Thanks for sharing this analysis.

I really doubt that all of this developers who are publishing tens of hundreds of skills are actually delivering high quality content. Maybe it is a strategy where they release 100 skills with hope that one of it will succeed for some (unknown or random) reason.

I am a developer interested in creating Alexa Skills and I already created my first game. Mainly to learn the technology yet I tried to create high quality skill. What I find somewhat disappointing is that I do not see much traffic for my skill.

As you have mentioned most of the skills does not have even one review and I think that it’s not always caused by bad content. I would say it is also because of the way how Amazon is choosing skills to promote on the market or in the search results. Only the skills with top number of reviews are promoted causing new skills to instantly go into oblivion. One can say that skills creators are at the mercy of an Amazon’s algorithm. Similar as YouTube creators but I think YouTube algorithm is doing slightly better in that area.

Amazon is trying to encourage developers by enabling them to earn money with in-skill purchasing (ISP) or by giving away Alexa devices for publishing your skills https://developer.amazon.com/en-GB/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/alexa-developer-skill-promotion but this won’t work in the long term when 99.9% developers will be discourage by seeing close to 0 traffic after publishing their first skill.

Of course it is also responsibility of the creator to promote their skill. However (at least looking from my perspective) after I have spent considerable amount of time and effort to learn a new technology, writing code, setting up a server (and paying for it) I am not convinced if I want to pay for a marketing campaign to promote a free skill.

I would really like to see Amazon looking into that ‘new creator’ problem.

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BTW, if you got to this point and you are interested in checking my game you can find it here:

US: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07YD4ZKNR

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07YD4ZKNR

Cheers