Incentivized downloads - where you give incentive to an app user to download another app - whether it belongs to you or not - has a long history on Android.
For example Tapjoy, GetJar, Sponsorpay etc. all have these schemes where the user can earn coins etc. if they download apps from an appwall. These coins then can be used in their app to remove ads etc.
Usually they will pay the developer maybe $0.04 to $0.08 or so per app. Which means to earn $1 the user would have to download about 10 to 20 apps - which is a LOT.
However, you can see how much those downloads are worth. Compare that to non-incentivized downloads - where similar appwall is presented to user - but the download of an app is completely up to the user if they do it or not - they don’t get anything extra from it. Presumably this leads to less incentive to download an app and if someone does it it is a “higher quality” user i.e. one less likely to uninstall the app immediately because they only wanted the incentive i.e. the coins they would ear as on Tapjoy, GetJar or Sponsorpay etc.
So there non-incentivized downloads can earn a developer $0.18 or so from AppBrain appwalls.
So you can see the difference.
Now if you are allowing users to remove ads - which may be worth say $1 per app - for downloading just one of your apps - then that is rewarding the user very highly. Plus you are losing that user and no longer contributing to revenue.
Perhaps you can instead just run what are called “House Ads” in your ad space in the other apps to promote your apps - they won’t flock to download the new app - but you will get some downloads.
Now examining the other side of the argument - there maybe some value to having users download your new app and rewarding them heavily for it - i.e. removing ads completely FOREVER for that user.
And that is that - what is the lifetime value of a user for you - if you did not remove ads but kept them - how much would he earn you typically until he uninstalls the app ?
The answer is probably maybe $0.01 or $0.05 or something - but that may be for a typical downloader - a user who is bothering to remove ads may be a serious user of your old app - and thus may be MORE valuable than the “typical” downloader who downloads and then immediately uninstalls. On the other hand a serious user of your app may never click on ads - it may be the more idiotic user who does so - so it is not clear whether you lose more or less if you stop getting revenue from your “serious” user.
Another aspect which may FAVOR promoting a new app at any cost. If you have 10 apps with 1000 users each - and if you are willing to lose revenue from those - to instead get 10,000 users on your new app - it could be argued that the concentration of users in a single app is better than having it in many apps - because it raises that app above others in rankings - and since we know ranking is nonlinear - i.e. as you rise up in ranking, the download numbers become phenomenal.
So it could be argued that sacrificing all the other downloads or their value in order to bolster one new app - may have some logic to it - as it concentrates all your goodwill into one app - and the effect of that may make it stand up much higher in rankings - and that might make it give back not proportionately more - but much more than proportionate - because the rankings have non-linear downloads as you go up in rankings.
On the other hand if the bump for your app is only going to take it from rank 500 to rank 400 - that may not make a huge difference. The ranking affect I mention above may apply to top 10 apps in a category maybe or maybe top 50 apps even etc. … ?
