"How do you get on the Top Paid Apps list? You sell lots of apps. How do you sell lots of apps? You get yourself on the Top Paid Apps list."

They could fix this by using exponential decay like Reddit and HN do with stories on the front page.

That's a good solution.

Another solution is to offer a few different top paid lists for each of the common selling price ranges. So have one at 0-4.99, another at 5-10, etc.... That way some of the more expensive ones are treated quasi fairly.

Also the ratings should be weighted towards the people that actually purchased the app.

Or they could sort the list by expected return. I.e. by the chance of selling a copy times the sale price. That would also maximize Apple's revenue.

Yeah, it would seem that they are giving up a lot of income because they have a fairly lowtech method of highlighting the best sellers.

They should look at poaching some of the google talent or look at acquiring a startup that does something similar if they cannot build it internally.

That requires expertise, not unlike, say, picking a winnig startup to fund. :-)

I meant they could do it based on past data.

Or they could just sort by revenue rather than sales.

Normally I'm not a fan of self-posting but I wanted to follow up with the discussion that went on here last weekend on this subject (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=472408) and let anyone who's interested know that AppCraver was the offending party.

aha, you outed the site in question :) which was the same one who offered the same deal to us..and they still haven't reviewed our app one month later. backlogged indeed that they can't catch up with so many other sites that do just fine?..

i took a closer look at the site and their traffic after an informative discussion with another hn reader via email, and i'm really wondering if any devs that paid for this found it worthwhile.

Excellent. Now we know all the develoeprs who paid for their apps to be reviewed.

I'm not sure that's the case. Although it's likely that many of the app reviews on AppCraver were paid for, there's no way of telling that a particular one was. For example, there are a couple of negative reviews on the site which I imagine weren't paid for.

I think that the best way to make a lot of $ on the iphone is to price your app $1 or thereabouts. Better to sell 1M people your $1 app than 5000 * $10.

I think it all depends on the kind of app. If it's a silly little app that anyone could find amusing then sure. If it's a useful app that only a certain subset of iPhone users will find useful, then maybe not.

"If Apptism is accepting money from developers, they ought to say so prominently at the top of each paid review."

That should read AppCraver, not Apptism, right?

Yes. Thank you for pointing that out—that typo's been fixed.

Speaking of Apptism, I like that site a lot, except that I can't figure out what those little numbers in red circles mean. I'm sure they explain on their site somewhere, just haven't found it yet.