I'm so tired of talking about fake gag iPhone apps.
I'd like to thank the person who made the Clinometer app, wherever he or she is. It's like a $2 digital level. It's really a slick real-world tool I didn't expect to turn my iPhone into.
I am just saying that because I wondered too what company does iPhone ads. I guess any "mobile ad" thingy will do it for you.
Anyway, in my 45 seconds research I found one called JumpTap.
What I didn't find is how much a publisher can expect to earn with any company. If it's around the same rate as websites, let's speculate because it's fun.
To achieve $200/hr at .50 cpm
$1 = 2000 "page views"
$200 = 400,000 "page views"
400,000... that's probably how many "sessions" with the app. Now with a:
10% ctr: 4,000,000 sessions per hour;
25% ctr: 1,600,000 sessions per hour;
Free app... 20 million possible user base... ah, whatever... that's getting complicated :p But I bet a spreadsheet where we could tweak the numbers could show what's the potential of popular apps to earn with ads...
I'm somewhat doubtful about the original claim of making $200 per hour exactly because of the math that you present. Or rather, $200/hour for how long?
Even if all 20mio(?) iphone owners downloaded and used the app once that only amounts to $10000 bucks. If we assume they show it to all their buddies in school, say 20 times, then we arrive it $200k bucks.
Heck, add a ton of clickthroughs and real hardcore fans and make that $400k.
One hell of a deal for a 20 minute app, no question. But all under imho very optimistic assumptions. I'd go as far as to smell a little PR stunt maybe?
Anyone know some real world figures about iphone app sales?
The comments thread is interesting. Apparently admob is mostly a CPC company not CPM. I can only imagine how low the clickthrough rate for golf resorts in hawaii on a sound bomb app are.
After a bit more research on the subject I think it's fairly safe to call bullshit on that $200/hour figure. It's either a concerted PR stunt or the app developer is trying to push his market value.
While I didn't find much information about iphone app sales or revenue figures I did indeed find some sobering bits about regular web ad gigs.
This game has undoubtly spawned one of the biggest viral hypes of the recent years. Nonetheless and despite fairly reasonable advertising efforts under massive traffic it "only" managed to pull in 100k over 12 months, or roughly $11 per hour.
So yes, those hawaiian golf resorts must be paying one hell of a CPC/CPM rate. Wonder what they'd pay me for wearing a t-shirt with their URL. I think I'd do that for a measly $1/hour...
Yeah, I feel you. I think I know what happened. Some "journalist" took poetic licence interpreting what the developer probably said:
Dev: It took me 5 hours to build and I made $1000.
Reporter: Developer makes $200/hr building iPhone apps.
We've all done this kind of math before (revenue / work time), but I think somewhere the context was lost on this one. Unless somewhere we can find the developer actually saying "I make $200/hr even when I am sleeping."
That seems to be his point. "Like the pop market, it's hit or miss; sometimes it will work, sometimes it won't."
Basically he's just managed to find the immature market. The thing about that is, it's extremely difficult to reproduce.
As much as gagware pollutes the market with bright colors, loud noises, and minimally functioning apps, it obviously has market value, so it won't be going away anytime soon.
I'd say it's still a couple rungs above spam: you're still making something people want. I don't think anyone actually wants to be defrauded. (you could bring up honey pots by law enforcement, but I don't think they're the inteded market for scammers) In fact, if the outcome was desired by all involved parties, you couldn't call it fraud.
I'd like to thank the person who made the Clinometer app, wherever he or she is. It's like a $2 digital level. It's really a slick real-world tool I didn't expect to turn my iPhone into.