As others have said they like having these crap apps for the number count. Last summer Microsoft had a developer promotion where they would give you 100 dollars per successfully submitted app. You could submit 10 for the regular store, and 10 for the phone store, so you could get 2000 total.
The reason I even knew this was because a Microsoft rep came to my school to promote it. He did a workshop that basically taught us how to submit apps to the windows store. Part of the process was making a boilerplate app that we used a third party application to make. The entire class, about 20 students, made similar "whack a mole" game apps, all of which successfully submitted. We all got 100 dollars and all of our apps are still in the store.
they like having these crap apps for the number count.
Which is a very strong argument for not using idiotic performance metrics (the app count is almost certainly built into multiple levels of policy goals at MSFT).
Or, as I like to say: be careful of what you incent for. You will get it.
Market share is another metric like this in my opinion. The local newspaper owns its market completely. I bet advertisers get given all sorts of impressive stats. I bet they count me and both my neighbours as readers, despite all three copies going from the letterbox, up the drive and into the recycling bin (or the fire in winter).
Right. That drives the distribution of "free" newpapers and publications of various stripes.
The real meat is in producing results -- a reason I've found CPM or clickthroughs or readership, or other forms of measurement to be somewhere between irrelevant and misleading. It's why promo codes (including branded URLs such as http://product.example.com/npr , say) are used (they track responses). Similarly coupons or other special deals.
Don Marti's long argued that highly-targeted advertising actually has strongly negative. That it's the very wastefulness of mass advertising that's a powerful part of the signal:
Quoting Evan Davis et al: “It is not so much the claims made by advertisers that are helpful, but the fact that they are willing to spend extravagant amounts of money on a product that is informative.”
Of course, this can backfire: if I'm aware that a specific advertiser (or industry) has a long history of deceptive advertising or trade practices, I may read their ads as a negative signal (as, in fact, I do for many mass-market consumer goods: if you've got to spend that much money convincing me this is something worth buying, it's quite possibly not).
Yeah, my buddy was the MS campus rep for the CSSE dept. at my university. Some if the guys were building lots of really quick do nothing apps to get cash. Microsoft was trying desperately to just fill its store with as many apps as possible as quickly as it could. I put one HTML5 peg game that I had built with Kinetic.JS together as a WinJS app and got a quick $100. I didn't want to put out ten crappy apps with my name attached to them though.
The reason I even knew this was because a Microsoft rep came to my school to promote it. He did a workshop that basically taught us how to submit apps to the windows store. Part of the process was making a boilerplate app that we used a third party application to make. The entire class, about 20 students, made similar "whack a mole" game apps, all of which successfully submitted. We all got 100 dollars and all of our apps are still in the store.
http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/rat-smash/ea0e98...
Go ahead and check it out; I promise it's as horrible as it looks.