Official Thread for Smartphone Gaming Believers!

[mrstickball]

famousringo said:

mrstickball said:

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.

When you say "optimize," do you mean designing the app with ads in mind so that they appear regularly, but not in such a way that the user finds them too obtrusive?

$0.25 per download would be very good revenue. I think the average iOS download earns ~$0.30 in purchase revenue.

Its a multi-stage issue when considering ads.

One step of optimization is making sure you have enough ads that are in areas that will get clicked, but not interfere with gameplay. Generally, the most profitable ads are a hybrid CPM/CPC (Cost Per Mille or Thousand, and Cost Per Click). Therefore, good ads will get a lot of clicks which equals more cash.

Additionally, the next step is ensuring ads are targeting the right demographic(s). If the company can sell targeted ads to given user demographics - age, race, likes/dislikes, it increases the amount of money earned from the ads. Crappy ads earn (from my understanding) about $0.30 per 1,000 ads via AdMob on Android. Optimizing would yield revenues of $1.00 or greater per thousand ads. That would greatly increase the value of a download, as Angry Birds likely has an ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) of $0.60 or greater - essentially the same value as an iOS user, but through the free model.

 

If the right models are pursued, it would be feasible that you could sell most any game on Android for free with ads - even more expensive ones.