Official Thread for Smartphone Gaming Believers!

[mrstickball]

famousringo said:

mrstickball said:

What do you want to know about mobile advertising, exactly?

For starters, just how much revenue is the in-app mobile ad market worth annually? And how does it compare to revenue from direct purchases?

Actually, I might have answered my own question while digging up old stories for this post. Carefully re-reading Gartner's estimate of 2010's mobile app revenues (they say $5.2 billion) reveals that they're including both purchase and ad revenues. A report from IHS tallies up the top four app stores and estimates $2.2 billion in sales.

So factor in all the smaller fish (GetJar, Cydia, newcomers like Windows Phone and Amazon's Appstore), and we can see that mobile ad revenues might be roughly equal to purchase revenues.

I'm sure the margins of error wrap around the block, but its a better impression than I had this morning.

Apologies to Euphoria for all the moneytalk.

For Android, its much greater than revenues. Angry Birds alone has likely made as much money in ad revenue in 6-7 months as the rest of the market has since its inception. iOS market is much healthier for purchases, so I'd imagine its a bit smaller.

If I was to valuate the Android app market, your probably looking at about $100 million USD or so from potential ad revenues per download. The main issue would be if such revenues have been realized or not (as it'd assume about a $0.25 lifetime value per free title download).

I've talked to a few developers that use ad-based monetization for their Android applications. It works well, but it seems that you really have to optimize for it to work properly. I doubt most developers do it right, and are losing out on a ton of cash, as AdMob is huge.