TheiPhoneAppReview.com — review

In my quest to promote my newest app, unFed unDead!, I am turning to several paid review sites. There are so many out there and you really have no idea what to expect when you sign up for them. Well, over the next few weeks I will be trying many of them out and writing up my results. Specifically, I will be focusing on the reviews themselves– were they well written? Were the videos good quality? Did the reviewer take the time to understand my app and clearly communicate it in his review? How many views did the review get? What was my return on investment?

And this brings us to our first review site, TheiPhoneAppReview.com. I signed up for a promo package costing $209. It includes a video review, a written review and social networking package, where they tweet about your app to their thousands of followers.

The review took a few days and was posted up on a Monday. My first thought was… sweet, I get promo’ed on a monday. Monday / Tuesday are typically the worst day for app sales. I watched our app’s video review…
Now, the site has a very respectable policy… just because we review your app, doesn’t mean we’ll like it. I completely understand that and respect it. That being said, what I do think is important is that the reviewer takes the time to really get your app. It was clear that the reviewer did NOT do this.

From watching the video, I can see that the reviewer did not actually complete a single level. The reviewer did not take the time to completely understand our control scheme. He did not mention kill streaks, power-ups, social scoreboards, our blood mode, or the perk store… so many key aspects of our game were not even mentioned. To me, it is clear that this is because the reviewer did not take the time to understand our game in the depth that is required to give a complete review. Prior to the review, I provided a very nice press release that outlines all of these key features.
More complaints… Unfortunately, the reviewer was not a fan of the zombie genre and frequently provided his own opinions on our gory graphics- but isn’t a reviewer supposed to be non-biased? The reviewer only referenced our paid version, and did not even mention that we have a free version on the store. I would expect links to be provided for both. Our press release provides two main taglines for our app, the reviewer made up his own corny one…

Next, is exposure. The site claims that your video review should receive at least a 1000 views over a 5 day period. During the first day of the promo my video was seen only 160+ times. Looking at previous videos, I see that this is pretty typical— and looking at their other videos that have been up for 5+ days, they are averaging more in the 400’s than the 1000’s. To make matters even worse, on monday late afternoon, their site went down and now on tuesday afternoon- it is still down. This means that over the course of 24 hours, when my video should be at the top of their homepage, their site is down. This is not acceptable at all.

I can say that when you use a promo site, you should expect the biggest jump in the first day, and then gradually this will fade. This is why I am posting my results with this site after only one day. My results from this $200 promo campaign: 2 paid downloads and 20 free ones. Since we are averaging 20 free downloads, I won’t attribute these downloads to them. So roughly $1.50 for a $209 investment.

Overall, I am requesting a refund through paypal because this site was so inadequate. I do not suggest using them for your video reviews.

UPDATE:
I emailed the site, sending them my feedback and they were actually quick to reply with the desire to do better. Another review was done and reposted on their site by a senior reviewer. This review was much better and game a more excited opinion of the game rather than concentrating on the reviewers opinion on the zombie genre. The site did end up giving me a small spike in downloads… maybe $15 or so worth. Were this review site $40 or so, I might suggest it. At over $200, I still cannot recommend it.