1 year'ish in retrospect apr2012 - mar2013

So to begin with i ended up making my first app a little over a year ago because it was more of a challenge than anything else. I said to myself hell if that dude can do it i know i can.

That set off an adventure that i will try my best to recount here for your reading pleasure. BTW i only make android apps.

In April of 2012 i decided that i was going to take the world by storm with an amazing sound board app. I built in ability to do notifications and all kinds of goodies. The sound editing took nearly twice as much time than the actual app did. Anyway i put it up for free on the app store and i just knew that i would have 1 million downloads by morning. I got up early the next day and checked…

Well google had an outage or something so no reporting that morning (sadface). So i got up the next day and bam i had 10 downloads. I counted on my fingers all the people i told to download it or i wouldn’t be friends with them anymore, I ended up with 8. I had 2 actual unknown people download my app!!! Wasn’t the million i was hoping for but i took it.

Over the next partial month i got up to 500 downloads. Then i had a thought. Wasn’t i trying to make money off this?.. I implemented admob and updated the app.

Over the next few months i released more niche soundboards, rss readers, and wallpaper apps. In total 8 free apps by January with admob ads built in.

revenue from admob during this time.

5/2012 $2.69
6/2012 $59.01
7/2012 $49.14
8/2012 $70.32
9/2012 $71.25
10/2012 $113.30
11/2012 $77.17
12/2012 $132.84
1/2013 $104.92

But before i continue i will explain the up and down nature of the revenue. I tried other ad systems along with admob. Revmob and a self sold adspot. Both were good for income, nearly doubling my total monthly revenue. But the backlash of users was pretty severe. So i removed them and left in only admob.

After reading a while about how others did things i decided to put out paid versions of my apps. In late February i did just that. I added in some extra functionality and remade the interfaces discarding any and all ads. Making an ad-free version. I updated all the free ones with a button that has text “click here to get the ad-free version for 99 cents USD”. I get aprox .69 cents minus the other percentage ( i think ~2%) google takes when they transfer it to my bank.

This strategy seems to be paying off pretty well.

admob 2/2013 $104.60
google play 2/013 $8.99

admob 3/2013 $218.38
google play 3/2013 $186.05

haven’t fully checked out April yet.

Currently sitting at about 220,000 downloads of all my Free apps. The main 3 are 95k, 55k and 42k. The others just fill in the remainder none really spectacular. On average about 1100 a day now.

Paid apps are very up and down from day to day. But as of today including April 493 sales. Average is about 6 a day with wild fluctuations.

Totals april 2012 - march 2013
admob - $1003.62
google play - $195.04

I have learned quite a bit so far. I really despise admobs ecpm fluctuations. Same amount of clicks but could be one third of the revenue. Also niche apps don’t go down (die off) they tend to go up in revenue and downloads (the ads supported and paid versions).

For the niche genre of 3 apps i am at the top of of the google play search. So pretty happy about that.

Well anyway that’s my story of the last 12ish months. i am still learning a lot and don’t have a handle on everything. But hey its still in the hobby realm for me. my hobby just happens to pay for my beer and some bills LOL!

Hi hubris,

A question about your soundobard, does it have recording function? Did u use any IAP or just admob?

no recording but buttloads of sound clips with just admob for ads. i am going to try out appbucks this week. haven’t tried an icon system yet should be interesting.