In app advertising has been a good way for developers to create revenue from a free app. What’s interesting is the statistics around mobile advertising and how this will affect the profits for free aps using the mobile advertising networks.
In Mary Meeker’s epic, 164-slide Internet Trends presentation http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends shows some very interesting information when it comes to the statistics on mobile advertising. On slide 15 of the presentation shows that 19% of advertising spending still goes to print publications. It also shows people now spend only 5% of their media consumption time on print. Only 4% of current ad money is spent on mobile, even though people now spend 20% of their media time on smartphones and tablets. What’s the conclusion you can draw from this?
There will be a big shift in advertising when it comes to mobile. Advertisers need to get their messages in front of people. Since the shift is going to mobile for usage this means the advertisers will also need to shift to mobile advertising.
Personally I think this is a good thing for us the Add developers. If there are more advertising companies and more money being spent on mobile that means more profits for us in our apps with advertising. The trick is to get millions of downloads for a free app and make money with these ads.
Slide 16 in the presentation shows very good growth of revenue generated by mobile apps. Global mobile app revenue exploded from $6 billion to $38 billion between 2010 and 2013. Now that proves we are in the right industry developing apps!
Another interesting stat from slide 16 is the money spent advertising in apps. It went from around $2 billion to roughly $12 billion in 2013. Wow that is quite some stat.
So I think the take away from this is if you have not considered in app mobile advertising a viable way of making income from your apps, then you are missing out on a big piece of the pie. At the very least I recommended that if you have a fee version of your app then you should have ads in it and possible offer a paid version to remove the ads. This seems to work as a simple revenue model for mobile apps and one you may want to also implement.
Personally I have seen money from Admob and I believe that network to be the first one to try in your apps. The idea you want to keep in mind is to serve the ads but not to annoy your users. These day’s it seems that many people will not pay for apps so having ads is one of the ways you can earn money with your free apps.
Let me know what your thoughts are about advertising and ads in your apps. Have you done this? Please leave a comment below.
