Making $ (Mobclix & AdWhirl)

There are a few ways to make money with iPhone apps. The traditional way is to release an app and charge for it. Another way that is gaining in popularity is to release a free app and generate ad revenue. I'll admit that the first time I downloaded a free app with advertisements that I was a little taken aback. Like most people I don't like commercials on the radio, on TV, on YouTube, on Hulu, or anywhere else on the Internet. (OK, Hulu commercials aren't so bad, compared to broadcast TV). So, when I saw ads on these iPhone apps, I didn't like it. That is of course, until the shoe was on the other foot.

When I was browsing on the internet one day, I found an article about generating revenue through advertisements. I thought it would be a nice experiment to create free (ad-supported) versions of my apps and see if they would generate more revenue than the paid versions. It's still too early to tell, but I will keep you posted as time goes on.

To do this experiment, I found a couple solutions, AdWhirl and MobClix.

AdWhirl was started by iPhone developers and had come up with a way to serve ads from different ad networks. This allowed for better fill rates so that there would always be an new ad served. Higher fill rates = higher ad revenues. There was even an option to post custom ads for people to promote their own apps. This appealed to me because I wanted to cross-promote my other apps. I incorporated the AdWhirl libraries in a development build to test it out and it worked as expected. AdWhirl was recently bought out by AdMob, one of the largest Mobile Ad companies.

I also looked at MobClix. I liked MobClix because in addition to the different ad networks, they managed your account with the individual ad networks, so you didn't have to have 10 different accounts with 10 different ad networks. They consolidate all your ad revenue in one place for you. MobClix also has superior analytics, so that you can track how well your app is doing in the app store and how much ad revenue it's generating. They recently added the ability to serve custom ads. If you have one of my free apps, you'll see my ads for chilidawgsoftware. One of the key benefits for developers is that the ad agencies bid on your advertising space, which means that you will get more revenue than if you were locked into one ad network. I've been very happy with MobClix and I use it in all my free apps.

As a developer, it's not easy to get people to look at your apps, and even when you do 1/2 the people don't like it, 3/8 are indifferent, and if you're lucky 1/8 might consider keeping it on their iPhone. The bottom line is advertising allows developers to provide free versions of their apps, that they might not otherwise make available. So don't hate the ads, just be happy that someone is paying developers for the work they do.