Developing Perspective

00:00:00 ◼   ► developing perspective.

00:00:01 ◼   ► If you were a regional listener to developing perspective,

00:00:04 ◼   ► you'll realize that it's been quite some time since I

00:00:06 ◼   ► recorded an episode.

00:00:08 ◼   ► It's just been not one of those things that I can get to.

00:00:10 ◼   ► Something that I'm hoping to get into more and more as time

00:00:13 ◼   ► goes on.

00:00:13 ◼   ► But anyway, that's the past, and this is now.

00:00:18 ◼   ► I think developing perspective, when it started,

00:00:20 ◼   ► was a daily thing that I'd do, sort of every weekday,

00:00:22 ◼   ► walking through links, articles, just various things

00:00:26 ◼   ► that I found interesting that an iOS developer might find

00:00:28 ◼   ► interesting, someone who kind of does what I do.

00:00:32 ◼   ► I think I'm going to be shifting that sort of more and more away

00:00:35 ◼   ► from probably that model in terms of it's just a bit too much

00:00:37 ◼   ► to keep up with it for the daily schedule, having all those links,

00:00:41 ◼   ► all that content.

00:00:42 ◼   ► It's a bit too much of a fire hose.

00:00:44 ◼   ► I think of moving a little bit farther back.

00:00:47 ◼   ► And rather than doing that kind of an approach,

00:00:50 ◼   ► we're talking a little bit more analysis, a little bit more

00:00:53 ◼   ► of a director's commentary, if you will,

00:00:56 ◼   ► on the content I put together and do for my website.

00:01:00 ◼   ► If you're not familiar with, I recently relaunched or changed.

00:01:04 ◼   ► It's now david-schmidt.org.

00:01:08 ◼   ► It's D-A-V-I-D-S-M-I-T-H dot org.

00:01:12 ◼   ► It's my new site.

00:01:14 ◼   ► Hopefully you'll like it.

00:01:15 ◼   ► It's built on Octopress, which if you are starting a new site,

00:01:18 ◼   ► I'd highly recommend if you're a bit of a hacker,

00:01:20 ◼   ► if you don't mind running around in some Ruby scripts and things.

00:01:23 ◼   ► it does just this really nice environment,

00:01:28 ◼   ► means that you enter up with a static HTML site

00:01:31 ◼   ► that you can just host in anything.

00:01:35 ◼   ► I host it on Linode with Apache,

00:01:36 ◼   ► which is a delightfully fast

00:01:39 ◼   ► and super low-maintenance way to do it.

00:01:42 ◼   ► I was recently entering Fireball,

00:01:45 ◼   ► and the Fireball traffic just barely even

00:01:46 ◼   ► made the server stand up and take note.

00:01:48 ◼   ► I think at its peak, when hundreds and hundreds of

00:01:52 ◼   ► during-file-bar readers were hitting the site constantly,

00:01:56 ◼   ► I think the server peaked at like 3 or 4% CPU.

00:02:00 ◼   ► It just was kind of irrelevant.

00:02:04 ◼   ► But anyway, so that's kind of what I've been doing and what I've been changing.

00:02:08 ◼   ► I'm going to be talking a little bit about, sort of on the post podcast going forward,

00:02:12 ◼   ► I'll probably keep roughly a similar format where she'll probably be fairly short,

00:02:16 ◼   ► maybe 10, 15, 20 minutes, probably still just me talking rather than other people or things

00:02:23 ◼   ► going on.

00:02:24 ◼   ► And mostly I'm just going to be talking about articles I've written.

00:02:27 ◼   ► And if you read the site, this will be somewhat a little bit less interesting, I guess, but

00:02:33 ◼   ► hopefully it's good to get the extra depth and perspective on what I'm writing about,

00:02:38 ◼   ► as well as just another way of getting that content.

00:02:41 ◼   ► So if you don't like reading it, you can hopefully get it in the podcast, and that'd be helpful.

00:02:45 ◼   ► All right, so I'm going to first off start by talking about an article I wrote yesterday

00:02:51 ◼   ► talking about the App Store Christmas bump.

00:02:55 ◼   ► So if you're not familiar with it, every year, on December 25th, Christmas Day, the App Store

00:03:02 ◼   ► experiences a dramatic increase in software sales.

00:03:07 ◼   ► This is well above and beyond normal sales.

00:03:10 ◼   ► It varies from year to year, but it seems to have kind of stabilized a bit.

00:03:14 ◼   ► And you can kind of see this amazing thing where everyone gets new iTunes gift cards,

00:03:19 ◼   ► new devices, new iPads, new iPod touches, new iPhones, who knows, whatever it is.

00:03:26 ◼   ► On December 25th and for roughly maybe the week, two weeks after, you see a massive spike

00:03:31 ◼   ► in sales.

00:03:34 ◼   ► As a result, it's been kind of an interesting thing because it creates this tremendous stress

00:03:38 ◼   ► in the developer community about making sure that everything's perfect for Christmas Day.

00:03:43 ◼   ► You want to be as highly ranked.

00:03:45 ◼   ► You want to have no lingering bugs that

00:03:46 ◼   ► are going to cause bad ratings, bad reviews to show up

00:03:49 ◼   ► in the app store for you.

00:03:50 ◼   ► You want to make sure your server can handle the load

00:03:53 ◼   ► that's going to be generated by, say, 7, 10 times, who knows,

00:03:57 ◼   ► users for that one day.

00:04:01 ◼   ► If you have a new app, it's very, very helpful

00:04:03 ◼   ► to get it in right before.

00:04:05 ◼   ► Because if it's going to take off

00:04:06 ◼   ► and if it's going to go anywhere,

00:04:08 ◼   ► it's a great jump start from a revenue perspective

00:04:10 ◼   ► to get that app in by Christmas Day.

00:04:13 ◼   ► then you'll see this massive jump the next day.

00:04:17 ◼   ► So anyway, that's kind of enough--

00:04:20 ◼   ► it's sort of the history of what's going on there.

00:04:22 ◼   ► And something that's been kind of interesting, too,

00:04:24 ◼   ► is Apple also shuts down iTunes Connect,

00:04:26 ◼   ► which is sort of the developer portal for managing

00:04:30 ◼   ► the business side of being in the App Store during this period.

00:04:34 ◼   ► There's a variety of things going on there.

00:04:36 ◼   ► I think it's both to give the people who run it a break,

00:04:39 ◼   ► probably also to make sure everything's locked down,

00:04:41 ◼   ► So it's easier for them to administer and manage

00:04:43 ◼   ► during the actual iTunes, during the Christmas period,

00:04:47 ◼   ► where they're dealing with so much traffic on their end

00:04:49 ◼   ► as well.

00:04:51 ◼   ► And so it's just kind of an interesting period, where

00:04:53 ◼   ► at least it's on Christmas Day, developers

00:04:56 ◼   ► can't be in there tweaking, and adjusting, and playing

00:04:58 ◼   ► because it's just shut down.

00:05:00 ◼   ► So anyway, they published sales for this year's--

00:05:03 ◼   ► this is Christmas Day 2011.

00:05:07 ◼   ► And their results were actually pretty impressive.

00:05:10 ◼   ► So for one of my main apps, My Recipe Book,

00:05:15 ◼   ► which is an iPad-only app that lets you organize recipes,

00:05:20 ◼   ► I looked at the sales for it, both for 2010 and 2011,

00:05:25 ◼   ► and kind of just saw how large that bump was.

00:05:28 ◼   ► And specifically what I did is I compared daily sales

00:05:32 ◼   ► to the year-to-date average for both years-- so in 2010,

00:05:35 ◼   ► the year-to-date average in 2011.

00:05:38 ◼   ► And in both cases, Christmas Day roughly had about a 700%

00:05:43 ◼   ► increase, which put another way means

00:05:45 ◼   ► that I sold about seven times the normal volume of my recipe

00:05:49 ◼   ► book on Christmas Day than I normally do.

00:05:52 ◼   ► So it takes an entire week, essentially,

00:05:54 ◼   ► and adds it to the end.

00:05:55 ◼   ► So it's almost like there's 53 weeks in the app store,

00:06:00 ◼   ► because you get that extra sort of week sales into one day.

00:06:05 ◼   ► And especially interesting now, this

00:06:07 ◼   ► is a couple days after Christmas and recording on December 28th. That seems to be still continuing

00:06:14 ◼   ► to some degree. It's not quite seven times at this point. It's probably, I think it's

00:06:18 ◼   ► probably more like five and six, maybe in at four and a half. It's kind of sort of gradually

00:06:24 ◼   ► tapering off. There's still a lot, a lot of increase and then it'll kind of diminish down

00:06:29 ◼   ► and if history is a guide, we'll become kind of into a steady, steady state at some point.

00:06:35 ◼   ► So just something interesting to look at.

00:06:38 ◼   ► If you're a developer, as of now, it's probably, what,

00:06:40 ◼   ► 362 days until next Christmas.

00:06:45 ◼   ► So if you're a developer at the hearing this,

00:06:47 ◼   ► you've got plenty of time to sort things out for next year.

00:06:51 ◼   ► But definitely something that's kind of fun.

00:06:53 ◼   ► Good way to think about sales in terms of, OK,

00:06:57 ◼   ► so I'm getting everything queued up for Christmas,

00:07:01 ◼   ► knock it off, and you can do a week's sales in a day.

00:07:04 ◼   ► So definitely nothing bad there.

00:07:07 ◼   ► All right, next is I'm going to talk about iTunes affiliate

00:07:12 ◼   ► links.

00:07:13 ◼   ► And this is kind of an interesting topic.

00:07:15 ◼   ► It's just a nice little way to make extra revenue.

00:07:17 ◼   ► And so if you're not familiar with it,

00:07:20 ◼   ► the affiliate links are a way that you

00:07:22 ◼   ► can create links to things in various Apple iTunes stores.

00:07:25 ◼   ► So that's for music, videos, podcasts, audio books, apps,

00:07:28 ◼   ► in the iOS and Mac app stores, as well as iBooks.

00:07:31 ◼   ► And you create a little link.

00:07:32 ◼   ► And if anyone ever clicks on that,

00:07:34 ◼   ► and then if they buy anything in the app store,

00:07:37 ◼   ► after clicking your link, the next three days,

00:07:39 ◼   ► you get 5% of whatever they bought.

00:07:41 ◼   ► So they click on a link on my site for my recipe book,

00:07:44 ◼   ► for example.

00:07:45 ◼   ► They click on that.

00:07:47 ◼   ► It's a $3 app.

00:07:48 ◼   ► They buy it, I would get an extra $0.15

00:07:50 ◼   ► on top of my normal actual sale.

00:07:52 ◼   ► And then say two days later, they bought something else.

00:07:54 ◼   ► Say they bought a copy of Instapaper, which is a $5 app,

00:07:58 ◼   ► I'd get a $0.25 commission on that,

00:08:00 ◼   ► even though I didn't link to that directly.

00:08:02 ◼   ► So it's just a nice thing that you can do to boost your revenue.

00:08:06 ◼   ► It's not never going to be a huge revenue maker for you

00:08:08 ◼   ► unless you have a huge amount of traffic that you're driving to the iTunes store.

00:08:11 ◼   ► But what it does is lets you really clean up your--

00:08:16 ◼   ► it's almost like cleaning up the scraps.

00:08:18 ◼   ► You're reaching around and saying, well, there's

00:08:20 ◼   ► just a little extra money on the table here.

00:08:22 ◼   ► Apple's providing this extra 5% of sales.

00:08:26 ◼   ► Why wouldn't you take advantage of that?

00:08:28 ◼   ► Especially as a developer, it's a nice thing when you're linking to your own stuff to increase

00:08:34 ◼   ► the percentage that you're getting back.

00:08:35 ◼   ► So rather than getting 70% of the sale price, you're more, in many ways, you're getting

00:08:41 ◼   ► 75% of the sale price, which is great.

00:08:46 ◼   ► So the process of getting set up is pretty straightforward.

00:08:49 ◼   ► Basically if you go to my site, or there's a link in the show notes, you just click the

00:08:53 ◼   ► link in there, you click it, you can register for the Linkshare program, you apply for the

00:08:58 ◼   ► iTunes affiliate program, steps and turns and conditions, sign a few things, then you

00:09:03 ◼   ► wait a little bit and you'll be approved for the program.

00:09:06 ◼   ► At that point you can create links.

00:09:09 ◼   ► Linkshare pays out your money back to you on a monthly basis, you can get it as a check,

00:09:14 ◼   ► direct deposit, and they've always been great with that.

00:09:16 ◼   ► I've had some affiliate programs and advertising things, it's a nightmare to actually get your

00:09:20 ◼   ► money at Linkshare, and Apple's iTunes affiliate program I've always had nothing but success

00:09:25 ◼   ► with.

00:09:27 ◼   ► And so that's kind of at a high level.

00:09:29 ◼   ► And you can go into Linkshare, which

00:09:30 ◼   ► is the system that runs it, and you

00:09:32 ◼   ► can manage the process of making all these links.

00:09:35 ◼   ► And you can do all these crazy things,

00:09:36 ◼   ► these big gaudy banners, like Glee, Now Out on iTunes.

00:09:41 ◼   ► That's kind of awful.

00:09:42 ◼   ► And you can also do things that are simpler,

00:09:46 ◼   ► say you want to just make a link to a single product

00:09:49 ◼   ► and you get a nice little text link.

00:09:51 ◼   ► But the ones that they give you out of the system, I find,

00:09:53 ◼   ► are just terrible for two main reasons.

00:09:55 ◼   ► one, they're kind of inscrutable and opaque.

00:09:58 ◼   ► You end up with this thing that starts, you know,

00:10:00 ◼   ► "http://click.linksynergy.com/fsbin/stat?"

00:10:07 ◼   ► Question mark, ID, blah, blah, blah.

00:10:09 ◼   ► And you're ending up with something that's just,

00:10:10 ◼   ► a user doesn't really know what to do with that.

00:10:12 ◼   ► And in my experience, if I want to have someone

00:10:14 ◼   ► click on something, I want them to be able to mouse over it,

00:10:18 ◼   ► and what pops up next to it, you know,

00:10:19 ◼   ► kind of in the status bar, is something

00:10:20 ◼   ► that they can understand, that that looks normal.

00:10:23 ◼   ► I want it to be what they're used to.

00:10:25 ◼   ► So if you have any experience in the App Store,

00:10:28 ◼   ► you're used to it if it says itunes.apple.com/app/myrecipebook.

00:10:33 ◼   ► You kind of know what that is.

00:10:35 ◼   ► You kind of know what to do with that.

00:10:37 ◼   ► And so I want those.

00:10:39 ◼   ► And then two, if you use the normal proxy links, where

00:10:42 ◼   ► it goes to click.linksynergy.com first,

00:10:45 ◼   ► it'll hit to that site.

00:10:47 ◼   ► And then it will redirect to iTunes,

00:10:48 ◼   ► and then it will open in the iTunes store.

00:10:50 ◼   ► Which on desktop is kind of annoying.

00:10:52 ◼   ► you'll have this two or three seconds of the browser just

00:10:57 ◼   ► twitching.

00:10:58 ◼   ► On an iPad or iPhone, this is just drives you nuts.

00:11:01 ◼   ► Because say you're in an application, you click, hey,

00:11:04 ◼   ► get an app store.

00:11:05 ◼   ► You click it.

00:11:06 ◼   ► It'll launch Safari.

00:11:07 ◼   ► Safari will open a new page, redirect, show nothing,

00:11:11 ◼   ► and then open the App Store, and then find the app

00:11:15 ◼   ► and show it to you.

00:11:16 ◼   ► It's just a horrible experience.

00:11:18 ◼   ► The phone was just going nuts for three seconds.

00:11:21 ◼   ► And I imagine most users just think they broke something.

00:11:24 ◼   ► So there's an alternate method.

00:11:25 ◼   ► It's called the short link method in Apple's Advanced

00:11:28 ◼   ► Affiliate Linking Reference.

00:11:30 ◼   ► And basically, it's a way of instead

00:11:32 ◼   ► of doing these nice, big, fancy links that have link tracking

00:11:35 ◼   ► and all kinds of stuff in them, instead what you do

00:11:37 ◼   ► is you just append two values to any standard iTunes link.

00:11:42 ◼   ► So itunes.apple.com/us/app/myrecipebooks.

00:11:47 ◼   ► The standard link you'd get out of iTunes,

00:11:49 ◼   ► If you right click on any icon and say, copy link,

00:11:53 ◼   ► you just add two things.

00:11:54 ◼   ► One of them is a site ID.

00:11:56 ◼   ► This is unique to you.

00:11:58 ◼   ► And you get it by going through the link maker tool in Linkshare.

00:12:02 ◼   ► Eventually, you kind of work your way through,

00:12:04 ◼   ► and you'll get this 11-digit code.

00:12:06 ◼   ► And that's unique to you.

00:12:07 ◼   ► And that's the ID that you'll pass to Apple

00:12:09 ◼   ► that they then pass back to give you money.

00:12:11 ◼   ► And the second is the partner ID.

00:12:13 ◼   ► Now, I'm only familiar with doing this in the US,

00:12:16 ◼   ► or some with Linkshare.

00:12:17 ◼   ► There's all kinds of other people who do it in Europe, I think. There's one in Australia or Asia, something like that.

00:12:22 ◼   ► But in the United States, you do it with LinkShare, and LinkShare's partner ID is 30.

00:12:30 ◼   ► So in my case, I can take any link and add the following to it.

00:12:34 ◼   ► Ampersand partner ID equals 30. Ampersand site ID equals

00:12:40 ◼   ► IZE7M699RYO.

00:12:44 ◼   ► And I put that on anything, anything I ever linked to.

00:12:48 ◼   ► Super easy, super trivial.

00:12:49 ◼   ► And I make a little bit of extra money.

00:12:51 ◼   ► Like I said, these aren't huge sums of money

00:12:53 ◼   ► you'll make from it.

00:12:55 ◼   ► But it's not bad.

00:12:56 ◼   ► I've probably made maybe $1,000 or $2 this year

00:12:59 ◼   ► from it, from all the various things I've linked to.

00:13:02 ◼   ► And depends on what-- and the interesting thing is,

00:13:04 ◼   ► you can link to things you didn't make.

00:13:06 ◼   ► You can link to things that are free

00:13:07 ◼   ► and hope people will go to other things.

00:13:09 ◼   ► For example, I recently linked to Logic,

00:13:12 ◼   ► which was just announced in the Mac App Store,

00:13:14 ◼   ► just to kind of let people know, hey, logic came up.

00:13:17 ◼   ► It used to be $500, now it's $200.

00:13:19 ◼   ► And someone bought it through that link just on Twitter.

00:13:21 ◼   ► I just tweeted it out there.

00:13:23 ◼   ► And so I got $10 from that because it's

00:13:25 ◼   ► a $200 piece of software.

00:13:27 ◼   ► So it's definitely worth doing.

00:13:30 ◼   ► I think it's a good way to make a little extra money, which

00:13:33 ◼   ► as an indie developer, it definitely doesn't hurt.

00:13:36 ◼   ► All right, that's it for today's show.

00:13:38 ◼   ► Hope you like the new format.

00:13:39 ◼   ► If you do, if you have any thoughts, questions,

00:13:41 ◼   ► comments, concerns, I'd love for you to hit me up on Twitter.

00:13:44 ◼   ► That's the best way to reach me, which I'm @_davidsmith.

00:13:49 ◼   ► Or if you go to my website, davidsmith.org,

00:13:52 ◼   ► or just with a dash, so david-smith.org, you hit there.

00:13:57 ◼   ► And on the About screen, there's an email address there

00:14:00 ◼   ► if you need to get a hold of me that way if you prefer.

00:14:02 ◼   ► Otherwise, I look forward to kind of keeping this going,

00:14:05 ◼   ► starting this back up.

00:14:06 ◼   ► And I hope you enjoy it.

00:14:07 ◼   ► Thanks.