Prices are falling as more apps are added. We learn in Econ 101 that as more competitors enter a market, the more likely we are to see price compression for an unlimited resource. We’ve been reviewing the App Store more or less hourly since it became available on-line, and (barring some ‘mechanicals’ from Apple), the trend over time seems to indicate that this may already be happening (Chart 1). I say “may” only because these are app owners’ initial bids into the market – we have not seen much activity in terms of price changes yet, but are less than 100 hours into it.

Is a proliferation of free apps driving this pattern? Chart 2 indicates that it isn’t. In fact it is a very similar pattern.

Competition can be “ugly.”

If you’re not the lead dog, the scenery never changes. People are taking advantage of weak points in the App Store process to get noticed. You will see the same behaviors if you look in the Yellow Pages. Here are the top 10 app names in alphabetical order as of around 7pm last night:

• !! Solitaire City !!
• !FLOverload!
• “CubicMan Deluxe”
• “Whack The Groundhog”
• “Jam’
• “Jirbo Break’
• “Jirbo Jive’
• “Jive’
• “Marble Mash’
• “Paper Football’

Strong desire for transparency.

How much money did I make yesterday/to date, etc.? For a while, the App store was publishing number of downloads, so you could directly see the performance of your application. If you were scrappy enough, you could benchmark vs. other apps. Which we did. Until Apple shut the counter down after about 15 hours. I can’t blame them. Where I come from, publishing real-time revenue for a publicly traded company leads to unemployment. However, now that Im on the other side, like many others, I’m pushing for price transparency – I want to see where the market is going.

The next best thing, we think, is to measure download activity by proxy using number of reviews posted. It does not give us insight to revenue, but it may be able to give us relative perspective on volume as a benchmark. The thinking is that the more an app gets downloaded, the more likely people will post reviews. I’ll let you figure out the math to interpret this vs. the 10 Million downloads Apple reported this morning. In the meantime, here’s a snapshot of one of our leaderboard tables that we have started publishing and updating 4 times a day (and boy are our fingers tired!).

Free is “Better”

At least that’s what the stats coming out of the first 3 full days of operations are saying. Using our volume proxy of reviews submitted, Chart 4 shows that free apps generate anywhere from 24% – 29% more reviews than paid-for apps do.

The obvious follow-up question is “OK, but are they of similar quality as paid-for apps?” We tested this, and were actually surprised to see that the average rating (on a 5 point scale) was higher for free apps (Chart 5).

It’s Your Market, Too

To carry on the racing analogy, we haven’t even reached the first turn, and there already are some smoke patches to drive through. At Medialets, besides providing specific metrics for our application development partners, we are trying to help the market become more efficient in general. We’d love to get your thoughts on some of the data we are publishing. Let us know how we can make this better or other ways you might like to understand the changes in this market and we’ll get our pit crew right on it!

We passed out over 200 Medialets s’more kits, each containing bamboo-skewered jet puffed marshmallows, rich dark chocolate bars, graham crackers, a tealight candle and matches.  The response was fabulous!  iPhone fans all around were roasting jumbo marshmellows while they waited.  Special thanks to our friends at CNET/CBS Justin Yu and Wilson Tang for making the day so memorable and making us laugh.  
Also, to Chrissie Brodigan, Tony Bacigalupo, Brett Petersel, Michael Gruen, David Riordan and DeeDee Stanbury, we cannot thank you enough for your support in making this event possible.  Thank you so much!

Photos courtesy of Tony Bacigalupo’s Flickr. 

Eric being interviewed on CNET

Eric’s business card

Greg Gregarious Narain from Blue Whale Labs and Adam Hirsch from Mashable