As mentioned before (about a thousand times) and probably agreed by the bulk of you, PR is one of the most important channels for a developer in order to push sales. You’ll get an (hopefully) honest review on your product, relevant to your target group and in most cases you will get to the crowd you want to reach. We think it will stay that way in a way, at least for sites that are only about iPhone (or mobile) apps and reviews and niche or, let’s say, topic specific sites. Of course, with the mass of apps rushing into the App Store this environment is also becoming more competitive and increasingly, your network or networking skills will be advantageous when trying to get reviewed.

But what about the more “mainstream” tech blogs with a broader and larger but still very relevant target group for you? This article on Techcrunch got us thinking. You find one of these types of app reviews in one of the larger techblogs every other day (if not every day). This particular article reviews an iPhone karaoke app that is the result of a collaboration between Lady GaGa and iOKi. This is without doubt a smart idea (the T-Pain app should be prove enough), but the amount of smart, funny, extraordinary and shocking apps, sometimes flavored with a celebrity name, is just growing very quickly. At some point, this will either lead to the tech-blogs not taking an interest in them at all anymore or to simply review only the few truly extraordinary ones (whatever this means).

Either way, unless you’ve contracted a reknown celebrity to co-brand your new 3D-Shooter, chances are your chances to get some public attention via any kind of blog or website are getting slimmer and slimmer. The PR channel seems to have already become just like any other marketing channel: one that requires experience, network and hard work to really make use of for yourself.  So, in our opinion – assuming that your product is well thought through and interesting to at least a few people – we believe it’s time to forget about mainstream PR (even mainstream tech PR) and start focusing on niche sites that have a similar target group to your app.

Sure, there is a lot more to it and we cannot help you with the PR part, but we can help you with finding out on what kind of target groups to focus your efforts on, by looking at which channels work better for you than others. And that’s knowledge that serves you in the long run.