Website

Introducing: Making Money With Android Wiki

Over the past few years, the blog and forums have facilitated some great discussions about Android development, monetization and marketing. Today I’m excited to announce a brand new addition to this website – the Making Money With Android Wiki.

The purpose of the Wiki is to collate the information people are discussing on the forums, and make it easily accessible and useful. Are you looking for a database of indie-friendly multimedia resources? Or clear and concise info about popular ad networks? How about implementation guides, or mediation adapters? Instead of having to dig through pages of old forum discussions, you’ll now be able to find all this information easily accessible on the Wiki.

Read more

Hacked

As you may have noticed, the website was down for about 24 hours earlier this week. This is because some lovely person decided it would be fun to hack the site. So What Actually Happened? On Tuesday morning I woke up to find the homepage for the Blog, Forums and Gigs website replaced by a … Read more

Opening For Guest Authors

Over the past couple of years this blog has documented my personal journey developing and monetizing Android apps. The initial goal of $1000/month seemed lofty at the time – but since October 2011, I’ve continued to exceed this target every month. Now it’s time to move on to a new stage in the site’s evolution. … Read more

Making Money With Android On IRC

Hi everyone! Forum member Gabriele (megasoft78) recently posted a thread about creating an IRC channel for this website. This would provide an avenue for realtime discussion, and another way of exchanging ideas with the people who already frequent the blog and forums. The feedback so far has been very positive, so we now have a new … Read more

New Forum for Android Developers

Roman Forum Today I’d like to announce a bit of a new direction for this website. I’ve just launched an official forum, associated with the blog. It’s available at http://www.makingmoneywithandroid.com/forum/.

There’s a couple of reasons why I decided to launch this forum. I’ve been getting a lot of email queries lately, which would probably be of general interest to many blog readers. Questions about how I developed an app, or details about the monthly income reports, as well as more general Android queries. Rather than communicating with people individually over email, it would make a lot more sense to post these questions publicly so everyone can benefit from them.

But also also I’d like to give others an opportunity to contribute their knowledge & experience in a public setting. Not everyone has their own blog, and even if they do, it might not have a large readership yet. My hope with this forum is to provide a place where Android developers can share experiences & code, with a focus on marketing and making a profit from their apps.If you are a developer or business manager of your software business contact Future sharks for directions.

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.

Read more

Android Income Report #3

ChartHere’s an interesting stat for you – this month, I made more money writing about Android than I did from Android apps themselves! How does that work? Well, this blog has seen a pretty steady increase in traffic since I wrote the first article at the beginning of April. A couple of weeks ago, that same article made it to the front page of Hacker News, which was a catalyst for this website – over 20,000 new visitors in one day. Thanks in part to the dramatic increase in traffic, my Google AdSense earnings were high enough this month to justify including them in this report. In fact, they exceeded my AdMob earnings by a significant margin.

Also, you’ll probably notice I’m no longer using the title “xx month on the Android Market”. That’s simply because from now on, I’ll be expanding beyond Google’s distribution channel, and trying out alternative app stores such as Amazon, GetJar and SlideME. The Android Market is still my first and primary focus though.

Read more

Second Month on the Android Market

Statistics bar graphThis post is a little late, but I’ll summarise the monthly stats here in order to present the full picture. My second month (9th May – 8th June) has been pretty straightforward, with Tap That! Number seeing regular growth in much the same pattern as the first month. I’ve now diversified a bit, releasing two new apps which has helped bump up the advertising revenue. Work and study commitments prevented me from spending a lot of time in actual development, but I did manage to push a major update to Tap That! Number – a new “memory mode” with hidden tiles. Read on for the full details from this month’s development, and a look at how the Flurry tracking service compares to Google Analytics.

Read more

Hacker News: The Aftermath

Yesterday, on a whim, I decided to submit one of my articles to Hacker News. I didn’t really expect anything to come of it, due to my previous experience with sites like Digg and Reddit. Well, I was wrong. The article hit the front page of HN within minutes, and stayed there for over 10 hours. By the end of the day (Australian time), this website had handled over 7,000 visitors – which is about 6,500 more than a normal day.

Today, the same article has been featured on Reddit, Twitter and The Next Web, resulting in another 20,000 visits so far. All that exposure has resulting in some very interesting comments from Android and iOS developers alike. I’ve previously been writing for a fairly small audience, it’s a bit of a different experience to get critical review from all over the web. So what have I learned? Two things – that WordPress scales well with caching, and that there’s always someone with a different point of view.

Read more