How much is your app worth? How much should you charge someone else to take it over and run with it? Chances are you would have no idea how to approach a question like that. How do you value your own work on the app, and what's the sunk cost for marketing it? You're unlikely to know with any certainty what its future revenue might be. And if you knew enough about its market niche and competition to put a price on the rights for the app, chances are you would be doing a better job with sales and marketing than you have been doing.
These are the kinds of questions that markets are good at answering. Last April, Apptopiaopened its doors in Cambridge, Mass., and since that time the service has brokered $300,000 worth of app acquisitions -- more than 120 deals, according to Inc.com.
The site currently lists 624 apps for sale, at prices ranging from $5 million (there is only one of those) down to $1,000 (nearly 100).
Apptopia acts as a trusted middleman and escrow agent for buying and selling apps. Buyers are more likely to believe download, usage, and revenue stats posted by a neutral broker like Apptopia than they would be to trust numbers from the developer. Apptopia pulls these stats daily from the developers' accounts in the app stores.
The company has built up expertise in figuring out how much apps are worth. Perhaps to offload some of the manual work involved, the company is about to launch a sister site, called MyAppValue, that will offer a free and self-service way for developers to get at least an initial idea how much their apps could fetch. (The site is currently collecting email addresses of interested developers.) When it is live, MyAppValue will generate a detailed report based on data in the developer's app store and analytics accounts -- which are accessed in read-only fashion, according to Inc.com.
I spoke with the company's marketing strategist, Yoni Zvik to get a better idea of what goes into the initial valuation of an app. MyAppValue has access to the entire history of an app's performance in its store -- downloads/sales, active users, revenue from in-app purchases, etc., and how these numbers have changed over time. The app's category has a large effect on its prospects and therefore selling price: Utilities and business apps have a different level of popularity and appeal than music apps or games. "We make ourselves completely available to developers," Zvik told me, in order to arrive at the best possible price range to offer an app for sale.
The Apptopia site supports sellers making a bid for an app. I asked Zvik whether data from auction sales was getting fed back into the pricing model. Not yet, apparently. The sales volume is probably too small, so far, to make such an exercise meaningful.
In other areas where online secondary markets have developed, a single winner seems to have emerged. For buying and selling domain names one thinks of Sedo, for Websites Flippa, for tickets StubHub. It seems likely that other marketplaces for mobile apps will be launched, but Apptopia certainly has the advantage of the first mover.
For more information visit now @ http://www.apptopia.com
YONI ZVIK
About the Guest Author:
As our Marketing Manager, Yoni is the point person for all advertisement , publicity of all Apptopia projects.
His goal is to make sure that all Apptopia products will be in notice of all customers and other peoples- and market out company on big scale.
Before joining the Apptopia family Yoni was the CEO and Producer of Mooniz, a fun and extremely successful iOS app. He built the idea from scratch, raised capital, and was able to use his unique mobile/marketing skills to help Mooniz get well over 1 million downloads.
As our Marketing Manager, Yoni is the point person for all advertisement , publicity of all Apptopia projects.
His goal is to make sure that all Apptopia products will be in notice of all customers and other peoples- and market out company on big scale.
Before joining the Apptopia family Yoni was the CEO and Producer of Mooniz, a fun and extremely successful iOS app. He built the idea from scratch, raised capital, and was able to use his unique mobile/marketing skills to help Mooniz get well over 1 million downloads.
