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Annual income report: 2011

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

AdMob:

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 impressions 2011

AdMob income 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

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

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.

Four reasons why your app wont be successful

Many developers produce tons of apps but still don’t earn much money. Others publish one or two apps and earn thousands of dollars every month. Why is that? Why are so many apps unsuccessful? Here are four reasons:

1. Your idea sucks

    That’s obvious. If there is no need for your app, why should it be downloaded.

    2. Your implementation sucks

    That’s a common error and its characteristics vary widely. I did that many times so I know what I’m talking about. Implementation means everything the user notizes (user experience, UX). This includes visual design and technical realization. Or in other words: If your app looks like the Android Market in it’s first iteration, it’s going to be hard.

    The good news is: When your idea doesn’t suck but your implementation does, you can still change that.

    The first release of the Android Market looked terrible

    The first release of the Android Market looked terrible. If your app does too, you should change that.

     

    3. You are not promoting

    Many developers develop and after that, they develop again. That’s not enough. Someone has to do the marketing and promotion stuff and if there is no one else, you are that someone. Twitter, blog, facebook and talk in forums. There are 1035 blogs found on Technorati when searching for ‘Android’. E-mail all of them. Seriously? Seriously.

    4. You don’t keep trying

    You like your idea, your friends do and maybe even your girlfriend (or boyfriend) does. You are excited and can’t wait to get the first update on the developer console. There it comes: 200 downloads on the first day… not to bad, but it wont bring you the expected millions. The next day will sure be better. 20 downloads. Hm.. Next day: 18. One week later: Total of 300 downloads has been reached, $o,45 has been made. Well, you’ll better focus on an other promising project.

    While some apps are successful from the very beginning, most apps are not. Also Angry Birds was not. Once again: I’m totally serious on writing each of the 1035 blogs. Write 30-40 of them every day and you’ll be done in one month. You invested weeks on building your app, why stop when it’s finally done. I know, programming is fun, but getting great feedback of and contact to your users and future users is too.

    Conclusion

    In order to have a really successful app you must

    • Have a good idea
    • Make a beautiful app that runs smooth and free of error
    • Promote and communicate a lot
    • Keep trying and have some discipline

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