my android reports

I decided, to open a new thread instead of spamming my old thread with not related stuff xD

I’ve just finished my report for 05/2012

This time I talk about what I have done the last month and also for the first time ever are talking about revenue directly xD
Ultimately, I talk about all other things happened in that months, my opinions about it, so everyone can get a little insight (hopefully)

let me know if I missed something completely xD

cheers, Peter

Nice report! I’m interested to see how your ad-hiding works out for you when you have more time to see if it works. In your report you said you didn’t like AndroidPit.com because you could not remove the app. Have you tried emailing them? I once needed to remove an app from there, and emailed them and got it removed. If you need their email address I can send it to you.

No I have not tried to mail them yet - problem is, it is a paid app I want to remove and I am not very sure, if they will do it xD (1 sale… )

Also I had some issues in the past and never got a response, so that’s why I haven’t tried mailing them yet xD

The ad-hiding thingy seems to work out - I can watch the CTR rising currently … but I think that is more because of the 10min refresh …

Thank you for these reports. How many DAU and MAU you have?

I currently do not track real active users so I cannot tell you, for me it is enough to gather that information out of the daily impressions :slight_smile:

Thanks for the update. Reminds me, I should be working on my next report as well…

You say there’s “nothing special” about this month, but I think $80-$100 a day for a single app is pretty good. Certainly if you can keep it up at this level or above it would be great. That’s making nearly $0.10 per download. By comparison, I figured I was only making about $0.01 (one cent!) per user when Fake iPhone was in the top charts on the Android Market.

Looks like you made a lot of changes this month, with the Facebook page, adding MoPub and the close ad button. Will be interesting to see what effect these have throughout June, as last month was pretty stable.

I meant there was nothing special what drives me excited :slight_smile: The 80-100$ a day is not bad at all and it seems to be very steady (it was over the whole last month) - It’s just that it was really much more in that peak month - but it doesn’t make me sad or something. It is fun to maintain the game, even when the revenue would not be enough to make a good living for it (which is the only small drawback :slight_smile: )

I can remember in the first days when Robo Miner started, I was so excited when reached the 100$/day mark :slight_smile:

Hallo Reiti,
it’s nice to see how much effort you put into your app, but I guess you are wrong, if you expect more downloads, higher usages of the game and therefore a higher income.

The good and bad thing is, that you can make money with a crap app, if it is just visible to more people then other apps. Your app isn’t crap, but it isn’t visible to produce more downloads.

I think you should, if you make 80$ per day. Write into blogs on a daily basis spread links to the google play store, if you want to do it cheap :slight_smile:
Marketing is very important, if not the most important part. Try to find out (make some calculations), how much revenue an average user produces per month, and put an amount below that into advertisement. Define how much a new customer can cost (you have to buy them, through marketing).
Find out how expensive your customers are. If your downloads are remaining the same over time, that’s a good start. 0 cost = x downloads. Put 80 Bucks per day into advertisement for one month. Measure your average daily downloads. And your daily ad imcome. Does it improve? What is the relation between ad impressions and active users / revenue and so on, try to find some key indicators on the internet. 80 Bucks is a good base. :slight_smile: You might say it’s wasted money, but that’s an investment. You should still make 80$ a day (if you keep up the good work), plus maybe 1$ extra through marketing effects, that makes 120 $ per day, and after 4 months you have got back your investment. (don’t take these numbers too serious, but I hope to get the point, that marketing might be more important than programming) :slight_smile:
Do it, until you reach a momentum, so you get featured and your downloads gets a boost. So the play store takes over free-marketing for you… Then your investments are even more successful. If you aren’t happy with your investments, try to improve them, by targeting the ads for a specific group. Find out in which country you have the best ecpm, advertise only people in these countries. (investment : return ratio is better), Who are your users? Men, women, age? Use your facebook page to find out target these groups, and so on and so on :slight_smile:

The life-cycle of mobile apps is very short. And the personal usage period is short too. Try to socialize it, to keep it more interesting, this might help to extend the use of the game per customer, long-term customers are the good ones, you only need to invest once, but they longer produce revenue.
Facebook is good for an information exchange, so customers, which already know your game and like it might like it on facebook, and post their ideas for improvements, but nobody would search for the game if he doesn’t know what to search for.

I sounds pretty easy, but it isn’t :slight_smile: But I know, that most independent devs concentrate on the development. But it doesn’t work like that. In your report you just moved to
I didn’t get rich either, but I don’t have 80 Bucks (which I would call a lot) per day to spend :slight_smile:

G.

HI Genom

I am pretty sure there are methods out there where you can make every app being a big seller - but unfortunately I lack the real knowledge about it and also (more important) I don’t find it funny enough to do it all the day :slight_smile: That’s why my website projects were never really successful xD

Currently I am experimenting very much in concerns of marketing and try to invest into improving it. My current experiment with the 10-min-refresh costs me around 20$ a day (currently)

I am one of these persons who do not trust always what other ppl say, so I have to experience it by myself - that costs time and money - but, well, that’s me :wink: I always did it that way and was driving good with it most of the time.

Also I want to step into investing into advertising - I just wanted to do it right now. But admob have removed the possibility to transfer funds - wth? are they crazy? So I may use another advertiser for this purpose.

As some of you know, I recently tried to go more into socialising but I am very new with it and also I am a nice guy and just cannot annoy people by flooding them with invites and such things - I feel not comfortable with it but I know that this is not very helpful in concerns of making your products popular xD

If Robo Miner will not recover to a higher level I have some ideas which I think will be very positive but also means a lot of work to do - so I do have some plans.

You are also right (all of you) when you tell, that 80/day is a lot for many people but not in concerns of business and hours-of-work. Robo Miner delivered over 300$ a day at its best - so the 80$ looks a bit odd - but don’t get me wrong, I am NOT unsatisfied with it, I am pretty sure Robo Miner paid off the involved work, so everything what comes now is a clear plus and only needs to support the work for future updates.
That’s also the reason, why I am willing to do experiements which cost me revenue or being willed to pay for advertising (which would be also some sort of experiment for me)

Also currently I am thinking much about outsourcing different tasks I don’t want to do myself … one of them is marketing, but it is hard to find serious partners in that business …

I’ve just took some time to make my new report ready, I will talk about some results in a brief overview about mopub and the results about the close-ad-button, my experiment and other activites

http://www.reiti.net/personal-blog/blog/122/android-report-062012

Finally I also interlinked my report posts xD

Thanks for these reports. They really do help, we will see how much when my game comes out(Still months away from that).

Just remember, that many things will differ depending on what type of app or game you are making and so will differ the experiences you (or others) will make.

I don’t want to give any receipt of “how to do it proper” because mainly I am also a newbie and do not know how to do it proper xD But hopefully people can workout some information from my posts and get confidency in their work by reading, knowing that other “n00bs” can do it also xD

And I highly recommand getting different income streams. Software Business is much like many ups and downs like stock. Personally I would not want to solely rely on android development. You never know when the next game hit comes out which will immediatly have an impact on your revenue

Wow reiti, thanks for these amazing reports and for being so transparent!! This is very helpful :slight_smile:

Interesting to see adMob was performing best of those networks. I had the impression it is rather on the low side. How was the revenue from MoPub marketplace compared to the rest? I’m looking into implementing mediation for my apps but if adMob is best anyway it won’t be a huge gain.

Do you mind sharing specific eCPMs from this month for all the networks you tried?

I am not completely sure, because with the marketplace there you set your minimum accepted eCPM for accepting their ads. obviously I set that below that one from admob. Also my apps at admob does not generate many impressions (maybe 10-15k a month) so they may not deliver an accurate result over the performance of mopub marketplace

Indeed I have not looked in their marketplace very detailed how it actually works - that is still on my todo list to get the most out of it.

Also I get not so much clicks per day, but getting over-average CPC … no idea why because the CTR is not so good either … so thats more a bit of questionmark for me and looks a bit random …

It is also interesting, that for Minesweeper: Unlimited! for example the revenue of ads is nearly the same as revenue from adfree version (paid)

Just made my july report ready :wink:

http://www.reiti.net/personal-blog/blog/137/android-report-072012