Your earnings per user

Hi everyone:

I am opening this thread to discuss about the potential earning per user you could have using different advertisement units. The idea is that everyone tells how much has one earned per user and what ad units did one used. The idea is to provide some useful information to determine the number of installs necessary to make the app economically benefitial and to provide a benchmark reference value for earnings per user for different ad units.

In my case, the numbers for Lights of the Atlantis are:

2.600 Google Play + 6.800 Slideme = 9.400 downloads.

By using a leadbolt banner during the menus (NOT in play) + leadbolt interstitial after every completed stage i have earned just $9.17 dollars.

So i am currently doing 0.1 cents per install approx.

I have much less downloads, and I’m using only admob smart banner (Not in play for the first game, only in play for the second, 120s refresh both). I find it very difficult to track download numbers, because the apk ends up in various stores without me putting it there. Tracking the “income” is much easier, sadly…

Here are the numbers :
Google play : 288 Downloads
Samsung : 1256
SlideMe : 244 (Submitted less than a week ago)

Baixaki (not submitted) : 348
1mobile (not submitted) : 264
apkbrain (not submitted) : 281
mobi.tuitku.com (not submitted) : 84

Total downloads I know of : 2 765
Earnings : $5.06

Ratio : 0.18 cent per download.

The first game (tower defense) earned me $1.38, and the second game has earned me more than twice in half the time (logical puzzle) : $3.58 so far (1.66$ first day on Samsung store). Not to mention that the second one was created in much less time.

I hope it will help beginners and would-be developers : not every one ends up making big money on first attempt. Oh, and by the way, I intent to go on trying, I have many projects (and so little time to work on these because of my day job). I still hope that given enough time, it will eventually turn into one of those success story.

I’ve calculated 0.2 cent per user. But it might be very imprecise calculation. Hard to tell really, depends on too many variables.

If you keep trying, you will get what yo want!
My first and only app (Lights of the Atlantis) its a total failure in terms of downloads, but that only gives me more motivation for the next one. Learn from your mistakes and improve for the next one ;-)!

Averaging about 2 cents per user with StartApp, SendDroid, Admob, AppBrain, AppBucks and Airpush varied through my apps.

1 cent per user
im using startapp, admob, and revmob links(more games button)

Before I launch into a long tirade - just some comments off the top of the head.

I recently reduced Leadbolt HTML AppWall (interstitial) ads - that I was showing a bit too often - and extended repeat time from 3 min to 3x that much.

Overall revenue from that did not drop that much. So there is something to be said about overpresentation - there are only so many interstitials users are going to click on - and it may even help to intermix between two different types so there is some “novelty” element.

I have also seen that banner ads which are different (for example Admob banner ad vs. AppBrain banner ads which are text-only and say “Download more apps”) are less likely to cut into each others’ revenue.

Otherwise excessive showing of banner ads may also hinder interstitial revenue (as user is tired of ads or just jaded from overpresentation).

Others here have pointed out changing the refresh rate for Admob banner ads from 60 sec to 120 sec - to get better CTR (show fewer ads for longer they are more likely to get clicked in the per-ad sense) - and “supposedly” that may affect how Admob doles out ads to developers - i.e. a high CTR app may be given better higher paying ad inventory (though I don’t know what relevance this has - except for the very slight that Google has to server fewer ads and save on bandwidth costs - though I haven’t seen any real numbers to back this up).

If you are using Admob mediation - then that has a separate refresh rate setting for each entry in the mediation apps list - so change that as well.

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With about 2500-3000 DAU for 2 apps, I am seeing about $20 revenue (less sometimes) per day. That is about 0.7 cent per user (so on the low end of what people mentioned here).

But this is with:

  • banner ads
  • Leadbolt HTML AppWall interstitial
  • AppBrain interstitial-on-exit

That is, no push or icon or such ads (i.e. no startapp/sendroid etc.).

However my apps have very low retention - i.e. novelty types and may have little “getting hooked” factor.

The reason Airpush push notification and such are a completely additive (i.e. not cannibalistic) factor maybe because - as noted here by others - they tend to do a bit of subterfuge.

That is, the ad types are “outside-the-app” - or are delayed by 24 hours - which is sufficient diversion that users may not associate the ad with the app (though now push ads do get identified by the app - which may lead to uninstall) or do not appear while user is running the app (leaving the app free to show other ads).

startapp icon only appears once when the user install the app and if he delete the icon it wont show again
if you use startapp you will get 0.7 cents average from each user (that’s what i get) which in your case will mean doubling your revenue

use this link if you want to sign up to startapp … StartApp - Developer Register

Anagram Hero:
$746.53 over 10222 users installed = $0.073 per user. Banners only.

Total sessions: 360615 … or 35 sessions/user.

That is an insane amount of revenue for every user - and that suggests your users are returning again and again to your app - the 35 sessions per user figure confirms that as well. For a novelty app etc. it would be closer to 4 sessions per user perhaps (i.e. your users are returning 10x what I am seeing) - which matches your higher revenue per user.

Maybe you can do a calculation to see if it would be worthwhile spending some money on promoting your app to give it downloads - perhaps launch it again (so it gets the fillip of a new app).
Though acquired users via “Download this app” campaigns may be of lower quality vs. those acquired organically through word of mouth etc. (as you are currently doing).

Let’s see - if you show banner ads or on AppWalls - that typically gets CTR of 2.5% or so - if those ads cost around $1 to $5 eCPM - i.e. paying say $5 for 1000 impressions - CTR of 2% gives 20 downloads). So you spend $5 to get 20 downloads - or $0.25 per download or so.

So this is certainly MORE expensive than your recovery.

BUT if you choose to spend money to promote that gets you into higher rankings - then it maybe worth it (give you have already spent $1K here or there - then maybe spend $1K - and that would get 4K downloads.

Hmm … that wouldn’t really change much i.e. wouldn’t get you consistenly noticed by Google ranking algorithms.

How about spending $10K within a week - that would get 40K downloads in a week - and would certainly propel you to top spots - but after that week there would be a slow decline (unless there is some viral upkeep).

Interesting conundrum - maybe someone has better ideas …

One of my games make me $0.015 per User :slight_smile: Not bad if you ask me.

The cheapest solution seems to be that you optimize the title or name of the app - so you better leverage just random search by users.

And as suggested earlier - the icon as well (since it gives no clue about what the app does - so box type picture of word game maybe better).

Secondly you could CONSIDER - I know this will be intellectually non-sensical for you, since you would want to be innovating your apps - to launch the Anagram Hero as a COMPETITOR to your Word Hero - as opposed to just a “complementary” app. Which I am assuming you were thinking when you did “Anagram” stuff.

The logic behind this would be that you are NOT going to be cannibalistic if you do so - but would in essence have two similar funnels by which you direct random search traffic that is looking for word/board games.

I can confirm that putting two competing apps might not be a bad idea. I once released a completely rebuilt version of my game as a new app and the downloads of the old one didn’t drop - it’s still popular while the new one reached similar popularity. The only problem is that for some time the new one was causing the old one to drop on the lists. But in the end it was worth it (in revenue terms).

From: Monetizing Apps ? What is Working? - NativeX

ARPD ranges from $0.37 (What’s the Word?) to $7.04 (Rage of Bahamut).

ARPD = AVERAGE REVENUE PER DOWNLOAD

I’m making about 1 cent per download with Admob banners. I don’t want to name the app, but it is an app that gets new content continuously during the day. Some of my users launch it multiple times a day and the average user launches it more than 0.5 times a day. Pretty good I think!

I’m currently getting about 300 downloads a day on average and my star rating is a little bit shaky because of bugs in the app so it’s not going to make me rich anytime soon and I don’t really want it to go viral or anything right now even if it were possible because I’m worried about the rating, but I think it has potential to become a nice supplementary income for me over the next six months or so.

The only real trick that I’ve employed is to translate my app description in the Google Play store to all of the languages using machine translation. It’s crappy, but it instantly increased the number of downloads I got by a factor of 3. Most people search for apps using their own language, so if all you’ve got is an English app description then almost all of your downloads will be from English speaking countries. I have gotten zero complaints about the machine translation so far.

If you chose to do this, do translate it back to English and check for blatant errors in meaning. Change the original text (make it simpler and more straightforward to make it easier for the translation algorithm to get it right), translate, translate back and check again. Repeat until the back translation is factually correct.

WOW. I wish I had more to say. But WOW.

If you thought those numbers were impressive, you would SHIT YOURSELF if you saw Candy Crush’s. That sucker has been top of the grossing charts for months!

On a side note, I claim that Google’s ranking/search is borked when it comes to app discovery. We can deduce that number of installs vs active installs counts for (almost) nothing. Same thing for ratings. Anagram Hero has a good rating, gets multiple uses per day for 2x longer than the category average… you would think the install rate would be higher than yesterday’s typical 48 installs…

The problem seems to be that most of the factors that the algorithm uses can get drowned out by number of recent downloads. This mainly seems to happen in the games category. In other words: it seems you need a really good spike in downloads to get a game to rise above other games and catch on. Once a game has a high rate of downloads it seems it becomes virtually unstoppable even if it gets lots of poor ratings. Other games end up virtually dead in the water with 50 downloads per day. Google should probably adjust the way that their algorithm values recent download rate, they should make it more logarithmic or something.