I disagree that you don’t want to sell an ad-free version due to ongoing costs. If you sell it for .99 at a .03 rate you need a specific user to click on the ad roughly 20+ times during the life of the app. If you sell if for 1.50 it would be even more. (Supposedly people consider anything between .99 - 1.99 the same so might as well charge more.) But if a person is willing to pay for an ad free version, it probably means they don’t like ads, and there is no way they are going to click on one, let alone click on one 20 times. (I am this user. I will pay. I will not click.) Plus I can’t see you getting more than 5% of your user base purchasing the app so you still have the majority of the users generating ongoing ad revenue. You aren’t losing all your long-term revenue, just the revenue from a specific person who isn’t likely to generate you any $$ anyways. And with a large user base I think an ad-free version could generate a nice chunk of change.
BTW I downloaded the app and love it. My husband was getting mad at me because I wasn’t paying attention to him or the kids. I have a rooted nook tablet and the game looked good on it. I would put an ad on the results page as well. I also think an app wall might be a good idea.
Yeah I totally agree, corvidapps! Although I think a paid ad-free version is a better alternative to the current strategy, but I don’t think it’s THE best strategy.
With in-app purchases, we can get WAAAAY more revenue out of users, than just a one-time “hit” from purchasing the ad-free version. It’s not strange for an app to get 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, even 20 dollars a month from a single player through microtransactions!
If you sell the ad-free version though, and then you show in-house ads on startup when you release a new game some of your users WILL get angry and give you bad reviews.
So “ad-free” versions are my least favorite type of paid apps, because you’re losing the lifetime value of a customer that’s dedicated enough to spend some cash on you, for the short term benefit of a small sale. So you lose the power of cross-promotion, or you gain bad reviews if you still go ahead and do that.
Paid apps with more features, less restrictions or added levels are much better in my opinion, cause you’re not locking yourself in the position of not being able to show a single ad, ever, even if it’s your own.
There are many ways to monetize, I do think most of us can still explore many different options and are clinging to ads like they’re the only way to do it…
I have definitely thought about doing a paid only version.
But, I agree with Kiwi. I think the biggest ‘loss’ here is opportunity cost. When I launch the next game, I want to be able to do in-house advertisements to cross-promote.
It does not matter if the game is not as good as WordHero and everyone goes back to playing WordHero. Here is what I think will happen:
Cross-promote on WH.
This jump-starts downloads, so the app gets a higher profile in the “new apps” category
Higher profile = more downloads
More downloads = runaway effect
On a side note… cross-promoting from an app that is mainly Kindle users to the Android store where they cannot view it or download it = stupid. Gonna have to put a landing page in the middle or something
That is a real good point. Even if you marketed as a no-3rd-party-ad version people would probably still get mad.
And yes you have to find some way to only market to amazon customers. I bet someday they will have their own ad network. I just had the brilliant idea of creating your own ad network using their affiliate program, but then I looked at the terms and they don’t pay you commission on selling apps. But you could still make your own ad network using affiliate links to their other products or their kindle books. Just a thought. Might be an interesting experiment.
I’ve tried the paid app with no ads and free app with ads model. And found that the free app still gets thousands of more downloads. The amount ad revenue your losing is not much and I agree with Corvidapps that these people would never have clicked an ad to start with. I tend to think you do the paid app almost as a service to the few people who really like your app and don’t like ads. I also tried another method with my game DagazEhwas. It only has the free version with ads, but has in-app purchases to buy new levels. When you download the game free you get the first “episode” 30 levels. You can buy three more “episodes” each with 30 more levels for 0.99 each. Also I made it whenever a person buys one of the level packs it also turns off ads for them. The app is kind of new so total downloads are still low, but the buying level packs seems to do better than a paid version as far as percentage of people who buy. Another trick I tried was I presented the user with an option to like my facebook page for a code to unlock the 2nd episode. So I’ve gotten a few hundred “friends” on my companies facebook page. So next game I release I will be able to post a status letting them all know about my new game.
I want to get into in-app purchases as well … but currently I found it very complicated to integrate … need more time to investigate the relevant parts of it … anyone has a good tutorial on that? Can I release an app with google billing to amazon or will it fail to start at all … such things are not mentioned at google developer for sure…
I used the google in-app billing api, I followed this tutorial here: http://www.anddev.org/advanced-tutorials-f21/simple-inapp-billing-payment-t52060.html?hilit=simple%20in%20app%20billing%20tutorial
It was actually not that hard to implement. If the user doesn’t have the Google market on their phone they will not be able to make any purchases; if you use google’s in app billing though. So I haven’t added this app to any 3rd party markets. Only the google market. I plan on adding it soon though, because I have ads in it as well, so even if people won’t be able to buy the extra levels, they may have fun with the first episode and I may make some ad revenue.
I took a closer look at in-app purchases versus free/paid model and I’m not so sure the percentage is that much more now that I look closer. It’s really hard to compare since your comparing it to a totally different app. I used my app Party Light to compare which has very much more total downloads, has been on the market for a few years. Also the google merchant account is very hard to get statistics for some reason, I tried downloading them as .csv but they were all out of whack. So only used last month to get these stats, and hand counted them:
Total installs of DagazEhwas for last month was 2630 with 3 in-app purchases making the percentage 0.00114 purchases for every install.
Party Light got total installs of 19457 with 25 sales of the paid version making the percentage 0.00128
So you can see they are not that much different, but take in mind this is only 1 month and two totally different apps.
I found it easier to update one app, instead of making changes to two source codes for free and paid. Once you have in apo billing working, theres not much you need to do to maintain it. I still believe the in app purchases will preform better than a paid app model. I just dont think i have enough/accurate data to show it yet.
I’ve found this true in my experience as well. With one of my apps, I released two different packages (free & paid) that were based on the same library project, but with some modifications to UI resources, etc. for the paid version. This method gets difficult to sustain across multiple versions though.
For Micro CPU Monitor, I’ll be keeping the current free version, and then releasing a separate “Pro Unlock Key”. So there’s one package with all the functionality, and it just checks to see if the Pro Key is installed to determine what functionality should be unlocked. This is turning out much easier to develop than the two separate apps I tried previously.
Oh cool, thats a good idea. I had seen some “UNLOCK” apps on the market, but hadnt really thought about how they work. So you just check to see if your package name comes up in the list of apps?
I really like the approach of the unlock app … one unlocker can published on different stores without messing with store-specific issues (like you have with in-app-purchases)
@XdebugX - Yep, it’s very simple to implement. Just create an empty package (no launcher entry or activities) for your Pro key. Then follow the forum thread about how to check the Pro Key package signature.
@“reiti.net” - Exactly. That’s the only concern I can see with this method.
I’ve just looked around in some “bad pirate forums” ( xD ) how they do with these unlockers.
The generell way they do it is to publish a zip file which contains the app and the unlocker app. So it’s as save as a normal paid app but brings the benefit of more freedom and comfort for publishers
One of my past day jobs was Product Manager responsible for licensing of a large software company with many software products. I can tell you that you should not spend too much time trying to make your application ‘uncrackable’.
NOTHING is uncrackable to a 15year old with UNLIMITED time, no girlfriend and a massive need to prove himself. He is probably also a LOT brighter than you.
Instead, focus on your users and consider the fact that it was pirated as a compliment.
I used to develop some very sophisticated anti-piracy methods some years ago - but that was quite expensive software with very less interest in younger people - with games it is very different - i know
Robo Miner in the first days was very well distributed over different websites, where they uploaded the apk for download. That would not be possible with a paid/free version approach but with the unlocker app, that would be great - expecially when the reason would be only adfree.
So you got all features with the free version but ads. The unlocker does nothing else than removing the ads. That would be simply the same as installing an adblocker - so there is no real reason to pirate the unlocker, because it is easier to get an adblocker
Lol, my reference had nothing to do with the games industry specifically. The 15 year old who can read assembly from a hex dump is the kid cracking your $20k per YEAR per COPY engineering software for epeen.
Exactly. It’s about the huge bump you get from tons of people downloading your new app. So cross-promoting is great!
Ahh yes… some users tend to be like that, hehe! =S
Dude, this is GENIOUS!!! I love it!! I wouldn’t do it with Facebook though, cause FB is a “stream” platform. If you post about your new game, it might get lost in people’s stream and they might never know.
What I would do is what we always do in the Internet Marketing space, which is to have them opt-in to a newsletter. Then I can email them about new games!
I really like this solution!! Don’t want ads? Ok no prob, but let me email you about new games in the future, to get a bigger bump in the store from all those downloads! (Plus in-app-purchases to make sure we also monetize those superusers) Thanks for sharing that idea!
But you could still make your own ad network using affiliate links to their other products or their kindle books. Just a thought. Might be an interesting experiment.
Do you use Google in-app purchase api or some third party library?