Data from Baidu show that 0.2% of the players enjoy 70% of the whole downloads as of three months ago, and now the few stronger ones hit the number as high as 78%, Qiu Deming, director of Baidu’s app distribution department, said so in an interview with Sina Tech.
It has been a while since the Matthew Effect was seen in the mobile app market. It seems really hard for any rookie to stand out in the sea of those “common apps” if it doesn’t bother to ShuaBang (using tricks to propel an app onto the top of the App Store ranking). What’s more, the promoting cost for a single app is rising high which really gets many app developers into hot water.
Baidu claims they’d offer a better way for app searching marketing. How does it work? Baidu app search would return results to users’ needs through cloud-supported recommendations or mining app data in users’ devices. The latter, Qiu said, is critical to app search and their mobile assistant app. The Baidu mobile app didn’t update itself to Baidu Assistant until this March, which is a little bit late among peers on assistant service. With the features of the assistant app, Baidu can collect more data about app using behaviors.
PC Web pages were about 670,000 in 2004, and now it’s already over 650 million. The current number of apps in the field is almost the same as that of the web pages nine years ago, which makes Baidu confident that there are still a lot to expect from this market. In the developing days of web pages, there emerges the anchor text link analysis which changes the rules. Similarly in the mobile internet world, something revolutionary remains to be explored, like a new distribution model.
2013 is supposed to be a year of another shuffle of mobile devices for the search giant. It is estimated that by the end of this year, 80% of the Chinese users would have owned smart phones. Furthermore, data show that since last October, the rising trend of Android devices has slowed down to 10%, while the searching growth rate of the apps has rose by 30%. The app downloads brought by Baidu app search has went up by 465%, according to Baidu. However, the app search requests are still limited to the specific names or app type, while the general mobile searches have more to do with users’ everyday life.