Android Income Report #9: January 12

January is over, time to sum things up.

If you are new to this series, let me explain it to you: Since Android is an open platform, I decided to be open about the income I’m making with my private Android apps too. In the last report I aimed to reach $4,000 for the last month. You will see if it worked out.

For all income reports, please click here.

Which Apps?

3D Invaders – about 192,000 installs (+25k), 16% active

AL Voice Recorder – about 592,000 installs (+53k), 23% active

AL Voice Recorder Ad Free – 913 installs (+60), 41% active

Droid-Blog.net Android App – 404 installs (+34), 15% active

SmsToSpeech full – 726 installs (+4), 38% active

A solid 79 k new downloads, nothing to complain about.

What did I do?

As some of you noticed, madvertise had a weak start into the new year. This made me work on my apps – I pushed updates for 3D Invaders and the AL Voice Recorder and worked a lot on my next app in the evenings. Furthermore, I invested 140k of the unused requests at madvertise to promote the 3D Invaders facebook page.

Advertising Stats

Here are some statistics from the two advertising networks I’m using, AdMob and Madvertise. Please read the second income report for an explanation of the following numbers.

AdMob:

Requests: 708,043 (+15k)

Impressions: 694,680 (+14k)

Fill Rate: 98.11% (-0.06%)

Clicks: 17.993 (-11.4k)

CTR: 2.59% (-1.74%)

eCPM: $1.31 (-$1.21)

House Ads: 937 (-406)

Adjusted Requests:  708,980 (+14k)

Adjusted Fill Rate: 97.98% (+-0.0%)

Madvertise

Requests: 1,204,155 (-83k)

Impressions: 160,285 (-46k)

Fill Rate: 13.31% (-2.74%)

Clicks: 6,511 (-3,621)

CTR: 4.06% (-0.84%)

eCPM: $6.48 (-$3.84)

The lower AdMob CTR is obviously related to the 140 thousand house ad impressions at madvertise that overlayed the “real” ads of AdMob. madvertise on the other hand had a weak start into the year, resulting in lower eCPMs and in a lower fill rate. I hope this will change again soon, but I’m confident.

How much?

Here are the numbers:

madvertise:

3D Invaders: ~$870.95

AL Voice Recorder: ~$169.19

madvertise Total: ~$1,040.14 (-$1,096.15)

 

AdMob:

3D Invaders: $289.63

AL Voice Recorder: $617.46

AdMob Total: $907.09 (-$805.27)

 

Market sales: ~$134.82 (+$40.09)

In-App purchases: ~$12.18 (+$2.82)

 

Total: ~$2,094.23 (-$1,858.51)

Compared to the last month, that’s a really bad result. However, January seems to be a harder month for ad networks than December, so it’s somewhat understandable that they both, but madvertise in particular, performed bad. When calculating the 140k house ads into money, that would be about $200, so AdMob should be close to a satisfying result again once I switch those off.

What’s next?

I didn’t reach the goal I set in the last month, so it’s $4,000 for this month again. I will put a lot of work into the app I’m currently working on, hoping I can start the beta phase early March. We will see.

 

Please feel free to share your own experiences and hints in the comments. Please also don’t hesitate to tell me if there is anything else you’d like to get some information about.

78 Comments

  1. Rico Saage

    2012/02/04 at 15:33

    Hey Johannes, I would also share this month my information. I had written some very simple games and apps, because I did not have much time.
    So here’s the results of my second month:

    Requests: 672k (+375 k)
    Income: $ 210 (+99 $)
    my CTR are lower than 1%
    my eCPM is lower than $ 0.40! I dont under stand this .. because my Fillrate is nearly 100% this month ..

    Thank you for sharing your information.
    Grüße aus Leipzig. ;)
    Rico

  2. You have VERY good eCPM at Admob compared to me: $1,31 vs. $0,21 O_o Any tips how to get it? :)

    • Hi Pawel,

      it depends on you app of course. When for example your users don’t use your app with their fingers often but rather read content, the barrier to make them click an ad is of course way higher than when you have an app that, like 3D Invaders, makes them hit the screen four times per second in order to shoot down some enemies.

      Best regards
      Johannes

  3. You have lost more than 50% on madvertise. But this is still good. I have only 20-25% of the revenue from december. Some android apps got a very low fill rate. I hope madvertise will get back higher revenues, because it is still good. I have added some other networks, when madvertise has no ads. At moment i try mobfox, inmobi, admob and millennial. I think next month i can say more about the success. But because of bad revenue this month, i switch to paid apps.

  4. Great numbers – very inspiring ! Can I ask how you obtained so many downloads for your main app AL Voice Recorder initially ? Do you think it was the name of the app, the description or just the market ie there are a lot of people who want this type of app ? I’m just starting out on Android and would love some insight into how you initially get traction.

    • Hello Mike,
      I think it was a combination of the three things you said. The big pro of a voice recorder is that it is type of app of which many people know they want it, so you don’t have to tell them, which is cheap. Whether that’s the case depends on your app of course.

      Best regards
      Johannes

  5. This is my first time seeing a report like this. I am a third year CS student, and it is very interesting. I am definetally going to try and make an app, even if it can only make $50/mo Thanks for making this information public!!!

  6. The money is in consulting for android apps, not for developing them on the app store. You have to be pretty lucky to get significant money out of it. Getting a job developing android, you’re going to get 5-10x the revenue you’re getting now.

    • Hello John,

      that’s true indeed, but it’s also way less fun and satisfying. Still, consulting can result in a higher learning curve because it forces one to deal with areas one probably wouldn’t touch when not doing it. Personally I think consulting and the development of own products produce great synergy effects and can profit from each other. What are your experiences?

      Best regards
      Johannes

  7. Dude, thanks for sharing this. It is good to see someone who is open about the actual goings on behind their app development, as I feel many people just utterly BS their results!

    Once again, Kudos to you :)

  8. The link to view all income reports does not work.

  9. when i click on comments on any article of your blog opera mini browser fails to transload. Maybe a plugin problem…..plz fix

  10. eCPM for Robo Miner is dropping since a week, startet at 1.40 and is now at 0.80 – impressions rising strong (40k yesterday, ~5k installs) .. still waiting for lagging clicks yesterday (normally they come in at around 17:00h)

    Maybe I’ll put up an income report to at the end of feb – maybe that’s good info for people just starting now to develop because many things changed in marktet since last year :-)

    • Hi Reiti,
      That’s good and bad news. 40k requests for 5k installs is awesome! Is the CTR dropping too? If yes, your users might have become a bit more aware of the ads which might decrease accidental clicks.

      Best regards
      Johannes

  11. “all reports” link

    you have to remove the date from the link, just category/money-income – you have the date in the link (at top of article) so it doesn’t work

    • I see. That seems to be a wordpress-problem since this doesn’t happen when clicking the link from the homepage. However, I updated the link to post to the exact same location, now it seems to work. Thank you Reiti and lonnylot.

  12. Hi,

    Almost half this month, but still great in my opinion.

    Have you published your apps at Amazon store?

    I published my game to android market, but after a month I got only 1023 total downloads with 357 active installs :(

    • Hi Rava,

      no, not yet (lazyness), but I’m considering it since I heard it’s performing great since the Kindle Fire came out.
      May I ask what your game is called?

      Best regards
      Johannes

  13. It’s me again :-) The CTR is realtivly stable (dropping very slowly) and yesterday was at 1.35 Worse: the CPM for yesterday was only 0.64 :-(

    I dont know the exact amount of installs, because I published on many stores and most of them count downloads, not installs (and google lags heavily).. I guess around 5-8k is the current amount .. maybe I’ll try some other ad-networks in the future..

    Another game uses madvertise also .. fillrate ~1% no clicks so far :-)

  14. I am also at amazon store, maybe you wanna read my article about my experiences there:

    About Amazon App Store (from a Developer)

  15. Hi Johannes,

    Your blog has been a great inspiration to me and I want to pay you back by sharing my own results with you. My game (Cherry Chaser Slot Machine) has only been on the market for three weeks so I can’t do a full month report but here are my stats for last week (7 days, 30 Jan – 5th Feb).

    AdMob:
    Requests: 3,990,419
    Impressions: 3,971,529
    Fill Rate: 99.5%
    Clicks: 31,045
    CTR: 0.78%
    eCPM: $0.36
    Revenue: $1410.71

    No house ads.

    Madvertise

    I added Madvertise support on the 4th Feb and haven’t got enough data to report yet. For the first few days fill rate has been 1% or less and daily earnings less than €10. Today it is on 3% so hopefully things will gradually improve. CTR is a bit higher on Madvertise ads with a 1.5% rate and ecpm is at €0.88.

    I’ve been very lucky and found a small gap in the market for a “european style” slot machine game. I think it also helps to be in the less competitive “cards and casino” section of the market. I think my relatively low ecpm is largely due to me wanting to make the ads in my game somewhat unobtrusive, I feel that has helped with its popularity which is a good compensation.

    I released an update on the 4th (that added madvertise support amongst other things) and that shot my impressions up to almost 800k per day. At the same time my CTR and ecpm both went down substantially so I did not really feel the benefit in terms of revenue. My ecpm continues on a downward trend at the moment and yesterday was only $0.26, I hope it picks up again soon.

  16. I was inspired and wrote my of summary of Android revenue. And linked to this blog. Take a look here; http://bitbetter.se/2012/02/08/android-income-report-2011/

  17. Yesterday I published my 1st app: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.idiotizador

    I use Admob & Madvertise. Admob seems to be working fine (140 impresisons today with a 100% fill rate), however in Madvertise I see 1.132 requests with 0% fill rate; on their site I’ve noticed that all the ads seems to be from German. Could be this the reason why I did not get yet a single impression?
    Is the madvertise refresh rate configurable?
    How about Mobfox? Anyone has tested it?

    Thanks

  18. I’ve forgotten to tell on my previous msg:

    When I was testing mad ads with the testoken all seemed well. But when I was using my real token I got many 204 errors (ok) but most of the errors were timeouts after not getting a response to my ad request.

    Aren’t those mad ads requests too many?

    • Hi Kuik,
      You can adjust your refresh rate to decrease the number of requests. You can also increase the timeout in the MadvertiseUtil-class (default is 10 seconds). 204 usually indicates that your device’s header is not yet know to the madvertise server, those of my Galaxy Nexus also isn’t yet. madvertise seems to have some problems with gaining enough ad campaigns at the moment, let’s hope this will change soon.
      I didn’t try Mobfox so far, any experiences would be appreciated though.

      Best regards
      Johannes

  19. Thanks for your reply.

    Most of the people that have downloaded my app are from Spain (90%) and after 5 days I have not received a single impresion from madvertise.
    Requests Ad Impressions
    43.683 0

    So all my revenue is coming from Admob where my CTR is 2% and eCPM is $0.46.

    I will do some tests increasing the timeout value and if I do not success I think I will just remove madvertise from my app.

  20. madvertise surely have a nice eCPM (I think) but taking that low fillrate into account the (true) eCPM is much much lower – clickrate should be the same as on admob (comparing on request not impressions) .. so is madvertise worth the extra implementation effort ..?

    • That’s true indeed. For me, the impressions I get from madvertise are worth more than those by AdMob they replace, so in my case: It’s clearly worth it.
      How do you think?

  21. I’ve just been contacted by Madvertise by email letting me know that I’m no longer eligible for the Developer Fund as my app has reached 1 million impressions. As my CTR is quite low that equates to an income of about 770€. They’ve also added that means my income reports will not be accurate for the rest of the month.

    Thought you might like to know about this because I’d not bothered to read the small print of the terms and conditions.

    • Hi Rich,

      thank you for the information.
      I already knew that and think it’s a bit sad since many campaigns are bound to the developer fund. However, the fund will expire with the end of this month, so I think the issue probably isn’t that big anymore. I’m curious about their performance in the next months.

      Best regards
      Johannes

  22. hi Johannes,

    Its good to see the income reports every month, and hopefully madvertise will come up soon.

    I have just launched an app called HideSecrets
    https://market.android.com/details?id=com.diskcache

    I initially integrate Madvertise, but it was taking lot of time to show an ad, and was sucking lot of resources (my observation can be wrong), do you have any idea for any possible reason for the same ?

    At last I integrated mobClix, I’ll post the stats once I get some considerable number of downloads.

    If you get time to review the app, please lemme know your thoughts, I will really appreciate it :)

    Thank you.

    Regards,
    Tejas

    • Hi Tejas,

      thank you for your comment.
      Your app looks nice on the screenshots, but I’m not able to open by dialing 1111 on ICS, so I couldn’t test it yet.

      I had mobclix integrated for some time a while ago, still haven’t seen any money, but I also didn’t earn much (see the first income report). Best luck, I hope you will be successful!

      Best regards
      Johannes

  23. Hi everybody!

    In first place I want to congratulate Johannes for this blog! It’s a great motivation to read your successful results.

    Has anyone found a solution for the Madvertise’s OnClickListener? I ll aprecciate if you share it.

    Thanks,

    Regards from Spain! :)

  24. Mike Niles

    2012/02/16 at 11:28

    You are building on sand. When you rely on users “hit the screen four times per second in order to shoot down some enemies” and accidentally click ads you will get banned by ad networks and all your income will drop to a full 0.

    Kudos on the fact that your scam with accidental clicks worked long enough even with the dumb exposure you’re submitting yourself to.

    • Hello Mike,

      thank you for your critical comment.
      Please don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to say that I’m targeting or relying on accidental clicks or that anyone else should do that. What I want to point out though is that there are apps with a smaller barrier for ad clicks and some with naturally higher barriers (for example speed indicators).
      Is there a certain way you prefer to monetize your apps instead of ads? If so, how are your experiences?

      Regarding the exposure: When I published my first app to the Market with the intention to make profit, I think it would had been very encouraging to see what’s possible to achieve with some rather simple apps. That’s why, as long as other people like them, I will probably continue with this kind of reports.
      Is there anything you don’t like about the income reports in particular or do you just don’t like them at all?

      Best regards and thank you again
      Johannes

  25. @ Johannes – you can add widget “Disk Cache” and than put 1111 there, the app would get opened.

    • Now I’m getting it, thank you.
      I have three things:
      1. I experienced a FC when clicking on “Messages”.
      2. The “Share”-View has a clickable area that is way smaller than the other ones.
      3. I tried to lock an app (Fruit Shoot) but it could still be opened
      Other than that, it looks great and very promissing.

      Best regards
      Johannes

  26. I am pretty sure nearly every ad gets accidental hits – no matter if it that is supposed by the uthor or not. Many ads themselfs are built up with exact that target – but maybe that’s just another type of accidental hits, which Mike don’t care for.

    As long as your CTR is at a natural level no-one will ever close your account, because there is no reason for that (except arbitrariness).

  27. @Reiti: I’m thinking about move my banner ad from bottom to the top of view, because I have CTR close to 2,6%. Is that normal? I’m using category filters, so maybe ads are better fitted.

  28. @pawel I would suppose every CTR below 5% as highly normal, and every over 20% as abnormal :-) But that’s just my opinion

  29. @ Johannes – Thanks very much for testing the app and words of encouragement, I didnt chk the app in ICS, but I’ll do it now and will resolve all the issues.

    Thanks once again.

  30. Hi Johannes!

    Thanks for trying help me, but it stills dosent works :(

    I try with:


    mMadView.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {

    @Override
    public void onClick(View v) {
    // TODO Auto-generated method stub
    haveClickBanner = true;

    }
    });

    And this..

    mMadView.setOnTouchListener(new View.OnTouchListener() {

    @Override
    public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) {
    haveClickBanner = true;
    return false;
    }
    });

    Please can you share your code for handle the ad click on madvertise?

    Thanks for your help!

    Iván Martínez

    • Hi Iván,
      when taking a look into the madvertise SDK here, you will notice that the click event is absorbed by the MadvertiseView, so no listeners will be called. What you have to do instead is go into the SDK’s MadvertiseAd-class and put your own listener or handler somewhere into the handleClick()-method. It should then look something like this:
      protected void handleClick() {
      if (mClickUrl != null && !mClickUrl.equals("")) {
      Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, Uri.parse(mClickUrl));
      intent.addFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK);

      try {
      mContext.startActivity(intent);
      if (mCallbackListener != null) {
      mCallbackListener.onAdClicked();
      }
      } catch (Exception e) {
      MadvertiseUtil.logMessage(null, Log.DEBUG, "Failed to open URL : " + mClickUrl);
      if (mCallbackListener != null) {
      mCallbackListener.onError(e);
      }
      e.printStackTrace();
      }
      }
      }

      I hope this was helpful,
      best regards
      Johannes

  31. You said: that you get banned when a app reaches a CTR of about 8%,but that would be mean, that you can change your refresh rate to 12sec and you have more impressions and so a far lower click rate, but the same number of clicks and the same income…if I’m not mistaken?Give AdMob some warnings bevor they bann your app?Did your whole account get banned or just this one app-advertisement?
    Best regards Rico

    • Hello Rico,

      My apps where banned on madvertise, I’ve never been banned on AdMob. When being banned on madvertise, one’s app won’t receive any ads for 24 hours. Since the refresh rate is not transferred to the server, this ‘workaround’ definitely is possible with madvertise. There is no warning, it’s just the typical one or zero thing.

      Best regards
      Johannes

  32. Sweet I can believe you are making that much money. It makes me want to finish my game and get it into the market even faster. I have also started writing Android Income Reports which you can see at androidappprofits.com if you are interested. I would also like to do a link share with you. Send me an email at the address above. Anyway your blog keeps me excited about Android Apps and maybe, just maybe quitting my day job eventually.

    • Hi Steve,

      thank you for sharing. It’s interesting to see your success with notification ads. How is the user feedback regarding this kind of ads?

      Best regards
      Johannes

  33. there are many reasons why admob can bann your app – they wouldn’t tell you why they banned it, so you have to guess. They can have so many reasons, it’s not as simply as just saying “CTR over xx%” maybe they checked it and found a froud against their ToS

  34. Thanks Johannes! It works like a charm!

    I just read the “Bearded Robot Apps” reports, and I cant believe how well works notification ads, amazing!

    I think it will be a good idea to open a new topic to talk over all these new kind of ads (App walls, Notification, Desktop icons..)

    Best regards,

    Iván Martínez

  35. I have had one user complain about the notification ads. I would also like to mention that I dont pound the user with them like some other apps i have seen on the market. The trick is to get a balance between impressions and not ticking off the user. If you like I could do a guest post on how I run my notification ads. This would cover how soon one is shown, how often per month and some other small things. Let me know what you think.

  36. The problem with notification ads is: The user often does not know which app is issuing them .. so you are going stealth, especially when showing them not instantly after installation. That will make your app acting like malware/adware and tricking them.. not my way and if I download such an app, I would flame it all over the net .. even installers nowdays asks the user if they accept the install of a toolbar or other nonsens

    • I see this as a problem too. Personaly, I installed an app with notification ads once accidentally which and once I noticed, this was the end of this app on my device.

  37. I agree with you that notifications are stealthy. But so it putting a button on your app that says “new top apps” when this is actually pointing to and app wall(advertisments). Also malware is malicious and disrupts a users os, which notification ads dont do. Yes notifications are considered adware, but so is any app that has ad’s integrated in it. For instance Angry Birds is adware because they show ads. I’ll bet 95% of the apps on the market are showing some form of advertising, which is adware.

    We could argue what is right or we could look at what form of advertising works best. In the case of notifications they work a lot better than banner ads. Would you rather have tons of impressions with very little to show for it or a few impressions with plenty to show for it. When you get up around a couple million downloads it would probably be the time to think about stopping using notifications. But most developers will never reach that amount. Therefore they will never make banner ad’s pay off.

    I don’t know what is right or wrong, but I do know what is making money.

    • Well, what do you guys think about a guest post written by the two of you (Reiti and Steve), arguing on the pros and cons, how tos and everything else of notification ads?

  38. @johannes we would need a moderator for that :-) but i was thinking about writing an article about that subject already.

    @Bearded I think the user should have a distinct knowledge where and when he see’s ads. Showing ads inside an app is another thing than showing ads, when app isn’t running at all – I agree, that for a service add or a live wallpaper it’s another thing, because they ARE actually running all the time.

    • Yeah, I would do that. it would probably look like two articles written separately and mixed together by me. Followed by a lot of comments I hope.

      Speaking of intrusive ads: Do you know services like sellAring?

  39. I am ready – just was in the mood of it :-)

    http://www.reiti.net/personal-blog/blog/61/notification-ads-are-they-evil

    I have made a very simple ap where I will try different methods of advertising in the future – still not the very intrusive ones but to figure out a good way of monetizing “rare used” apps.

    Currently I use them mainly to advertise my other products

  40. I am willing to share my information.

  41. Thanks for share information, I cant wait to read the post.

    In order to other things, I would like to recommend me another ad network, Madvertise is not working good for me. For the last 4 weeks I ve the followings fillrate in my apps: 1%, 5%, 3%, 9%, 3%, 6%, 5%, 8% Since the new year started, my income has dropped dramatically. In December I get : 10%, 23%, 27%, 70%, 71%

    For the time, I only want to integrate banner ads on my apps. How about airpush or leadbolt? Which do you recommend me?

    Regards,

    Iván Martínez.

  42. I am using AirPush ads in my app “Hide Secrets Pro” – they have made it compulsory to put a toast with disclosure, which says something like “this app is ad supported by airpush – you can opt out at LINK”

    And whenever users are shown ads, they are clearly shown from which app they are getting ads.

    So, I guess as far as user is cool with the push ads, and he knows where the ads are coming from and can opt out at his will, I would say push ads are good – very high CPM, and as rightly said by Steve, banner ads make money when the no. of downloads are pretty high.

    So my opinion would be +1 to push ads. :)

    Thank you.

  43. @byivan: I have the same problem. At moment the statistics are frozen. The developer fund has ended yesterday. Let’s see what happen.

  44. This is my first time seeing a report like this. I am a third year CS student, and it is very interesting. I am definetally gonna try and create an app, even if it can only make $50/mo thanks a million for making this information public!!!

  45. Hi ,

    Thanks for sharing these no.All these very helpful for everyone.

    Thanks,
    Sneha

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