Get Yourself Into GetJar’s Gettie Awards
Bruce Jones from GetJar came over to Berlin as a sponsor for our Jam Session at IT-Profits earlier this month, and he shared the exciting news that GetJar had just the day before announced that it had delivered its 1 billionth download. Since then, the company's gone from strength to strength: its CEO, Ilja Laurs, appeared on CNBC talking about the company's success, and it also announced that it closed on its second round of venture funding. So congrats all around to the team at GetJar!
I was able to catch up with Bruce this week for a chat about all the news, as well as to learn more about The Gettie Awards, in which GetJar is recognizing the top apps on a number of different platforms, and giving away tons of great prizes to developers. Entries close June 30, so be sure to visit the Getties site and submit your app!
Carlo Longino, WIP: Hi Bruce! Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do at GetJar.
Bruce Jones, GetJar: I started the first week of May as the Senior Developer Evangelist at GetJar, and I'm really excited to be here. My role is to work with developers to let them know about all of the cool things they can do with GetJar, and all of the ways we can help them extend their business. I came to GetJar after being the App Development Manager at EventRadar, the Chief Gecko at Savage Geckos, and working as a futurist at Ford Motor Company. I also was a bedouin C programmer in the deserts of Saudi Arabia!
CL: Let's talk a little bit about the Getties. What's in it for developers and why should they rush over and enter right now?
BJ: We've been swamped with the amount of traffic and nominations we've received, and we've been really impressed with the viral nature of fans nominating apps that they love. Things have gone so well and have been so popular that we've extended the deadline to June 30, so we're still taking nominations and submissions.
What makes the Getties cool and different is that they're the first cross-platform awards. We'll have awards for the various platforms: best Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Java, Symbian and Windows Mobile apps, and then on top of that, we'll have the Gettie Award for the best in show. The winners for each platform will get $15,000 in download credit with us, and the overall Gettie Award winner will get $25,000 in credit. What that means is they'll be able to spend that credit towards getting users to download their app, so it's a very powerful war chest towards market acquisition for their app. In addition, DeviceAnywhere is also giving out hours of testing to the prize pool, with the winners getting 80-100 hours of testing for cross-platform testing.
Also, you don't have to currently have your app in GetJar to submit your app -- but you can, of course, get it in our system when you submit for the Getties!
CL: The pay-per-download system is an interesting model to use, and one that's pretty familiar to most people thanks to Google AdWords. But how do you help developers get the most out of it, since they're not necessarily just looking for downloads, but for active users?
BJ: We have a new tracking API that will tell you not just that users downloaded your app, but that they launched it and used it. You can monitor how many times it was installed and launched, and tune your PPD campaign to get right to whether the app is being used.
People are really trying to figure out what its cost to get a user, to get them to install the app and use it. That's more important for developers than cost per click or cost per download, because it's very hard to monetize a user that doesn't actually launch your app. A lot of the developer community are trying to move to a pay-per-first-launch or pay-per-usage model, so your ad dollars are getting you right to an installed base of monetizable customers. So by putting together GetJar's pay-per-download system and our new API for tracking, you can really get to this bit about tuning your campaign to be paying based on how many people are launching your app. We're still doing PPD, but moving toward a "pay-per-real-customer" model.
CL: One area in which this model could be very helpful to developers is when it comes to cross-platform applications. A pay-per-click advertising model could see developers paying for clicks on their ad or links by users with devices their apps don't support, or they click on an ad that takes them to a download service that doesn't work with their handset. How does GetJar address this?
BJ: We are the largest independent app store and the second to ever hit 1 billion downloads, but what makes GetJar really exciting as a distribution platform is that we're global and cover over 2000 types of phones in more than 200 countries. Developers can have this one spot for their binary, and we'll determine what kind of phone a person has and give them whatever solution is appropriate for that device.
So for a developer that would like to tackle Android, BlackBerry, Symbian and a whole bunch of other devices, or maybe even just a mobile web site and offer a shortcut to that, we are the distribution platform of choice for a cross-platform developer who wants to get their solution into the hands of as many people as possible.
What's really cool is we're seeing developers use our application download page (ADP) as one advertisible, tweetable, brandable URL that they can drive all of their viral mobile clients to. It's a web permalink with the smarts behind it to do platform detection, allowing developers to promote a single URL that can deliver their app to multiple platforms automatically. We've seen incredible case studies in a week of a developer going from 0 to 500,000 downloads across platforms, just using the one ADP. Developers can focus on the code that they want to write, and not have to focus on keeping track of every new device as it's launched. We'll allow you to focus on your core competency, developing apps.