How to discover the next big game before the top charts do

There are now millions of apps on the market, but only a tiny fraction are being viewed and used. It’s not because the rest are poor quality; rather, they’re being cornered out of sight by the proverbial ‘App Store conundrum’ (TechCrunch, June 7) which renders any content not on the ‘Top’ charts effectively non-existent.

However, since this April, a mobile content discovery platform might just be leading the charge to solve that problem for good with a totally out-of-the-box take on what content discovery should look like.

The platform is built by YTTRO Mobile, a Silicon Valley tech startup founded by Dr. Xiaoxu Ma, an MIT PhD and ex-Google employee with artificial intelligence and big data expertise. YTTRO’s content discovery platform builds on machine learning algorithms that expose long-tail quality content on the App Store and Google Play. Following human-computer interaction principles, this content is then embedded and mapped out in a touch-driven interface, organized in neighborhoods by genre. This innovation has made it possible for end users to instantly access an unprecedented scope and variety of quality content without needing to navigate deeply into the endless lists of app stores.

In an exploding app market where the top 20% of huge, sponsored titles dominate a disproportionate 80% of all app downloads, YTTRO’s patent-pending approach to long-tail content discovery significantly levels the playing field for developers.

The extent to which this has already disrupted the field of content discovery is captured above. In this ‘Gini’ plot of the app world, the diagonal green line of equality represents the ideal case of all app store content gaining equal exposure, the red curve represents the present ‘winner-takes-all’ (or literally, ‘richer-takes-all’) dynamic on app stores, and the blue curve represents YTTRO’s content distribution. At a glance, one can immediately identify that YTTRO’s blue curve drives much closer to the ideal, with a significantly lower Gini coefficient than that of the app store. This translates consistently into the real world with a striking implication: apps on YTTRO’s platform can experience more equal exposure than the same apps would on the current app stores.

For content consumers, this data represents unprecedented access to quality content that was previously buried out of sight beneath the top charts, inaccessible to end users. And for content providers, these curves represent something equally important: the fact that YTTRO’s approach to content discovery is making tangible progress on its mission to give all developers an equal shot at app exposure.

                  Heat map of exposure of 8100 Android apps (in 90×90 grid)

Google Play download distribution

YTTRO content distributio