We classically hear about some industries (such as movies, pharmaceautical drugs or games) as having a blockbuster business model. The top products make a ton of money, making up for all the loses of the average product.
I've always thought that the iOS game market might rely even more on blockbusters than Hollywood itself. Sensortower recently released their app leaderboards, which estimate how much each App is worth. I obviously can't say whether or not their estimates are correct (and they don't claim to be representing revenue exactly), but I just took it as the truth and compared it with the top grossing movies of 2012.
I represented the revenue of each game or movie as a percentage of the top grossing example in its category. The results are interesting - movies exhibited a much flatter curve than the iPhone games.
Why is this? It could be because more people discover iPhone games by looking at the top charts, whereas movie recommendations work in a variety of ways. It could be that it is difficult to market to a niche iPhone game segment compared to a niche movie segment - leading to mass market games being most popular. And it could be because the top iPhone games really are that much better than the 100th iPhone game.
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Friday, December 21, 2012
AB Testing Laws?
Recently I was thinking about test-driven web development (AB testing and the like) and how you could apply that to governments. One way it could work is you would pass a law, but then build in some metric that would make the law repeal itself if it didn't work out well. Let's consider a law that would lower the drinking age to 18. Well, some would argue that this would increase deaths from alcohol from people aged 18-21. That sounds reasonable. Others would say the current drinking age of 21 encourages high school students to drink surreptitiously, which leads to binge drinking and deaths. I don't know how I feel about it, so I'm not sure how I would vote on a law that lowers the drinking age to 18.
What if instead the law was "Lower the drinking age to 18 for 2 years. If the drinking-related fatalities increase in these two years compared to when the law wasn't in effect, increase the drinking age back to 21."
While I was on the fence for the prior law, I can get behind this conditional law. You would need some objective third party to measure the data, and you would have to make sure you are measuring the right things. That's pretty hard, but it seems a lot better than just passing the law and not measuring it. While many laws have effects too complex to measure this way (like lowering tax rates) there seem to be a decent number of laws that could work (for example, do carpool lanes really help traffic? how about banning sugary drinks?)
It seems like a good principle for laws to be built with explicit goals in mind. I'm not a legal expert, so I don't know if this has been done before, and a quick Google search didn't reveal too much. What do you guys think?
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