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Ask HN: Small Developer Attempting to Verifying Large Corp Stats

5 points by araes ↗ HN
General Question: Being a small app developer (like 1-5), how do you verify anything Google (or any FAANG frankly) tells you?

Bgd: Made a few apps. Tried them out on the store. Found that the stats looked "suspicious." People do not even accidentally find my apps. Back in 2021, humans apparently download 111.3 billion mobile apps. Not mine. At least based on the stats Google shows me. Google says I had ~10 downloads over the last 3 years, and ~100 looks ever (mostly spike on release and then no looks ever again).

Honestly, maybe the app store situation is just horrible, and with 3500 apps a day, there's no reason to ever waste months making anything unless you've got deep advertising pockets or an already known brand. I have already mostly gotten out because of the "Update Your Target API" issue.

However, had a similar issue with YouTube. Made videos in recent news topics with limited obvious competition (searched to see if there are many others). Nothing. Not even accidental hits.

So how do people who are not major publishers actually figure out whether Google is unfairly hiding your app? Or in the really dystopian version, how do you verify Google is not just totally falsifying ad clicks? Or if you're a small musician/content creator, how do you verify there's actually any "competition" and its not just Google/Spotify/iTunes picking winners?

Since if I really just wanted to cheat and milk people for money, I would charge ads, make a botnet to click the ads I want to have pay me, and then charge everybody a bunch of money. And now the WWW is apparently >50% bots...

6 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] thread
darkclouds
You cant verify the stats because like in politics, the question is part of the charade. An example of what I mean is carrying out a survey in a poor part of a country, or during the middle of the night outside a hospital or night club. So many entities have their special relationships with their pollsters, and the pollsters are excellent at identifying the best ways to manipulate a survey.

And with the ease at which to produce an app, especially with ChatGPT (if the hype is to be believed), are people just competing against the app stores own developers, to rinse them of their very last drop of income?

Its not like anyone can check each and ever app in the appstore is it?

>So how do people who are not major publishers actually figure out whether Google is unfairly hiding your app?

I used to spend money on adwords when it first came out and I couldnt verify any of the people who clicked the links, and nothing was converting to enquiries let a sale, so I pulled the plug.

Here in the UK we have/had something called the Thomson local directory, its a variation of the old yellow pages, pre internet times.

So I used to spend money advertising in both Thomson and Yellow pages, and before the next Thomson directory was due to be released, I started to get lots of enquiries pertaining to the advert I had in the Thomson. They were phone enquiries, couldnt be specific about the IT hardware they were having problems with and wouldnt even let me come out to them for free to take a look, and even offering stupidly cheap rates, like £10 an hour, they never would commit. I would also ask them where they got my number and they would all tell me the Thomson local directory.

Fast forward 6 weeks, get a call from Thomson telling me its time to renew my advert with them, I called them out, and never heard from them again.

They relied on the suckers like me, not being able to verify whether the caller was genuine or not.

There are lots of businesses, some big names, carrying out crimes. The Law protects these criminals, partly because its an offence to hack them!

And they have big budgets for big law firms who can employ the services of companies like Lexis Nexis for their case law research.

The law and legal profession, including judges are just white collar criminals.

Not one of them have got the public to sign a contract stating an individual would adhere to the laws of the land.

So if it doesnt feel right, dont do it and dont be talked into doing it.

Edit. Dont for one minute think I'm against businesses per se, but in the scheme of things, at least here in the UK my life experiences boil down to this. Employees of the state carry out the physical and mental crimes on kids and adults, businesses do people over with what they have at their disposal, like poor workmanship, fudging stats, or the small print!

araes
Thanks for the thought on AdWords, that's at least one route to possibly verify. Setting up something where you can at least check if a "secondary expected result", yet not an "obviously connected result" occurred.

Out of all the people Google is charging me for, did anybody actually buy anything? It's not obviously connected, but if you got 1000 people clicking, because they were "supposedly" interested, then you'd figure 1 or 2 might actually buy what they clicked on (or at least start the shopping cart process)?

darkclouds
I couldnt tie anything up with the server logs, no refers or matching IP address landing on the webpage, thats why I pulled the plug and stopped spending money on it.

However someone I know professionally, another coder, did spot I was using their bsuiness name in my adwords campaign so they did have a go at me telling me to stop using their business name in my adwords program.

Thats the problem in this business, its hard to know who to trust.

You are aware of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_farm#Advertising_provide...

araes
I am aware of the occasional purges at some of these companies, and that when the purges happen, often many of the accounts are "found" to be fake.

It is still difficult to determine what is "found" vs we need stats showing responsiveness, or even if its real, how much has been discovered. FB makes those statements, and then I have all of Africa trying to friend me for some reason...

The other issue, is it's still mostly internal numbers, internal statements, "auditors found something," if you find something really egregious then we'll do something, ect... Comparably, I still don't really know they're all not just running a web-ring, and bot farming each other for ad money. I see too many folks at Davos who have mentalities like "how dare the President keep me waiting" for me to believe they don't all collude. [1] Life has had this kind of message for centuries.

"The merchants and the traders have come; their profits are pre-ordained..."

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public."

https://news.yahoo.com/ex-uber-ceo-travis-kalanick-120014703...

mlhpdx
The history of app stores is pretty clear on this — the primary ways to get non-negligible exposure is to get promoted/featured (literally “picked as a winner”), or somehow trigger a viral word of mouth event. One can pay to advertise an app, but that isn’t likely to support long-term product development (expense vs revenue).

Nonetheless, there are success stories so if you believe in what you’re building keep at it and keep talking to folks about it.

araes
That's part of what I worry about, because I talk with musicians, and the impression they give me is that they are basically making music to try to get "picked as the winner."

IE: We look at what's doing well on the Spotify/iTunes/YouTube/ect... lists and then make our next single look our sound toward what will make it on a high ref list, or we pay someone to do something for us that will get us on a high ref list. Apparently, the first one from their perspective was "kind" of working, and the second worked much better.