Making Money With Android

Increase Mobile Ad Revenue by Avoiding These 5 Common Mistakes

This is a guest post written by Richard O’Connell, Global Marketing Director for PapayaMobile and AppFlood.

What we’ve learned from the thousands of Android developers that we’ve helped is that there is always a way to increase a developer’s revenue. Improvements to their mobile monetization strategy might be as complicated as A/B testing ad formats and encouraging advertisers to propose direct deals. But optimization can also be as simple as avoiding these five basic mobile monetization mistakes.

Overview

In my October report, I described how this one simple app turned into an overnight success. Fake iPhone 4S brought in over $700 in October alone, helping to bring my total earnings for that month over the nominal target of $1000.

In November, these already fantastic results improved in every way. Total Active Installs went from ~140,000 at the end of October to over 400,000 by mid-November. By the end of November, I’d reached about 1.2 million total installs. This boost in downloads seemed to be mostly self-propagating. By reaching the top Trending charts for the Android Market, it was noticed by a lot of people, which in turn helped keep it in the top charts.

It still amazes me that an app which I created as a casual idea in my free time would reach this level of popularity. There’s no way I would have predicted this number of people could be interested in downloading a Fake iPhone. But I tried it – and apparently a lot of people do want this kind of app.

Anyway, this torrent of new users brought a proportional increase in revenue. In fact, during November I brought in an average of over $200 per day! This was an incredibly exciting month for me – and busy too, as I released a number of updates.

Received My First Payment From LeadBolt

A few people have asked whether LeadBolt is a reliable advertising network, and how quickly developers are paid. I’ve been using the network for a few months now, with very good results. Using the new app wall format, I’ve been getting an eCPM of $1.86. Here’s my first payment notification from December last year. Yes, … Read more

Android Income Report #7 (October)

When I started this blog, I set myself a goal: to make $1000 from Android development in a single month. This seemed a lofty goal – especially starting from scratch – but I thought it would be achievable within a couple of years. Thus it was quite a surprise in July when I got nearly halfway there – $690 in a single month. This was just 4 months after my first income report of less than $4!

Even more surprising – and exciting – is the news that this month, I passed the $1000 mark. Yes, after 7 months of Android development I’ve actually reached the goal set back in March. This was mainly due to the phenomenal success of my latest app – “Fake iPhone 4S“.

Read on for more details, including the full story of how one weekend’s work turned into my most successful app yet.

Received My First Payment From Madvertise

This month I received my first publisher payment from Madvertise. I started using this advertising network in October, and have had some fantastic results so far. Madvertise only works well in Europe (fill rates are very low in the rest of the world), but for European traffic it can return very good revenues. During October … Read more

LeadBolt Introduces App Walls for Better Monetization

I’ve been using LeadBolt (an in-app advertising network) for a few months now, with mixed results. The rich media content unlockers offered by LeadBolt are very effective, especially if you’re developing a game where the interstitial format makes sense (e.g. a blocking advert between levels). However, their banner advertising hasn’t been as effective for me, … Read more

Android Income Report #6 (September)

September was my first month back in the swing of things, after the August holiday. It was still pretty quiet, with no new app releases, but I was able to do a bit of groundwork in preparation for the coming months. I wrote a number of blog posts, and tried submitting my app to a few more alternative app stores. Revenues saw a bit of dip compared with August, but this was still my 3rd highest income to date.

This will be another short income report – I’m a few months behind already, so will try to keep things brief. Without any further ado, here’s the breakdown for September – my 6th month on the Android Market.

Android Income Report #5 (August)

Well, I’ve got way behind in my income reports. My last report (July 2011) is over 3 months old already. It’s good to keep the continuity though, so I’ll publish this post for my August revenue – even though it wasn’t a very exciting month. The huge revenues from my Google+ Invites app had diminished significantly, and I was travelling overseas for most of the month, so didn’t release any updates for my other apps. So mainly, this month’s report covers passive income from my existing apps, during a month of inactivity.

Received My First Payment From Tapjoy

Today I received my first payment from Tapjoy. Just over $700 USD isn’t too bad 🙂 This is income from the Google+ Invites app, which is the only place I’ve used Tapjoy’s incentive advertising. With online sales figures continuing to soar annually in the UK, there’s more room than ever for new online businesses and more … Read more

Should I Write Sponsored Posts?

I’ve had quite a few offers lately from people who would like to sponsor articles on this blog. The basic understanding being, they pay me to write about a particular topic, or include a link to their product. The payment is sufficient and helps me pay off my iva. It’s not an unusual situation in web publishing, but I know a lot of people have strong opinions on the ethics of this practice.

I’m not a big fan of blogs that post a “Message from our Sponsor” every week, with a blatantly promotional article full of links back to the sponsor’s website. I see this as a kind of intrusive advertising, that only takes readers’ time and offers nothing in return.

However, I do see benefits in writing a sponsored post which is of genuine interest to the blog’s target audience – in this case, Android developers. For example, say a mobile advertising company such as AdMob were to contact me, and offer to pay me in exchange for writing an article about their company. Obviously the company itself is of interest to this blog’s readers. In this situation, I think it would be appropriate to write the article, and accept payment for the time I spent researching and writing the post.