Hey pedalpete, thanks for that great thought-out and detailed reply, thats really awesome.

I've been thinking about the idea for a while, because I've noticed a lot of dissatisfaction with the App Store's reviews, and I've identified a lot of advantages a website would have over the App Store.

One reason is that Apple's self-imposed design requirements limit the information that is available to people wanting to learn more about apps. The App Store is only available through iTunes, so it keeps the same look and feel as the music store and doesn't have all the functionality of a website. Reviews are limited, and currently, they can be left by anyone, vastly degrading their usefulness (not to mention it doesn't incorporate better review mechanisms, like upvoting or downvoting of reviews to eliminate annoying/useless ones). You can't compare two apps directly, and there is no objective editorial content on which apps might be better than others.

Finally, there are problems of categorization in the App Store. The categories are very static and broad. If a new series of apps come out, Apple will likely to be slow to respond and is very unlikely to further divide categories, even though that would be more useful. What I mean by that is best illustrated by an example from the iTunes Music Store. There is an electronic genre of music, but really "electronic" is too broad for someone looking for a specific type of electronic music. A website that further categorizes this large genre would be more useful than the iTunes Music Store to someone looking for a specific type. Just like an apps website could make more useful categories.

I haven't yet begun much research into competitors. I have noticed that many people complaining about the lack of good reviews in forums are not answered with "you should check out X website." So there isn't one website thats far out ahead and constantly on people's tongues. One the one hand, those two you mentioned are quite far ahead, but the App Store has also only been open a month. However, those two sites likely started some time ago by reviewing jailbreak apps.

I will disagree with you on the viability of the platform, but thats something that can't really be decided now, so its one thing I'll just have to believe in. But I am curious on what a "niche" site is. I'm having trouble determining the size of my potential market, but I'd like to think its larger than niche.

My reasoning is that people don't have to buy an app for their iPhone to want to know which one is better than another. So many applications are available for free that I'm confident people will want apps, and will want to get reviews for apps. I am having trouble trying to quantify the amount of potential users. I consider everyone with an iPhone or iPod Touch a potential user. There will be an estimate 10 million iPhones by 2009, so 10 million people will theoretically want to get more info on apps. At any time they can go download a free app, and presumably, might want to choose between two free apps.

A successful iPhone website can also be expanded to a "Android Apps" website, so the potential audience can be expanded later.

So I'm confident I could match those sites that you mentioned. What I can't figure out is what I would need to do to to make a living off of it. I'm going on the assumption there will be two principals. So, for example's sake, what would be required for each person to make $50,000 before expenses? I was looking to create a chart, starting at low CPM/high pageviews, up to a higher CPM with lower pageviews, just to see what it looks like. Using your example, I would need to have 5 times the visitors to earn over $100K. So around 285,000 visitors.

Basically, its preliminary work to see if it passes the sniff test. Even with generous estimates on how many visitors I think I can get and high CPM's, will it be enough?