A couple of days ago I put Ancient Frog on sale ($1.99! Down from $4.99! This crazy offer cannot last!) The last time it went on sale was back in May (with rather disappointing results), and I thought it was worth trying again. The App Store is constantly evolving, after all.

I was impatient to see what effect the price drop was having, so I started stat mining. Previously, I've tended only to look at the bigger markets - originally the overwhelming majority of my sales came from the US and UK, later adding Germany, Canada and Australia. Over time, though, the distribution has started to flatten out more. The US is still the biggest of course, but it now accounts for under 50% of my sales, and Japan is up to nearly 10%. With that in mind, I decided to just grab everything - every ranking from every region - and see how I was doing.

One figure jumped out at me immediately: in one of the rows, Ancient Frog was ranked at #1. The number 1 paid app! Woohoo! Still got it, 10 months after release! Number 1... in the Family Games category... in Paraguay. But who cares about the details? That's got to be worth a screenshot:

In fact, digging further, I saw that in the Paraguay App Store I was not just the #1 paid app in Family Games, but the #2 Puzzle Game, #2 Game overall, and the #4 paid app in the entire region. I owned Paraguay! This is how fortunes are made, right?

Well, it turns out that to reach these dizzyingly high rankings, you only need to sell one copy. I had a trawl through my stats, and precisely one Paraguayan has bought Ancient Frog. (Thanks, whoever you are! If I'm ever in Paraguay I'll buy you a drink.)

Interesting, but probably not that surprising. But then I had a thought - just how much ranking does one purchase get you in all of the other regions? This price cut has led to a very broad but very shallow spread of new sales, and in a number of regions I've just made my first sale. In the following table, I've listed all of the regions where I've sold only one copy in at least the last two weeks. The purchase generally took place in the last couple of days, but I've listed some where I'm still ranked despite an interval of several weeks. The positions noted are the highest that I saw - these can drop off quite quickly (because we're necessarily dealing with regions with very granular figures).

So it's all a bit haphazard and imprecise, but I think it's interesting for all that.

App Store ranking achievable with a single sale:

Country        Family Puzzle Games Apps
_______________________________________
Paraguay       1      2      2     4
Czech Republic 18     39
Slovakia (1)   20     36     50    94
Finland        28     71
Hong Kong      31     60
Poland         41     83
Portugal (2)   42     91
UAE            54     92
Luxembourg (3) 59
China          67
Austria        72 
Kuwait         75
Singapore      84
Turkey         90
Thailand       92
Switzerland    98

1 I saw it at #4 in Family in Slovakia, but when I took this set of figures a day later, it had dropped to #20
2 Copy sold on Nov 21
3 Copy sold on Nov 28

Now you might say that this isn't terribly useful or interesting information - obviously regions with low sales won't take much to break into their rankings. You might say that, but have you got the number 1 paid app in Paraguay (Games/Family subcategory)?

No you haven't.

I have.