AppGrade's new SDK release!

Dear developers,

I’m Tamar from AppGrade, nice to meet you.
I’m excited for the opportunity to tell you a bit about who we are and what we do. Some of you may already know us and have worked with us, but stay tuned, since AppGrade has developed greatly since its previous beta testing, and we are now launching a brand new SDK!

AppGrade specializes in providing powerful monetization solutions for app developers. With our innovative SDK integrated ad-units (industry standard and proprietary of our own), we partner with app developers and enable them to make more money from their free apps.

We are launching our brand new SDK, entailing our Interstitial AppWall, that we believe will generate an attractive eCPM for you.

After careful customization of its visualization and sharpening our BI algorithms, and due to our worldwide spread of offers, we currently see great eCPM, an average $2-$4 from it (worldwide).

I welcome you to join us!

Check us out at our brand new website - AppGrade.com

Developers from our developers’ community can go right ahead and download our SDK from their dashboards. New members can sign-up through our website (AppGrade.com).

Please contact me with any feedback or question. Would love to hear from you:

Skype: tamar.appgrade
mail: [email protected]

Looking forward to doing great things together.

Tamar - AppGrade.

I was beta tester and when beta test ppd was great . Just waiting beta payment but SmartBar(beta tested) is not avaible now and when will ppd values same as Startapp .
Interstitial Ad promised ecpm is not difference from others but didnt tried .

I can’t see your difference . Just regular , another , bad pdd and normal Interstitial Ad network

What are PPD rates?

How disappointing, what happened to the “attractive” PPD rates? The beta was $0.09 for US installs and $0.02 for non-US… now your site says $20 for 1,000 US installs or $2.5 for 1,000 non-US?! So $0.02 US or 0.0025 non-US, oh but there’s a 25% bonus if in-app revenue is 20% so you can earn up to $0.025/.003 per install. That’s the same BS offer StartApp made and your “smart bar” is way more intrusive than a search homepage. So how do you figure it’s worth the same PPD (especially after we all ditched startapp because $2.50 is a joke)? At least make your rates competitive with mobario since you have a similar product. It’s a shame because your widget is nicer but mobario pays 2-4x more for the same thing

Yes , that is the point . I remember “attractive” PPD rates too. But as we can see they didnt . They are act like they are same as startapp but startapp doesnt have system wide widget like smartbar .

I was going to make a reply, but this sums up my thoughts on the matter nearly perfectly. It’s just not reasonable at all to have such an intrusive form of advertising pay so little. As developers, we don’t appreciate negative reviews or uninstalls, so when we integrate an SDK like this, we expect revenue to adequately compensate for it.

Exactly, I can’t believe this is what we waited two months for. I was invited to their beta test back in July (before they added the hide option), and within a week we had lost 30% of our active user base with every single user review complaining about the “3 dots that won’t go away”. $90/$20 for 1,000 installs was barely enough to justify keeping their floating widget integrated. Even Mobario’s rates are pretty low for such an aggressive unit but $20/$2.5 isn’t even worth showing an extra EULA

Yes . Absolutely they wasted their time . They send me too about new beta test but didnt return . Did you get your beta payment ? I didnt

We did get the payment but it was a month late. Here’s my experience with this company…

I saw their first thread in July asking for beta testers, so I wrote them an email and they sent a link to register and download the sdk. We stayed up late integrating it with our top 5 apps and published the first one in the morning, right before they sent another email saying there actually wasn’t enough space for us in the beta. I explained that we had spent several hours integrating and testing their sdk so they agreed to let us keep that one app published, but a week later they said the beta was already over so it was a waste of time anyways. The payment should have arrived the next friday but that was right around the time Google announced the new policy so we had bigger problems to worry about. A month later they sent another email inviting us to a new beta test, so I said we might be interested but hadn’t received the first payment yet. They sent it by paypal the next morning but we didn’t hear anything about the beta invite for another month, which was a few days ago. And then this morning we got an email saying the sdk went live.

So despite the poor communication we did eventually get paid, but it was obvious they had very little respect for our time. And with these new rates it’s pretty obvious they don’t value our app’s real estate or ratings either. This type of unit is more intrusive (and damaging to market rankings) than icon and push ads combined, so devs who take that risk deserve to be compensated fairly. I wouldn’t add the new sdk for anything less than $50 per 1k US installs and $10 per 1k non-US. $75/20 would be more fair but apparently appgrade got greedy. Why even bother with interstitials when the established networks are having a hard enough time competing with admob…

Dear developers,
I appreciate your replies, and would like to address your concerns.

First thing first, I’ll start by addressing our new in-app SDK.
You’re right, it is indeed a very competitive market, but as we see from the testing that we have conducted, this ad-unit in most cases beats competition. We have worked feverishly on improving our BI to make sure optimal offers will be offered to the end-user, as well as on filling out our fill rate.
I encourage you to try us out, you will find us providing higher eCPM for.

The SmartBar and the PPD payment model
The beta-testing itself was intended to explore how the end-user, your traffic, responds to the SmartBar, and this is why, as all betas, it ran for a limited period of time.
These attractive rates were offered in order to compensate you for your hassle against the short period of beta, as well as to compensate you against the risk that the SmartBar will not be accepted positively and will cause an active users dropout, since obviously, as in the case for all betas, the product to be tested isn’t refined.
This comes to say that we highly value your app’s real-estate and ratings.
We appreciate you participating in the beta-testing. We have learned a lot from this testings, as well as your feedbacks and are now implementing changes accordingly.
However, note that users eventually vote with their feet, and as you can see will are getting close to having 50,000 downloads with mostly positive reviews by users (4+rating), so while we are working on making it less intrusive, eventually it seems that generally users like it.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appgrade.smartbarpro
Having said all that, we are not running the SmartBar ad-unit at the moment. I suggest to ignore the reported rates in the website. We will take your comments under consideration, and once our out-of-the-app ad-unit will be released, we will update you regarding the payment model and rates.

Beta testers’ payment
Our finance team is currently calculating the earnings per developer. It takes time a bit since a significant amount of developers joined our beta testing, so there is a lot of data to analyze, and it’s being done manually. It goes without saying that in the future everything will be automated.
We apologize for the delay, but I can assure you that we are doing our best in order to deliver the earnings’ data to the developers, as well as the payment itself, as fast as we can. We release payment upon finishing analysis per developer, and some of you have already received their payment, with no malfunctions.
Hope you will bear with us in the early stages, so we can establish a beneficial cooperation for both parties.

Customer-care
MoneyMike55, I’m sorry to hear that this was your experience with us. Our volume of activity has grown significantly during the beta-testing period. This of course required some adjustments from our part in terms of Human-Resources. These adjustments were made and I’m positive that other developers that have been working with us since those adjustments can testify about their positive experience with our service level.

What’s next?
We are currently working on improving and sharpening our out-of-the-app ad-unit, which relates to the mail I sent you a few days back. We are now analyzing the data you gave us regarding into what application our SDK will be integrated, your daily installs and your geographical spread.
We will get in touch with each and everyone that replied to us by mail, and post an additional message in the forum closer to the release date.

Looking forward to cooperating together. Again, I want to encourage you to try our Interstitials ad-unit and see for yourself that we can make more money for you.

Be in touch -
Skype: tamar.appgrade
email: [email protected]

Tamar - AppGrade.

More and more networks seem to be doing this (Mobario and Widdit come to mind) in order to demonstrate that their product is well-received, but this ignores that there is a very large difference between a user that is actively searching Google Play for a smart-bar, and one that installs an unrelated app that comes with the smart-bar as an add-on.

In the former case, it’s only a matter of the smart-bar doing what the user expects it to in order for it to receive a positive rating, while in the latter case, there’s a rather high chance that the user didn’t want a smart-bar at all, no matter how useful it may be, which in turn causes a lot of discontent that sadly gets aimed at the app containing your SDK. (I realize the EULA intends to single out the potential users that have no interest in the offer, but realistically, a lot of people select Accept without reading anything)

And this is why I mentioned that this form of advertising needs to have payment rates on the high-end (matching Mobario, at least), in order to compensate the loss of revenue from other advertising types due to bad ratings and high rate of uninstalls.

Hey Lockdown,
Thank you for your comment.
The users that got access to the SmartBar through the developers were not directed to GooglePlay, so they are not counted there. They were given an option, through the SmartBar itself (the one they got through downloading your apps), to go and download the SmartBar app from GooglePlay.
This comes to say that all the SmartBar’s downloads you see in GooglePlay (nearly 50k), are users that got the SmartBar through the developers and went ahead to download it directly from GooglePlay.
This testifies that users that got the SmartBar through the developers were generally satisfied from this widget, leading a lot of them to a direct download.
Having said that, we care greatly about our developers’ community satisfaction, so we of course take everything you say under consideration, to keep you satisfied.
Our motto is that if the developer is satisfied and makes a lot of money, so are we, so it’s a joint interest.

Tamar.

Point taken, but it’s not as straightforward as that. You’re essentially assuming that all users that receive the smart-bar, will go download the full version from Google Play and rate it. But why would someone that is unhappy with it go and download a more complete version of it? Only the users that like the bar will want additional features, so your ratings are inherently skewed towards positive.

While I haven’t used AppGrade’s smart-bar in live apps yet, I can say from experience with using Mobario/Widdit/etc that my reviews mostly switch from a 4/5-star “love this” to to 1-star “I can’t get rid of the ****ing widget/lockscreen, uninstalled”.

@Lockdown, are you throwing mobario/widdit on U.S./E.U users which generally have good internet speed so they catch your app instantly. I push these ads to aisan users who will get to see mobario/widdit after say installing 5-6 apps and I get some cover from those installs.
Do confirm about my assumption of you using mobario/widdit for tier-1 countries…

I do have a rather large US market share in most of the apps (30-40%) though there is also a significant amount of installs from India and other countries.