I think Pixelpower was presenting his information - or whatever he could deduce in good faith.
He could be wrong.
And the person asking the question will know there could be many opinions about the issue. Whether it is ok to spend money - or not - and whether one needs to first be sure the app is good enough - otherwise the money spent may not be useful.
But it seems that for apps that have caused the developer to spend 6 months of their time - some would suggest they spend some money to get the app some early visibility. They may not have enough cash to take the app to full visibility - but it may still be enough to get the app out of complete invisibility.
While others may suggest that to minimize risk - as most paid installs will not necessarily lead to long-term payoff.
Others would suggest that spending - gives a new app a “fighting chance” - and minimizes risk - i.e. the risk that it is not discovered for months by the right demographic etc. So spending some time early may reduce that risk - esp. if they were planning to spend lots of time on the app - so spending money is part of the commitment.
Pixelpower argument that if you get app into top 50 then you have a chance at top 10 - seems to be his most contentious comment.
But that may just mean that appearing in top 50 gives you a chance to get to top 10 - in the sense that if you don’t appear in top 50 you are unlikely to appear in top 10.
What would be interesting is to see which apps in top 10 - actually had a marketing budget behind them.
I have noticed some apps in various niches - which are a nuisance in terms of in-your-face interstitial ads - and very bad app mechanics (although perhaps they had better design or eye-catching design maybe). But their huge number of downloads seemed to suggest to me that they may have had paid installs behind it. When a low-grade app - which is actually unusable in practice is seeing 10x the downloads of other apps - then that suggests that the installs are being driven by paid installs perhaps - but what developer or backer would have the money to push such an app so heavily - and would it every achieve “organic downloads” that make it stay at the top - or will it fall ?
Some of these types of apps have uniformly bad ratings also - or showing up in most useful - but their overall ratings seem to be spectacular also i.e. very high 5 and 4-stars - and low 1-stars etc. So this part was very confusing for me. That is - are they buying paid reviews in large numbers or what ?
So there is a lot of fishy stuff going on … but perhaps the mechanics of it is evident to those who HAVE spent the money - perhaps it IS possible if you spend enough money - to get your app very high in the Top New Free and then Top Free etc. (at least in the app’s category) - and that would somehow even after paid app install campaigns by developer are over.
I am not sure - but perhaps when one operates at the very top end - i.e. is spending enough every day for days - that at the very top the downloads increase a lot.
I know that with AppBrain - for a modest budget at least like $200 a day - you can get app installs to happen like flowing water. That is - for even a shitty app - you can just make people download it just by showing it to enough people.
It is possible that a similar type of dynamic starts to happen if you manage to get your app to the very top.
But I suspect Google ranking algorithms ALREADY know what kind of download numbers you need to have to be at #2 for a category for instance - and how much the app will get just from people finding it in Top Free at #2 - and if your app starts dropping in downloads - then it maybe a slippery slope - UNLESS the developer is constantly pumping money into paid installs - at a trickle perhaps just to keep the app high - and maybe using the high downloads revenue to feed that ranking elevation.
I don’t know - but I suspect the mechanics of this is probably well known to those who have the budget - to run this risk - or those who perhaps have already tried this with $10K or $20K of cash - and they may have arrived at some sense about what kind of strategy is a “sure shot” or a "slam dunk " or whatever … ?