i want to talk you about some suspicions that i do have about google play.
Almost all my apps have admob as ad network. All except 2 apps. What i noticed is that those 2 apps are not doing great and both of these apps were promoted a lot in comparisson to the apps that have admob. Yet the apps that do not use admob drop every day. I am starting to believe that google play ranking takes into consideration your ad network/monetization process. I believe that it will place higher in rankings an app that contains admob and/or in app purchaces than those apps that do not. The reason is obvious, bigger revenue for admob/google.
your thoughts on that? have you seen your admob apps getting more downloads than the apps that you do not have admob/in app purchaces?
I had suggested this could be a way of ranking for Google in an earlier post - I am not sure if Google does it or not - or if they check if you are using Admob solely or have multiple ad networks in your APK. Although if they do base on Admob traffic and not exclusiveness - one would think that should be a reasonable way for them to tackle - i.e. base it on the admob ad revenue etc. …
I had proposed that just like paid app revenue is used to rank the apps in the earnings rankings - a measure of how much revenue an app is making from ads could be a reasonable measure of it’s real-world “value”. And I was proposing that perhaps Google may use this number to better tune their rankings for free apps.
Although this would seriously skew results for apps which don’t use Admob ads - and I suspect some big games etc. may do so i.e. not be using Admob - so I don’t know how that would work.
But for smaller apps - where the numbers are not that big - there the ad revenue measure could be a useful no-nonsense indicator of the value of the app … ?
I don’t know guys, I think you’re just paranoid. There are tons of popular apps that don’t have any ads in them, especially in the social networking section.