decreasing compatibility to increase sales?

"RokuPatrick" wrote:

That's not what happens.

Yep, it is exactly what happens.

Thanks for taking the time to answer. I had assumed it was intentional, since it has been happening since before the UI upgrade as well, but if it's not intentional, then it's definitely a defect in the store code.


I suppose I'm too much of a stats nerd since it's so obvious to me and apparently invisible to everyone else. hehe. Luckily I find this kind of stuff pretty interesting, so I'll try to demonstrate.



We'll use 2 roku models for the comparison, the r1HD and the Roku2. This should keep things fairly simple. We'll also mostly ignore those 4 or so "special" channels that have their own compatiblity rules for simplicity's sake.


Baseline, the web channel store is a good one, (we'll see why later) let's take the games section as our sample.


If we make a spreadsheet of this info, we get some base info.

open the linked spreadsheet and take a look.


Sheet 1


the "Web Rank" column is the base ranking. This is what we'd expect.

the "R1.x Rank" column is the order on the Roku1(HD). This is also what we'd expect. It's basically the same exact list as the web store, in the same order, with R1 incompatible channels removed.


So far, so good.


On "Sheet2" We've added a "R2 Rank" column listing the channel ranking on the roku2 store.

Look closely. It should be pretty obvious from anayzing this sheet what has happened. Each of the channels that is R1 compatible has been skipped, and only the R2 channels are then ranked in order. After that, the remaining channels are added incrementally at the bottom. This is completely incorrect, and should match the "web order" column.



On the next sheet "Compatibility Order", we have resorted the data by the ranking on the R2 store. It should be pretty obvious here when we look at the web rank and the compatibility what we are looking at.



Summary: the ranking is EXACTLY sorted by compatibility, then original ranking as compared to the Web Store. There is zero overlap. No doubt at all this is what is happening in the R2 and R3 stores. So, if you drop compatibility for the R1+, your channel will get a higher ranking and more visibility on the roku. (But, if this is a defect that might be fixed, the question is moot)