$200,000: What it costs to push an app into the U.S. top 25

We know that the top 10 mobile games take 25 percent of global app revenue -- but here's another indicator of how huge the app biz has become. According to mobile marketing research firm Fiksu, it costs $200,000 in advertising to place an app in the top 25 on the iOS App Store in the U.S. 

Those numbers come from a report on VentureBeat. The (relative) good news? High ranks in other countries are a lot cheaper. It's just $65,000 to hit the top 25 in Germany, and a mere $10,000 in Thailand. Of course, those prices are still well out of the range of most independent developers. 

The two conspicuous absences from the list are Japan and China; mobile is now the biggest segment of Japan's game industry, while China has 366 million mobile players. There's no doubt that getting to the top of their app markets is not cheap.