Publicity Wheel - A new form of free app promotion

[arcturus]

I would like to share with you a service that may give you a different angle for helping to promote your app (disclaimer: yes it is my site). The idea is very simple:

1. You place a small widget on your app website and upload a 125x125 ad to Publicity Wheel
2. For every visitor who clicks on the widget, you earn 5 "tickets" (or you can purchase tickets yourself if you'd like to accelerate the process)
3. Every 5 days, the "wheel" is spun and one of the websites is selected based on tickets and featured on every other site until the next spin
4. Tickets that you earn are not removed if you don't win, so even if you're not featured straight away, you soon will be.

The link: Publicity Wheel

Here's why I believe it works - The key to success on the App Store is visibility (i.e. a top 100 list). Getting there is tough, as those that are already there experience increased downloads due to the fact that they're visible. That's why a quick boost in sales over a short period of time to "jump" into the top 100 can be the most effective method, and Publicity Wheel is designed exactly around that concept. Since every other site is promoting yours for 5 days, you're promotion is effectively crowd-sourced and reaches are wider audience than, say, advertising on a single website.

Without going into too much more detail, feel free to check out the FAQ page on Publicity Wheel itself.

Publicity Wheel has been going for a few years now and was predominantly designed around promoting traditional websites and blogs. As the developer of the site, I moved to iPhone App development a couple of years ago and continued to maintain Publicity Wheel, but always thought it would be a good concept for app promotion as well. That time is now, and the iPhone App category has just been added, meaning that numbers are quite low during this initial stage (I'm sharing this with you guys first).

My recommendation to everyone here is to sign up but do not purchase any tickets right now, it'll be a waste of your money. Since there will be limited numbers at first, competition is low so even with 5 or 10 tickets, you'll probably still win quickly (i'll update this thread should that change) I'll be honest and say that I make a loss on the website (most of my income is through my apps) and I don't expect that to change, so i'm doing this more as a thank-you to anyone who has helped me in the past and as an experiment to see whether anyone can share some success stories with Publicity Wheel.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. As I said, don't pay for anything yet, just sign up if you're interested and see how things go.

[ziocleto]

Originally Posted by arcturus

The link: Publicity Wheel

I really like this idea, I will always be in favour of free advertising (infact we are trying to build a free-advertising platform ourselves).

I think you should try to make it as fun as possible, spinning the wheel it's a concept that could be quite cool, so why not exploit that?
We want to so something similar app-side, ie incorporating a bit a interactivity in the ads, so the ads becomes something you play with rather than something you get annoyed by!

Here's why I believe it works - The key to success on the App Store is visibility (i.e. a top 100 list). Getting there is tough, as those that are already there experience increased downloads due to the fact that they're visible. That's why a quick boost in sales over a short period of time to "jump" into the top 100 can be the most effective method

I think this is the crucial point, from what I've seen with our platform you do get spikes in the top 100 somewhere, but because they are not "organic" they will soon fade off.
I believe the next step in free advertising it has to be to create an organic flow of clicks/install, without sustainability the chain breaks immediately.

Of course, my 2p IMHO