The App Marketing Imperative: Don’t Count On App Stores To Advertise Your App
Sprint announced its "Place Your Ad" program this week, which will allow developers and publishers to bid on featured placement in its tab in the Android Market and its Sprint Zone app for its customers. This follows in the steps of other App Store providers like GetJar that use similar systems to sell their featured slots, but it also reinforces the need for developers to do their own marketing, rather than solely relying on app stores to do it for them.
This was a point that came up yesterday in the WIPJam at Apps World NYC, as Caroline mentioned in a tweet:
It's become clear over the past several months that the app store world is becoming more and more like the world of content decks in some ways from several years ago. Apps from big publishers are dominating the top-download charts, and once those apps get in the charts, they're hard to dislodge. When they do get knocked out, it's often by an app or game from another big publisher.
This used to happen because these publishers had the resources to invest in business development and relationships with operators, which gave them access to the decks. Just getting distribution was very difficult for smaller developers. The world of app stores changed this significantly, solving the distribution problem. But the big players still dominate. Why? Because just as they had more BD resources than everybody else in the on-deck world, they've now got more marketing resources to put behind their apps -- resources that can translate into dollars to buy the premium slots up for grabs in certain app stores.
So you need to understand that the playing field isn't level when it comes to app stores, because of external factors. You've got to be willing and ready to market and advertise your apps outside of them. You won't be able to match the big publishers on scale, but you don't necessarily need to, since your costs (hopefully) haven't scaled like theirs 
Grasping this is step 1. The next step is getting going on marketing your application. Stay tuned to the WIP blog over the next few weeks for tips and guest posts on ways to increase your downloads and sales by marketing and advertising your app.