Medialets

We turned one month old last week, and as our present to you, we’ve redesigned our sites!  Now, Medialets.com, Medialytics.com and App Store Metrics will be under one unified navigation, plus we’ve created some new sections to make it easier to find content and added many new pages describing our offerings in greater detail. Medialets is still shiny and new, so why redesign now?  Well, we spend most of our days talking and listening to you, our customers and developers, and we discovered a few things based on these conversations.

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.

It looks like a simple price change in the App Store may have revealed just how extensive the gap is between free apps and their less-downloaded, paid brethren.

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).