Nan Zhong
Florian Michahelles
ABSTRACT
Distributions of popularity of many online markets have long tails. However, the profitability of the long tail remains in dispute among researchers. With an analysis of an extensive dataset of Google Play transactions, this work first examine the long tail of the mobile application market. Our results suggest that Google Play is more of a "Superstar" market strongly dominated by popular hit products than a "Long-tail" market where unpopular niche products aggregately contribute to a substantial portion of popularity. Blockbuster apps have more downloads, higher ratings and satisfaction ratio. Additionally, we investigate the impact of price on sales of paid apps and find that certain expensive professional apps constitute disproportional large sales. Our findings reveal the unique market structure of the mobile app market, under which the discovery of niche apps is still an intractable task.
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Index Terms
- Google play is not a long tail market: an empirical analysis of app adoption on the Google play app market
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