You must be ranking somewhere at this point… 
congrats man it’s a good feeling tripling your revenue overnight
Thanks man! Yeah I’ve been checking App Annie, I’m in the top 50 in China now. I’m still getting hardly any downloads elsewhere though…
I’ve been digging around a little bit and spoken to /r/china and I believe a different ghost app a girl was using kept telling her a 48 year old male was near here and her father died at age 48 so that story went viral and the search term they used points to my app.
Downloads have gone down quite a bit overnight, I’m still on over 10k downloads already today but at this point yesterday I was over 30k so I may be seeing this dying down, but on the other hand I am so far up Chinese rankings I can’t see why it would drop so much suddenly. So perhaps Sunday is a slow day in China… time will tell I guess. But yeah I am loving seeing the earnings increase, might treat myself to something nice!
china has a billion people so it is possible a user liked your app and published it to a china market without your conscent, this happened to one of my apps and even happened with a few of my paid apps.
This has to have been what’s happened, I’ve just been looking at the statistics and out of the 120k downloads I’ve had in the past four day’s only 8k of them are on the playstore…
Whatever luck I had though seems to have died I’ve had literally 0 downloads for the past four hours. Would love to know where it was uploaded and what caused it to be so good can’t imagine it will be easy though.
Google Analytics can show you where your downloads are coming from…
only to the google play page though, is that right?
No, It will show also other places where your app is being downloaded…
it would be interesting to know about earnings during this time interval. @Oates, since not all chinese phones have got google play installed on them and apps with IAP don’t show up on play store for china, what is your experience with earnings. can we see some kind of report.
Here’s an example of a game I did that got copied into some chinese stores…
I also uploaded to Yandex store…
I spent 20 minutes making you a sweet ass table then accidentally closed the page so I will just use screengrabs instead.
Click on the images then click again on them at imgur to see them full size,
AdMob:
MobileCore:
Daily New Users:
24/2/13 - 330
25/2/13 - 1,456
26/2/13 - 1,313
27/2/13 - 19,632
28/2/13 - 34,906
1/3/13 - 46,834
2/3/13 - 22,477
Totals:
New Users - 126,948
Earnings in Dollars - $1259.63
Average Monthly Earning - $4178.50
So with that app in a week I earned a third of what I do normally in a month, Including all my other app’s I actually earned half of what I normally do in a month this week. As you can see from the figures MobileCore was far far superior to AdMob for advertisements, I am curious to see if anyone else has major experience with China what networks they use and what kind of results they saw because $5 seems like a huge CPM!
Unfortunately as you can see the downloads dipped down at the end getting less than half the downloads than the day before as of writing this I am at about 7.3k downloads so far today so looks like I am getting a tonne less again today.
I have taken a look at the “App Marketplace” section under “Acquisition” in Analytics and for the rankings of AppStores Google Play actually came 7th and the top downloaded location is (not set) accounting for 72k of the downloads so I guess I won’t know which store that is.
It was a really exciting few day’s and has shown me I should definitely look at more than just Google Play as somewhere to distribute my apps. It’s also given me a taste for extra cash so I will definitely be putting way more work in to get those earnings up! If you want any more info let me know 
Your impressions and earnings prove this. Since most Chinese users don’t use play store and I am sure admob is checking to see if play store is installed before giving away ecpm and hence less ecpm. But guess what, mobilecore and other networks don’t even care to check about the war between google and china and giving away nice ecpm based on clicks (even when the user couldn’t install the app being advertised because google play is missing).
probably mobilecore developer can show us some if-else code to prove my theory wrong 
It could be that advertisements in China go to the most popular appstore there? Obviously the ad’s were alot more relevant considering the click through rate was 30% compared to admobs super low CTR.