With the arrival of iAd came a way for developers to produce free apps and still pay the necessary development expenses. Some have seen huge success, but with questionable fill rates to see profit worth your time you will need an app with a steady 1,000+ a day download rate which is pretty hard to achieve in the App Store these days.
I will use iStrobe as an example. The first day of release saw about 35 downloads at $0.99 with a quick drop to about 3 downloads a day. Once I made it free I got a rush of about 2,000 downloads with fill rates on ads barely touching double digit percents.
It has since tapered off to a steady 50-100 downloads a day with fill rates climbing to a high of about 75%. I have averaged about $5 a day in ad revenue and most recently have been seeing $6-$11 a day. Profit before making the app free was about $2/day from sales. I have more than doubled my revenue and on some days I am doing much better. Not much, but $150 a month pays for my Red Bull addiction and coupled with ads from this site and donations all combines to keep me just motivated enough to update the site with fresh content. Not bad considering a flashlight app isn’t used nearly as much as something like a social networking app.
So before you think you will strike it rich on iAds, make sure to do your research and get a realistic estimate of how many people you expect to download and consistently use your app.
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If you found this useful, shoot me a small donation or at the very least leave a comment, every bit of encouragement helps keep me motivated to update with more content on a regular basis!
what do you think about finding an ad network with better fill rate or ability to use mediation layers? especially for bigger players, for which most ad networks can’t hit consistently high fill rate, mediation layers seems to be the way to go. is there a better ad network (for monetization) out there? am thinking about going the paid to free route as well…
I heard about other ad networks that hook into iAd and only display their ads when iAd can’t fill the spot. I may look into it, but I can’t remember the name. Do you know of any?
Any reason for the 7% CTR for SpaceBubble?
Well in SpaceBubble the user has to stare at the screen so they notice the ads more than iStrobe which is basically just a fancy flashlight app.
Hi, thanks for your interesting iAd details.
I’ve experienced less luck with iAd so far, but then my app is based on an existing open source game:
http://iphone-game-blog.blogspot.com/2010/08/iphone-app-developer-reveals-iad.html
Giles, thanks for the comment. But I’ll be honest. I’m a bit disturbed to see how you abused the #1 open source rule and rebranded TweeJump with only minor changes and didn’t abide by the license.. Does that seem ethical? Especially to keep the old platform images unchanged with no credit to the author.
TweeJump license states you CAN resell the software without limitations but you must include the folliwing license agreement.
I also wrote an iPhone app, and decided to release for free using iAds as the income stream. This application is a Middle Eastern drumming “metronome” instructional type of application, called DumTek.
All I want to do is break even on the $100/year “hobby” price. Even then, I’m not totally upset if I don’t.
I found a flaw almost immediately: most of my customers are in Turkey! And the 2nd largest customer base is in Saudi Arabia. Turkey alone hits nearly 1,000 requests/day, but there’s one problem. iAds are not (yet) supported there.
So, consider carefully your market as well when selecting if you want to fund your development with ads or with hard cash.
[...] long ago I posted an article outlining what one developer (myself) was making of iAds. I wanted to point out how profits are [...]
How are your iAd stats now?