iAds

So one of the big news items last week in the Apple world was the introduction of iPhoneOS 4. A big part of Steve Job's presentation had to do with mobile advertising, and in particular Apple's solution iAd. When I was releasing my apps, I did some research into different advertising platforms because I wanted to release a free app that would generate ad revenue for me. I eventually decided to go with Moblix and have been very pleased with the developer support and the analytics that they provide me.

Apple's iAd model gives 60% of the revenue to developers and they keep 40%. Will I make more money using iAd or sticking with Moblix? I don't know yet. I guess it depends on what Apple charges advertisers. If I do make more, how much more? Steve didn't mention any support for analytics that tell me how many people downloaded my app, how many people clicked the ads, or how much ad revenue I made on a particular day. Another drawback is that there didn't seem to be any built in support for custom advertising. At the present, I have my own ads promoting some of my other apps; they show up 2-5% of the time.

For the time being, I'm not ready to jump on the iAd bandwagon. That may change if moving to iAds means 2 or 3 times more Ad revenue, but it will still be hard to give up the analytics and custom ads.

But Steve Jobs is right about one thing, a lot of mobile ads are garbage. Hopefully, ad agencies will create more compelling, higher quality ads.

Posted via email from Chili Dawg Software

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.

Financial Reports - August

UPDATE: I posted the data a little early. I have updated the chart to include sales from Great Britain, Australia, Europe, and the rest of the world. Previously, I only had the data from Canada and the U.S.

August numbers are in, and there is an upward trend in units sold for FlashCardz and QuoteKeeper.

If you notice the number of units sold more than doubled compared to July. But it is important to note that July numbers only reflect the last week in July when these apps were released. I was pleasantly surprised to see the numbers for QuoteKeeper. My original thought was that FlashCardz would be much more popular, so it's nice to see QuoteKeeper holding it's own.

As for FlashCardz FREE, the data from Apple for the month of August shows 99 downloads from 12 different countries, the majority of which (81 units) is from the United States. The total number of users is somewhere around 350 which includes September, according to the analytics data I get from mobclix. The great thing about putting your apps on the App Store, is that iPhone users all around the world can download them, and Apple will handle all the currency conversions.

QuoteKeeper FREE was released in September so these results are not available.

By the end of next month, I will be able to compare the revenue from the paid and free versions of FlashCardz. As a reminder, the free version generates revenue from advertisements. The reason for the free version, was to offer people the opportunity to try before they buy. I suspect that the paid version will generate more money in sales than the free version from ads, but that remains to be seen.

Egg! has about 1500 users now, and seems to generate a little less than $1/day. After an initial spike, the number of new users is steadily increasing. My goal is to get to over 100,000 downloads for Egg!

August is the first full month of results up to this point, so comparisons will be more meaningful when I get numbers for September.

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.

Financial Reports - July

So how much money can you make on iPhone apps? It depends.

I recently received my monthly financial report from Apple for the month of July and thought I'd share it with you. To give you some context, my first two paid apps are QuoteKeeper and FlashCardz. They are simple and functional, and most important, they do what I want them to.

FlashCardz went up on the AppStore on July 23rd, 2009 for $1.99 (USD).
QuoteKeeper went up on July 29th, 2009 for $0.99 (USD).

I wanted to put FlashCardz up for $1.49, but the AppStore doesn't give me that option.

In July, I sold 3 copies of FlashCardz in the U.S. at $1.99 of which I get $1.40, for a grand total of $4.20. I also sold 2 copies of QuoteKeeper in Australia, for a grand total of $1.52.

Some quick math give me $5.72 for the month of July.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this. I guess, FlashCardz was only up for 7 days, and QuoteKeeper only 1 day, so I will have to wait for the August numbers before I draw any conclusions. The thing I didn't expect was to sell things through the Australia AppStore. This is surprising because my only advertising thus far has been through Facebook.

I'll continue to share my financial reports as they become available, and in future posts I will talk about monetizing through advertising.