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iOS How do free apps make money?
- Thread starter phreebees
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Depends on the ad service but I suspect most work on two fronts: impressions and click-thrus. So, a publisher (those showing the ads) get paid one rate for a certain amount of impressions (displaying various ads) and another rate for if the user clicks the ad. These are known in the industry as CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and CPC (cost per click).
Agreed, there are various articles on the web stating that its pretty damn hard to make a decent income off of advert funded apps and it isn't usually the best option to take. Having said that I'm sure some of the more popular free apps on the AppStore have made a fair amount using this method.
ive done some reading on cpm and theres one concept i dont understand; it states that cpm can dramatically decrease as impressions rise..ie: 500k impressions for a few pennies cpm..I dont understand how that works. Thanks for the replies!
It's a tricky game. I've seen estimates that paid-apps get about 1% of the download figures as a free-app. I've seen similar figures with my DEJOware apps but there are no hard-and-fast rules in this area. [app]a.k.a.[/app] probably averages around 1000 downloads per day. If I were to charge 99¢ instead of giving it away for free, I should expect to average 10 downloads per day, which would bring me $7 in revenue. Through my AdMob ads, I average $15 / day in revenue. But this is just one example.
I'll have to ask my wife about that one. She's an ad-ops person.
Way to give him 8 hours, many of which being the dead of night to get back to you.
The thread was getting pushed down, so instead of a useless 'bump' I thought Id ask him incase he'd forgotten. Lul u mad?
One more way to make money with a free app is to use it to advertise a paid app, e.g. one of the free but "Lite" apps. At least one analytics firm has published data showing that a properly timed free (but with less features) app can reverse the normal drop in sales rate of a paid app.
There's also having an app in the store just to build up ones resume. I've heard of developers getting jobs due to having a high quality (but not necessarily profitable) app in the App store on their resume.
There's also having an app in the store just to build up ones resume. I've heard of developers getting jobs due to having a high quality (but not necessarily profitable) app in the App store on their resume.
We have a free app in the AppStore called Arctic Clock, it gets downloaded around 1000 times a day now and drives a lot of traffic to our website. I feel that this reason alone is worth having a free app on the appstore for as it will increase exposure to our currently in development games when they are released.That's an example of an indirect way of making money from a free app