Lessons From Flappy Bird’s Success

Much has been said in recent weeks about the conundrum that is Flappy Bird and how it could have possibly become the #1 Free app on the App Store.

First off I think it’s great to see a small independent developer is still able to have some success on the App Store.  It has become increasingly difficult to compete with the big game companies that are pumping a lot of money and development time into creating games.  For a while it seemed to be unlikely that independent game designers had a chance to be found at all; that the top charts were being gamed or bought.

One interesting comparison I haven’t seen any one talk about yet is the difference between a poorly monetized #1 Free App (Flappy bird) and a Top Grossing app. Flappy Bird was reportedly earning $50,000/day in advertising revenue.  Clash of Clans is reportedly generating $5,000,000/day. Interesting that even with the massive surprise success of Flappy Bird it’s still generating merely 1% of the revenue of Clash of Clans. What insight could be gleaned from that? possibly the poor performance of banner ads vs. IAPs, the value of engagement, or importance of session length?

To me, the reason for Flappy Birds success hinges on two factors:

1. Comically entertaining and difficult – In my first attempt I was dead in literally 0.1 seconds.  I believe the initial response to this for most people is “WTF!? I have to show my friends this so we can laugh at it”. It’s the same urge people have to share funny things they find.. how could you NOT post this to Facebook if you found it at Walmart:
   
2. Rating and Reviews – The game has very few things you can do. Play, share and rate are the only buttons you can press.  I believe that once the word of mouth virility spread (due to point #1) the game’s design lead to unusually high number of similar WTF app reviews.  Due to Apple’s weighing of reviews and ratings into the search, Flappy Bird started to snowball up the charts. Eventually part of the game was to write a funnier review and for a while it was seeing 100’s of reviews posted per hour.

If there are lessons to learn from Flappy Bird they would be the importance of having something worthy of sharing, and a call to action asking for users to rate your app. Flappy Bird proves that with a bit of luck, these two factors can create a tipping point which is enough to reach #1 in the App Store.