Is publishing a No-ad version(paid) of my app worth it?

I’ve got free app on the play store ~90k downloads, generating about $5 a day…

I’ve received around 4-5 requests for a No-Ads version(paid)… But given the nature of my app, I’m not sure whether it’s really worth it.

Two things.
I update like twice a month so I’ll have to keep two projects updated with identical changes… (see the link above to know why :slight_smile:
Second, I don’t want my paid app’s apk to pop up on torrents. I know that’s probably way too paranoid for someone with just a 100k downloads, but still…

So, is it worth making a paid No-ads version of my app?
I’m looking for figures. Numbers that will compel me to do it :slight_smile:

Regards,
Xeus

Why not have an In-App Purchase that removes ads for $1.00? Personally, I did not make much money off of IAP, but it probably depends on the app.

Did you have direct payment or used something like Tapjoy’s incentivized traffic method?

You can use Googles In-App Billing to prompt the user to purchase ad-removal. Here is a link to it: In-app Billing Overview | Android Developers

People wants to make you rich, but you need to give them a way to give you money!

Definitely go with in-app purchase. This way you’ll only need to maintain one project.

Also I feel like you can do much better than $5 a day with the ads. Check out the threads in this forum for ways to squeeze the most out of your app.

I ave both: free apps + paid apps published (2different apks) and free app with IAP to remove ads.
Although it’s more work to keep both apks updated, there is an interest in publishing a free apk AND a paid APK: you show up twice more in the search results.
So it depends on your acquisition strategy I guess: if you rely mostly on search engine, you might want to try publishing 2 apks.
If you rely on paid advertising & review sites, only 1 apk with iap to remove ads might be better.

Oh yes! 2 apk’s = Twice the exposure in the play store :open_mouth:
That’s quite appealing…
But in-app billing is a bit more neat … I think I’m going to go with this only, considering the ongoing piracy of android apps.

Any more related suggestions would be much appreciated :slight_smile:

That’s totally up to you of course. Just for the sake of curiosity, is piracy such a big problem for your apps?
Unless your price is high like 5 bucks, it seems to me you don’t lose much sales, since people getting them with a torrent would not buy them on the playstore anyway… Just my 2 cents

Well not really, my app isn’t even that popular. Bit of a grey area, both methods will probably be just fine.

Actually I might go the incentive traffic way. I’m thinking of doing in-app billing only with an option to pay directly or complete some offers like those from Tapjoy.
This way I won’t have to keep two APKs. Plus, I’ll even be able to subtly put in a “Remove Ads” option on every single page (given the nature of content of my app), so it’ll always be in front of users…
More exposure = more interaction (I hope)

This is exactly the same question i just worked on.
Currently i’m implementing in app billings in all of my free apps (to remove the ads).
As my ‘full’ versions are all ranked a lot worse than the free one’s i guess unpublishing them from app store wouldn’t really matter.
However there will always be some guys not knowing that there’s also a free version, so they’ll probably buy directly the full one.

Is your price for removing ads the same as for purchasing the full version?

yes, same price, and same content. I agree with you, the exposure of the free app is much bigger than the paid one.

I think it should be exactly the same if the full version simply removes ads with no additional functionality.
Otherwise, if some user unknowingly goes for the higher price option and then discover the same thing was available for a lower price, that wouldn’t be very great for the app’s reviews.
You could try adding something else too, to make it higher price if you’d like… such as “Quicker and better Updates”, more personalized customer support etc.

Or one more concept would be to set the price of the ‘full’ version to something really high (such as 4,99€) and to set the in app billing option for removing ads in the free version to something like 0,99€ :smiley:

I had added “Remove Ads” option on 4th Jan,2014 in my Free App.
Till today, i got 24 orders and total revenue from orders is $40

But I Got?

  • extra $40, which is really not very impressive and i get this money with in 3 days from Ads.

But I lost?

  • IAP is full of bugs and does not work flawless with all the devices.
  • Few devices are crashing on IabHelper.StartUp. i have no clue why.
  • Giving bad impression for new users
  • App is crashing left and right when user trying to purchase.
  • In 80-905 cases IAP is working fine. but for rest it is crashing.
  • Frequent users are using ads-free version and decreasing the daily revenue

Bottom Line?
“Remove Ads” Order does not add up any impressive growth in daily revenue. I will try for another 1 week and may remove the option after re-reimbursing paid users.

Please share your views on this.

I inserted the in-app billing 4 days ago in 2 of my free apps (both cumulated around 13.500 active installs).
Till now i got 3 ‘remove ads’ orders, however i now decreased the price to 0,99€, i think it was too high in the beginning (1,99€).
So let’s see how this will develop within next days…

Till now i can’t confirm problems with in app billing causing crashes or errors. Had no error reports yet, also in my testing it seemed to be quite stable.

Regarding income:
If you say that you need 3 days for making 40$ with ads and now you made additional 40$ within ~2 weeks, for me this seems to be ok, or?
You also have to take into consideration, that it will take a bit (also because of distribution of new version) until the users realize that they now the possiblity to remove the ads.
And one more thing, which is maybe the most important one: Does your app / game need internet connection?
If no, then a user in general has no reason to have an internet connection activated, so he’ll anyway see no ads => no reason to buy the ‘remove ads’ package. So is guess apps that need an internet connection will have significantly higher selling rates.

yes. my App need internet connection to function.

How many active installs did you have?

Around 15000 active installs

No ‘remove ads’ sales since the last days :wink:

How are you doing?

  • 2 orders day before yesterday
  • 1 order yesterday

earlier it was average 4-5 orders daily. definitely it has come down for last one week.
Mostly my orders are coming from Russia,Slovakia,Germany,France,Spain,USA