3) Getting pulled from the App Store and subsequent free publicity, again, fairly risky and unreliable for getting covered.
That's some road to take not to require advertising to get the word out about your app. It's technically TRUE that you didn't buy ads, per se, but it's not like this success, especially in relation to point 1, was free, as your opening seems to imply. Put another way, your marketing expenditures aren't zero.
The article is specifically about buying advertising such as Daring Fireball RSS Feed Sponsorships and Google AdWords. They aren't saying "don't spend money" and definitely not "don't do marketing", in fact they're saying the opposite! They're just laying out that the ad market has changed and buying ads is no longer the deal it previously was.
I'd even argue that now there is greater brand recognition for the app that they SHOULD be advertising for it. There's still plenty of arbitrage in app advertising, trust me - otherwise, selling ads on iphone app review sites would not be a significant portion of our revenue (http://buysellads.com/buy/channel/id/22)
Interesting, taptaptap, interesting. Let's see here:
1) Multi-thousand dollar, multi-day giveaways and promotions that require you to follow and retweet.
http://taptaptap.com/blog/win-the-ultimate-10000-canon-5d- mark-ii-camera-rig/
http://taptaptap.com/blog/laser-engraved-ipads/
2) Lisa Bettany making seven appearances on This Week in Tech, and in surely all of which plugging Camera+, a channel not everybody has.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_This_WEEK_in_TECH_panel...
3) Getting pulled from the App Store and subsequent free publicity, again, fairly risky and unreliable for getting covered.
That's some road to take not to require advertising to get the word out about your app. It's technically TRUE that you didn't buy ads, per se, but it's not like this success, especially in relation to point 1, was free, as your opening seems to imply. Put another way, your marketing expenditures aren't zero.