My experience with AdNetworks

I am going to post my small experience with Ad Networks. I am rather unsatisfied with ad networking, I had many disappointments and few successes. I hope that this message will help other developers, and of course that other developers share their experience to help me increase my revenue :slight_smile:

Currently my apps have been downloaded about 150,000 times overall and 1,500 times per day.

At the beginning I started with the obvious choice: AdMob banners. eCPM fluctuates so much from app to app that is useless to try to understand anything. Generally speaking, I can say that eCPM on AdMob is for me around 0.40$ (although I have apps with 1.80$, but very low number of requests).

Then I tried different networks, mixed with AdMob (for example banners from AdMob and interstitials from others) to see if I could get better earnings, this is what I experienced.

I tried:
LeadBolt, RevMob, InMobi, StartApp, AirPush. I was very disappointed by most of them, StartApp is the only one I am currently happy with.
I also tested other networks like Flurry, MobFox, without going into production with them.

LeadBolt.
I got very high revenue at the very beginning, then it dropped. I was very disappointed by the fact that I was earning 5$ with a single very small app every day, then after a week suddenly I started getting zero, even bringing hundreds of clicks! The model of revenue might be CPI, this is really upsetting for small developers when you see 500 clicks and 0.10$ earning!
Other problems are with adwalls and interstitials too big for small screens (so showing partial) and very slow: there is no way to preload the large images and then users must wait in front of a white screen while the ad is loading from the network.
The pros are that there is a very high number of possible different advertising solutions, and mail answers by assistance are always very, really quick.
Currently, I keep LeadBolt ONLY for AdWalls on user request (so I put a button that launches the AdWall), just because of the high level of assistance.

RevMob.
I started using RevMob for banners and interstitials, and got an immediate earning. Then again, like LeadBolt, it dropped to near zero.
The interface is really cute but I am still trying to understand if and how better does it against AdMob.

InMobi.
I am testing InMobi on a small app with banners and I have a fill rate that is incredibly low: around 70% and a eCPM of about 0.70$ . I will test it better with bigger apps. Unfortunately documentation is so weak that is even hard to test and implement other forms of ad, like interstitials.

AirPush.
I wanted to test AirPush because of the notification and icon ads, I got so low numbers that I was upset. Also statistics were not very clear, for example in one case I have a fill rate of 194%… although CPM seemed good, I stopped early all ads with this network.

StartApp.
In all this disaster, StartApp is the only one of which I am really happy besides AdMob: earnings are low, but what is important is that they are perfectly constant: it does not happen like in LeadBolt to have 500 clicks and zero earning one day, and 100 clicks and 2$ the day after: here earnings are very predictable. Differently from other networks, are also very well decumented (you can see what you earned, while in many other networks you just have to trust their numbers without understanding very well how they were determined). It is very easy to implement (one line of code) and they do what they claim to do, nothing more.
The only negative point I can say is that it may be a annoying thing because you have to inform your user with a Accept/Decline question.

Currently my opinion is that I will soon go back to my good-old AdMob smartbanner, implement and test better AdMob interstitials and keep on with StartApp’s icon and LeadBolt AppWall, without notification ads.
The fact is that this solution is the most stable, to my experience, but has low earning rate.

Now I ask to other developers to share their experience:

Which BANNER ad-network has had the best revenue for you, and the most predictable and constant revenue?

Which INTERSTITIAL ad-network has had the best value for you, without annoying your users, on every screen size?

Which ICON ad was the best for you?

Which NOTIFICATION ad is acceptable for users?

My experience is very personal, as every developer I suppose has his own personal experience.

For me too, admob is one stop shop.

javaexp, you are right, I felt good with admob too, but everywhere I see it compared to others as the “lowest limit”, as if others MUST do better. Actually to my experience it is not that way.

Hi Beppi, you’re in the same boat with me in term of no.of apps downloads - accumulative & daily. I do agree that admob is the most stable source of revenue for banner ads. I would recommend using AppBucks - a way to generate income thru push notifications & icon ads with ‘peace of mind’ - no virus threat alert by anti-virus software.

But some of my users are complaining that when they decline appbucks dialog, they still get the push ads :frowning:

Hi javaexp, my daily impressions [appbucks’s push & icon ads] are approaching 20k - with no user complaints as you experienced. I have included appbucks’s EULA according to the doc.provided - adding AppBucksAPI.userOptOutDialog at the end of your main activity’s onCreate() method.

I am also calling that method but immediately after calling setContentView in onCreate. May be the user was mistaken that he has pressed Decline button.

I never tried AppBucks, but is it really better than StartApp?
Is there anyone that have compared the revenue of the two networks?

Such networks cannot work together, because you simply cannot present two authorization dialogs to the user… so choosing a mix like “pushes from AppBucks and icons by StartApp” is simply impossible.

What do you mean? Are you saying that it’s too spammy to display two EULAs? Or do you mean it doesn’t work?
I use 2 EULAs in a few of my apps without any complications or complaints from users. People are used to EULAs being presented these days and not just EULAs for ads, but for T&Cs/Privacy Policies etc.
You can actually create your own EULA that features all the code from others, although I have not tried it myself.

That’s probably what’s happening. The “Accept” and “Decline” buttons seem to switch places randomly every time you present the user with the EULA, so if they are just spamming the button without reading, chances are they will press “Accept” when they think they are pressing “Decline”.

For banner ads amazon has been really consistent for me and pays on time. Not sure if admob instersteller or Leadbolt instersteller is a better option though, playing around with both for the no banner portions.

What is the eCPM for Amazon Ads (and refresh rate you use)?

And more importantly from my perspective, what is the geographical fill rate of their ads (special Asia)?

Hi Beppi, I have been developing android apps for the past 8 months starting with only $50+ for 1st.month earning. Currently my 11 apps have been downloaded more than 330k times (around 50% active installs) with 1.5k - 2k daily downloaded and getting almost $1000 monthly earning - flourishing day by day. Here are ad-networks I have been using in my apps :

  1. BANNER - ADMOB ,MMEDIA [MEDITATION WITH ADMOB]
  2. INTERSTITIAL - LEADBOLT’S HTML APPWALL , APPFLOOD’S PANEL WALL
  3. ICON - APPBUCKS
  4. NOTIFICATION -APPBUCKS,APPFLOOD

PERSISTENCE is a magical word for me since I had been thinking of quitting developing android apps when looking at extremely low downloads & earnings at early stage of my endeavor !

Me too, I have tried many banner networks. In order of preference:

Admob: The best so far but they banned one of my apps, and I’ll always have the risk of getting my account banned. I have absolutely no idea why they banned the app.
Smaato: The ecpm is nice, even a bit higher than admob. The payments are NET+150 which is bad, but they do pay.
Mobclix: They simply don’t like to pay developers. And most of the time they don’t. Too bad because they have the best features, sdk, interface, reporting… But earning virtual coins is simply not worth it!
Mobfix: They cheat on impressions and click counts. They cheat a lot!
MoPub: Very poor performance and they cheat on stats too.

About MoPub - are you talking about MoPub marketplace? Could you tell more? I’ve recently turned it off because it was giving me some technical problems (or so I thought - the reason was probably hardware acceleration turned on) but was considering turning them on again because the eCPM was quite good.

Hey magnesus,

I am talking about MoPub marketplace and mediation. I was trying them one year ago. The marketplace had infinitecimal fillrates, and the mediation had wrong numbers.
One thing I have learned about stats on ad networks panels, is that they are not reliable. Each of them counts impressions, clicks, fillrate, ecpm, the way they decide to. So you can never compare these values because you have no idea how they are computed. The only ad network not cheating a lot on stats is admob, and they still adjust clicks and impressions by 30-40%.
I know all this because i record ads stats myself in a database. And my own stats are reliable because I have no interest in cheating myself.

The only variable worth consideration is taking all of your traffic away from one network to another, and compare the results in cash.

And MoPub real ecpm was NOT good at all, at least for my apps. About 1/3rd of admob’s price. Both for marketplace and mediation.

Is there anyone here that is happy about mediation?
I tried to implement it, but found so many obstacles: first of all it is never easy to understand which sdk you have to add for the mediated network. More of it, for every sdk you have to use a different way to implement. Then, I wonder if the fact of having so many different places where my money is accumulated is really an advantage. As a third problem I discovered that smart banners are not compatible with mediation. Last but not least, implementing so many sdk’s would increase a lot the apk size and the maintainance work.
So I quitted mediation. What about you?

I have no problem with moPub or adMob apart from some strange complaints from users (but it was probably caused by Android bug with hardware acceleration for adviews - I will be fixing it next week).

I wonder if the fact of having so many different places where my money is accumulated is really an advantage

Depends how much you earn. Having only one source of revenue is suicidal - always think how many persons it would take to bancrupt you. When you use only admob the answer is - one.

As for smart banners - I hate them, they are too big on tablets. I prefer to have happy users and less revenue from ads (I can support it by IAP, happy users are more likely to buy in-app items) and sheer number of requests. But that is my strategy - and it works well enough for me, but I make less or even much less that some people here that use different strategy.

As someone else who also records stats to compare with networks (only impression counts), I would like to add that I had issues with MobClix almost 2 years ago and stopped using them. They claim they backward adjust their stats based on what the networks tell them actually happened. Well, it seems some of the networks falsify that data (presumably so they don’t have to pay).

I have seen accurate impression counts in the Mobclix interface on the day and the day after… but two weeks later, the impression count had fallen by 90% or more (sometimes EVERY SINGLE IMPRESSION was removed).

To be clear… MobClix may be honest… but some of their networks sure are not! So I stopped using MobClix.

Also: MoPub marketplace I have had some success with. Just set your eCPM to > 0.60 :slight_smile: … An expensive threshold ensures you are working with legit companies with legit adverts.