Fiscal Year 2009

$56.93 This is how much I've made in app sales for the past 6 months on FlashCardz & QuoteKeeper.

For the most part this is done with very minimal advertising. The majority of which come from the custom ads for chilidawgsoftware in Egg! (my free app).

As you may know, I also have free versions of both FlashCardz and QuoteKeeper that serve ads and generate revenue from ad clicks. So over the same 6 month period QuoteKeeper Free has generated $56.94 and FlashCardz Free brought in $15.00 for a combined total of $71.94.

One of the questions that I had at the beginning of all this was whether or not I would make more money with ad-supported free apps or from traditional paid app sales. The final answer is IT DEPENDS.

Depends? Depends on what? Well, I think it depends on the type of application. I made more $ from regular app sales on FlashCardz vs. the ad-supported version (more than double). I attribute this to the fact that people who use FlashCardz are most likely using it to study for something, so seeing ads at the top is distracting. So the demand for the paid version is higher than the ad-supported version of FlashCardz. The usage of the free version is actually very low.

However, the ad-supported (free) version of QuoteKeeper made more $ than the paid version even though the paid version was available more than a month earlier. In fact, the ad-supported version of QuoteKeeper more than doubled the revenue of the paid version. My view of this is that ads are more tolerable in QuoteKeeper because people are using it more casually.

What about Egg!? It is by far the most popular app. The ad revenue over the past 6 month period is $128.72; this accounts for 1/2 of my total revenues.

Although, QuoteKeeper and FlashCardz are valuable to people in their respective niches, Egg! seems to be more universally popular. Over the last half of 2009, a total of 3,258 people have downloaded Egg!.

At this point, it's about getting noticed. With over 140,000 apps on the app store and more being added every day, its easy to get lost. I consider myself fortunate that I can get people to see my other apps through the custom ads that show up on Egg!. I'm in the process of getting Egg! to update user's Facebook status as a way to generate more exposure. The idea comes from this blog post. Hopefully, by the end of next year (or sooner) we can add a lot of zeroes to the end of these numbers.

If I add up all app sales and all ad revenue, the grand total is $257.59 for the last half of 2009.

Financial Update - End of 2009

Only posting the unit sales because I think there's a error in the financial reports that are skewing the results. The error in question has to do with the financial report from the Japan AppStore. It lists one sale, but for $81.00. So either the Japanese Yen is doing a lot worse against the dollar than I thought or there was some kind of conversion error. Regardless, this is how the unit sales have been.

As for Egg!, this is what the last 90 days looks like:

The blue bars represent daily revenue and the red line is the click through rate. It's been a while since I checked this, and at that time, I was averaging about $1/day.  This has increased a little bit to $1.46/day. Still not enough to retire with.

Unwanted Calls

Recently, I've been getting some unwanted calls on my iPhone. I went looking for a way to block these calls, but unless you want to pay $4.99/mo there is no good way to do this. After googling around on the internet, I found a workable solution that others may find useful:

The Silent Ringtone

Instead of blocking calls, you can add them to your contacts and set the contact to a silent ringtone.

I created a contact called "Telemarketer" and added the number of the person that has been calling. The great thing is that you can add multiple numbers to the same contact. (I don't know what the limit is, if there is one).

To get a silent ringtone into your iPhone, just google "iphone silent ringtone" and download one. Then drag the ringtone to iTunes and it will be available the next time you synch w/iTunes.

I know this solution has probably been around for a while, but most people don't look for it until they need it.