Johannes is the co-founder of It has not been one year since I started publishing Android income reports, but it has been far more than a year since I released my first app to the Android market, so it’s time to for my first annual report. It is structured the same way my monthly reports are but with a little more detail on certain aspects.
For all my income reports, please click here.
Which Apps?
3D Invaders – about 167,000 downloads
AL Voice Recorder – about 538,000 downloads
AL Voice Recorder Ad Free – 853 downloads
Droid-Blog.net Android App – 370 downloads
SmsToSpeech full – 722 downloads
Unfortunately I have no numbers of my app’s last years downloads, but this will sure change next year. What might be interesting to you is that all the above apps were published in 2010.
What did I do?
I made improvements on my apps, added great features and completely reworked the internals of the AL Voice Recorder. I did some App Store Optimization but invested also a lot of time into ANDLABS, the Android development company I cofounded.
Advertising Stats
Here are some statistics from the two advertising networks I’m using, AdMob and Madvertise. Please read my second income report for an explanation of the following numbers.
AdMob:
Requests: 6,539,380
Impressions: 6,339,677
Fill Rate: 96.95%
Clicks: 151,543
CTR: 2.39%
eCPM: $1.06
House Ads: 3,201,330
House Ad Clicks: 33,007
House Ad CTR: 1,03%
Adjusted Requests: 9,740,710
Adjusted Fill Rate: 65.01%
Now what’s pretty interesting here is the house Ads. When you have been following my income report series, you probably saw that my house ad requests were close to zero in the last months. This means that, in the beginning of 2011, AdMob had far less ads to serve than they have now.
Madvertise
As I’m not using house ads in madvertise, no adjusted requests and fill rates are shown here.
Requests: 4,819,463
Impressions: 917,899
Fill Rate: 19.05%
Clicks: 43,989
CTR: 4.79%
eCPM: $8.75
When you took a look at my last monthly income report, you will notice that about a quarter of my requests and impressions on madvertise were generated in December. This truly was an awesome month!
How much?
Here we go.
Madvertise:
3D Invaders: ~$6,750.41
AL Voice Recorder: ~$1,292.61
madvertise Total: ~$8043,02
3D Invaders: $2,089.43
AL Voice Recorder: $4,601.90
AdMob Total: $6,691.25
Market sales (includes In-App purchases): ~$1,595.82
Total: ~$16,330.09
That’s an average of $1,360.85 per month. Nothing one could live of in a city as expensive as Munich but, since this were only my private apps, still a satisfying result.
Analysis
Let’s analyze this a bit. A pretty interesting thing is the development of my impressions vs. my income on AdMob. Let’s look at some graphs:
AdMob impressions 2011
AdMob income 2011
As you can see, my impressions and my income totaly don’t fit at the beginning of the year. However, when taking a look at my eCPM, this correlates pretty good:
AdMob eCPM 2011
While I had lots of impressions at the beginning of the year, the eCPM AdMob provided at the end of 2011 was able to top the results of that period by several 100%.
With madvertise, I had a similar szenario income wise. As I wrote above, I made most of my impressions in the last month(s) of this year, same with my revenue:
madvertise income 2011
What’s next?
For this year I’m planing to release some awesome apps and hence want to make an awesome income. This is why my goal for this year is to have one month with an income of at least $10,000. I hope this will work out.
Please feel free to share your own experiences, hints and opinions in the comments. Please also don’t hesitate to tell me if there is anything else you’d like to get some information about.
2012/01/18 at 19:52
For $10000 you can live in Munich? :)
Very impressive and inspirational! As a side income it’s very, very good. Didn’t you think about making Android apps full time (or maybe in ANDLABS you doing this?)?
2012/01/18 at 21:48
One can even live well.
Well, indeed, that’s the purpose of ANDLABS. While I’m on my own with my apps, we are a team at ANDLABS, which is why I can’t publish the income I’m making there.
2012/01/18 at 20:29
$10000 is a really nice target income, and a giant leap from what you got now! Excited to see what your new apps are and how they will evolve :)
2012/01/18 at 21:39
He too! :D
2012/01/19 at 05:18
Hi Johannes, I’ve been reading for a while and this yearly breakdown is nice to see. Coming from someone who is preparing to drop my first ad supported app on Android, my main question for you is what do you think happened to increase eCPM so dramatically at the end of 2011? I know from your earlier postings that the Madvertise eCPM was always very good, but the really interesting thing is the big big jump for AdMob.
What was the main component of that increase, did your CTR jump way up? Essentially I’m interested to find out if you took specific action to shore that up or if it was just something that happened.
Thanks, and keep up the good work in 2012!
2012/01/20 at 23:32
Your reports are really inspiring and motivates me to continue studying Android, hoping one day I’ll get free. :)Thank you for sharing them.
2012/01/25 at 10:42
Hello Johannes, Does Madvertise alway pay your income on time? How long does it take to transfer your income to your bank account after mount end? I use Mobfox and Admob on my apps, they both pay me on time and I considering to integrate Madvertise to my apps to due to its incredible high eCPM.
2012/01/25 at 10:51
Hello insa,
good question. Yes, they pay on time, usually 40 days after the end of a month, so that’s a little faster than AdMob. My payment was delayed once, but after one mail it was on its way.
Best regards
2012/01/26 at 14:06
Hey Johannes
How are your revenues this month.
I see a great fall from both all networks we are using.
2012/01/26 at 14:15
Hey there,
well, I’ll tell you precisely next month, but definitely worse.
Best regards
Johannes
2012/01/27 at 10:00
Hi Johannes,
I’ve tried to integrate Madvertise to my apps since a couple days ago. But I got 0 click with 30k requests. Is this usually happen at beginning? Did this happen to you too? I can’t test requesting live ad because I’m living in Thailand and the sdk always return no ad error msg but I’ve tested with TestTokn and it worked fine. Hope you have some suggestion.
2012/01/27 at 12:15
Hi,
did you get any impressions?
I think it worked properly for me right from the beginning. When you where able to see the test ads, everything should be working fine. Is your app being used in Europe?
Best regards
Johannes
2012/01/28 at 08:05
hi Johannes Borchardt
1. Is Madvertise pay on time ?
2. Madvertise is support paypal ?
thanks.
2012/01/30 at 10:26
Hello hou,
1. Yes. They pay about 40 days after the end of a month.
2. No, only bank account.
Best regards
Johannes
2012/01/30 at 00:32
Hi Johannes and thanks for sharing your revenue – I think that’s a pretty important thing to do, because it gives hope to all the indy developers out there.
I started 2 months ago with making games on android – currently I pushed out Robo Miner some days ago, which performs really good and I am curious if it stays such a performer ..
Do you only publish at Android Market? I am currently not very satisfied with most of the stores because approving needs so much time and they all want different image sizes.
On Android Market I found it VERY hard to get some attention because nowadays there is no more “just in” section .. sadly..
2012/01/30 at 10:33
Hello Reiti,
thank you for the kind words.
Your app looks very nice. I publish almost only on the Android Market, but I’m aware that there are some other good markets out there. At ANDLABS we have an expert regarding this topic, I hope he will write a guest post on this soon. However, there are also lots of markets to which you didn’t publish your app, but it’s listed there anyway. For example: In the last month the AL Voice Recorder got downloaded 45k times via the Android Market and 12k times via some other sources.
Have you tried to get featured on some of the major Android blogs?
Your game looks pretty nice by the way.
Best regards
Johannes
2012/01/30 at 10:46
I regulary google up my game to see, where it shows up and stay informed about that, so there are many sites where it is listed – hopefully they are updated, because currently i throw out new versions very frequently
I haven’t tried to get featured currently – maybe I should try that :-) Robo Miner seems to be a game which is good enough to get mentioned .. thx for the tip
2012/01/30 at 11:50
I’ve just created a madvertise account. Is it not possible to use a paypal account for revenues?
2012/01/30 at 12:21
Hello Kuik,
no, as far as I know you can’t. But you can just e-mail the support, maybe there is an opportunity.
Best regards
Johannes
2012/02/03 at 05:00
Hi Johannes,
Look like you became a Madvertise consultant around here ^^. Since last time I asked you why I got no click from Madvertise ad. Currently, I got 200k requests , but the ad only served 1000+ impression! That’s ridiculous low impression number. And it’s quite different story with another ad network I’ve used on the same apps. I think my app quite popular in Europe and America, but thing turned out isn’t what I expected. Do you have any idea how to improve the impression number?
Ps. I got 11 clicks from the ad impresstions and the CPC is quite high, I hope I’ll get more in the future. ^^
2012/02/04 at 14:17
Hi there,
it seems like madvertise is still having problems bringing up enough ad campaigns. I hope it will be up soon so that a lot of you guys can get some money out of the developer fund. Let’s hope for the best.
Best regards
Johannes
2012/02/05 at 10:36
Thanks for sharing your income report again, the detail you go into really helps.. I had a similar drop with admob, worryingly enough February looks set to be worse :-\ On my best day in December I made $100 with 38k requests.. 38k requests yesterday earned $12. I had a definitive drop in ecpm on the 1st of Jan and again on the 1st of Feb, is this also the case for you?
2012/02/05 at 18:37
Hi xksr,
you ‘re welcome.
I only had one big drop which was on January 06st, from $2.45 to $1.67. After that it declined slowly but steadily. Let’s hope for better times and be innovative :)
Best regards
Johannes
2012/02/14 at 22:15
That huge spike is likely big brand advertiser spending for the Holiday season. If you’re doing worse this month then that’s definitely why.