Sadly, good reviews don't do much on the app store for sales, unless you have a competitor with awful ratings. Colloquy has 4 stars (skewed by the couple of people who didn't understand what the application was (sigh...) and the couple of people wanting feature requests in inappropriate places) but that hasn't done anything much. Neither has being in the top 10 for paid social networking applications for 2-3 weeks (now dropped down to top 20) nor having a recent release date impacted sales as much as I imagined..although this may be genre-specific, i.e. games would be more popular than social networking.

The only way to really get good sales of your app if you're not on the front page of the app store in any way is to promote it elsewhere, and typically the best places to go to are the big Mac/iPhone/tech websites with promo codes. TUAW reviewed Colloquy (well...more like Colloquy's built-in browser, it was a very odd review: http://www.tuaw.com/2009/01/22/first-look-mobile-colloquy/) and sales almost doubled the couple of days right after the review.

If the $50 review site in question is the site I think it is, the only reason why we haven't paid is because we've gotten reviews out of higher-traffic sites for free and can't justify paying for a review from a site that we can't even trust any longer for good reviews. It's one thing to charge everyone a flat fee, but another to tell developers they're just going to sit on the review until later unless they cough up a fee. Sure, it's their choice to do so and if they can profit that way, good for them..and there are developers who will pay and perhaps find it worthwhile, but we just don't see that happening for our app.