Onlinenerd24

Couple of weeks ago I signed up with Admob to try out their iPhone In-App advertising system. Since then Admob has been bought by Google, btw…

I implemented the Admob API into one of my most downloaded free apps, which was really easy. Just add a few libs and classes, place a view and you are ready to go.

The interesting part, of course, was how much money can be made through Admob. Admob uses a CPC-based system, much like Google Adsense. Advertisers book ads on the network, they are shown in your app, as soon as somecone touches the add, he is taken to the advertisers website or to his app in the Appstore. And of course you earn some money.

The App I tried it on has been on the Appstore for about 9 month and has constantly been downloaded roughly 600 times a day. This sums up to about 150.000 downloads.
I have never used any tracking techniques to see how often the app was actually started each day. So I was in for a little surprise when I saw the actual ad impressions for the first day.
I have set the App to display a new ad every 30 seconds. This ads up to about 10.000 ad impressions per day, which was quite a bit higher than I expected.
Click-Through-Rate was also at a rather high 4-5%.

All In all this adds up to a revenue of $20 per day for this app.

So here’s the revenue over the past few days. In the last 3 days revenue went up due to higher CPC and more impressions.

Here’s the sales stats for the past few months (courtesy of AppViz)

So, suffices to say I am quiet pleased with this return. Not getting rich on this, but it’s still quite some money. With this steady income I estimate the app to pay off after about a month, considering the time I spent developing and after that it’s nice passive income for the time being.

Of course 150.000 downloads is pretty good for an app which has never gotten any widespread exposure. But still it stays in the Top-50 of it’s Appstore category in the major markets and gets a decent amount of downloads.

So probably you are wondering if it’s really that easy to replicate this (although small) success. Well, frankly I think it’s luck that my App seems to be used that much. You need to come up with an idea for an app that is used by a very broad range of users and on a regular basis.

Overall I am pleased with the income from my little app and think that Admob can very well be an alternative for monetizing an iPhone app. With now over 100.000 apps in the store the space on the sales charts gets very tight for paid apps and making even $20 per day from a $-,99 App can be quite difficult.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 13th, 2009 at 20:09 and is filed under iphone development.