When you develop an app, you always have to make a few choices. First, what kind of app are you looking to make? Is it a game? A productivity app? An information app? How are you going to design it? What platform are you going to make it for? And, of course, how are you going to monetize it?
The monetization question is especially important when it comes to deciding whether to create a free to download app or not. Free apps get many more downloads, that’s a given, but they also rarely make as much money for their developers as paid apps. And in the free app world there are still decisions to be made, do you make your app freemium? Do you add microtransactions? Or, do you use ads?
The final question is one that many developers go through because, ultimately, do you want ads to be part of your app? Do they make you money?
Well, according to Rovio, they make more money from the free, ad driven version of Angry Birds than they do from people buying it (although that could be something to do with the fact that everyone has already bought it). So that’s at least a good start.
But if you’re going to make an app with ads as its main revenue, you might want to pay attention to this latest report by Opera, an ad research firm.
In it they find that despite being temporarily beaten by Android at the end of 2012, iOS devices are back on top for mobile ad “impression volume”. Which essentially means that iOS is the platform to go to if you want to make money out of an ad based monetization plan. According to the report, mobile ad campaigns on iOS “consistently achieve the highest average eCPMS” and in all, pulls in just over 49% of all ad revenue.
The table above tells a more complete tale. As always, Smartphones have a massive lead over tablets in terms of revenue generated, but iOS does have a significant lead over Android in this regard. This may be somewhat odd considering Google is an advertising powerhouse, but they specialize in a different area of advertising which is targeted ads, not ad campaigns so it makes sense.
As for where the revenue is coming from, it’s largely from the US still. 75% of all ad revenue still comes from the US. And almost exactly half of global ad requests are still coming from there, but other areas like Europe are closing the gap quickly, with massive ad request growth throughout 2012 that brought Europe up to holding 21% of the share of the overall ad requests. Asia Pacific holds 14% and the remainders are made up by Americas (non US) at roughly 8%, Africa at 4% and the Middle East at 1%.
The main thing to take from this is that if you’re looking to monetize through adverts, iOS seems to be the choice to go for. If you’re developing an iOS app with this in mind, it would seem you’re on the right track, and if you need a little help, just talk to us at Kumulos. We’ve got a Mobile Backend as a Service that can support you whatever your Mobile Backend needs and it’s been designed to be the most useful tools for app developers without any useless guff attached.
So why not talk to us today and see what Kumulos can do for you?
