Where should you focus: Long Tail or Superstar?: an analysis of app adoption on the Android Market

Abstract

This talk presents the examination of the long tail of sales distribution in mobile app market. With the analysis of a large data set of transactions in Android Market, our research suggests that, rather than being a "Long Tail" market where unpopular niche products aggregately contribute to substantial portion of sales, the Android Market is more a "Superstar" market strongly dominated by popular hit products. We also show that though most downloads of paid apps are from cheap apps, but some expensive apps accounts for unproportional large revenue.