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Making money with iAds? Not so easy
- gte910h 15y agoYou should generally speaking use something like AdWhirl, (which will also show iAd's when they're available), because it will show other adds when your iAds don't fill.
- andrewljohnson 15y agoOr www.mopub.com - that's what we use - really good stuff, I have been meaning to do a write-up for HN.
- gte910h 15y agoThanks, I'd wanted alternatives. Can you link an app that uses it?
- andrewljohnson 15y agoSure, this one does: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gaia-gps-lite-offline-topo/id333273242?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gaia-gps-lite-offline-topo/id... I am mostly just running house ads now, but Mopub is great for being able to promote sales and mix in back-fill ads too. It's nice that it's all open source too.
- treblig 15y agoI'd love to see it - been considering them myself.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- salman89 15y agoI think it comes back to active daily use. The author mentions revenue spikes coinciding with installs, so I think its reasonable to conclude that users used the app after they installed and did not return again.
- arn 15y agoiAds has its issues. But this blog post isn't the reason not to use or rely on them. Just because this guy who has a very unpopular app hasn't made much on iAds doesn't extrapolate out to iAds or ads in general not being useful for mobile. 15,382 downloads for a free app is a low download number. An unpopular app is simply not going to make you money no matter what monetization you try. Imagine a blog post saying "Making money with Adsense? Not so easy" and then someone proceeds to detail how his site which gets 5 hits a day isn't making much, so he concludes that there's no money in websites using ads. And I suspect if this app had started as a paid app, he would have also made a piddling amount and would have written a comparable blog post about how you can't make money selling apps. That said, iAds aren't doing well. Apple seems to be having trouble filling them. I think mobile ads are down across the board, so you do need to use multiple networks as people have mentioned.
- salman89 15y agoWhich begs the bigger question, why hasn't any single ad network dominated the mobile space, like Adsense did for non-mobile space?
- nupark2 15y agoAds on mobile is going to be a marginal business compared to the web. Screen real estate is at an absolute premium, alternative revenue models exist (such as charging your users directly), and there's a high barrier to any call to action (such as signing up to your service on a mobile keyboard). I doubt that any ad network will gain the traction to dominate the space.
- davidedicillo 15y agoI suggest you to look into AdWhirl (https://www.adwhirl.com/ https://www.adwhirl.com/), that let you use multiple ad networks at the same time.
- nhangen 15y agoI've actually been very happy with iAd for my Zazen Suite lite version, which is a free meditation app for iPhone. The only problem is that the fill rate is low, and I've been horrible at adding something to backfill. Good reminder to do that.