Dan Grigsby

There’s been a lot of talk about pricing iPhone applications.

I was curious about correlating price and popularity within product categories. Peter Cooper thought it’d probably follow a Zipf-like distribution, with more expensive apps falling off quickly.

(see article for larger graph)

Turns out, it kind of does and it kind of doesn’t. By and large, cheaper apps are more popular. That said, in every category there are exceptions: there are apps that are way more popular than they should be for their price. Can better apps fetch more?

While working on this, I started experimenting with combining price and popularity. Multiply them together and you should get a relative ranking of who is making the most, the second most, etc. You can’t get absolute numbers, but as a relative gauge it’s interesting.

Anyway, we’re working on a series of articles about this that’ll be posted to Mobile Orchard. The first one, Price and Popularity: The iPhone App Store’s Data Show Who’s Making The Most Money, went up today.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 3:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.