Android Income Report: March 2014

It's been a while since I published my last income report, so I decided to prepare one for you as an Easter present. In fact, the times when I would open my ad statistics every day and analyze them meticulously are long gone. To be honest, I wasn't really sure how much I was making a month these days (at least not exactly) before writing this post. It's been helpful for me as well to realize where most of my revenue comes from and what I should do to maximize it. Let's see the results together.

Ad networks and ad types I use

In my apps I have AdMob banners and interstitials as well as Airpush smart wall ads and AdBuddiz interstitials. Why I chose these? AdMob was just the most obvious choice - they are very reliable when it comes to payments and they have very detailed statistics. Unfortunately, they don't offer so many ad types (banners and interstitials only) and their CPM is not the best as well. I decided to try Airpush and AdBuddiz, because their ads are quite pretty and they promised high rates for each click. They actually are decent, although definitely not as good as advertised. You'll have a chance to see the numbers below. I haven't been paid for them so far, because I only just realized that you need to fill some forms with payment details first, but I believe that I won't have any problems with it.

Statistics

Here are some numbers that might interest you. With some simple math you can figure out how much you could earn with a similar app or what kind of ads make the most revenue. I decided to skip the paid apps, because they generate less than $10 a month for me.

AdMob
revenue: $52.04
requests: 109,142
CPM: $0.51 (max: $2.75, min: $0.07)
fill rate: 93.9%

Airpush

revenue: $37.66

requests: 18,652

CPM: $2.02

fill rate: ?

AdBuddiz

Note: the values below are approximate, because AdBuddiz doesn't offer detailed statistics (only those visible in the screenshot below).

revenue: ~$7.5

requests: 14,503

CPM: $1.21

fill rate: ?

Total

revenue: $96.9

requests: 142,297

CPM: $0.68

Conclusions

My income increased in the past couple of months from less than $20 to almost $100. In fact, I'm seeing a slight (around 20%) growth in April as well. This is definitely a good thing, but the fundamental question stays the same - was the app development really worth my time and effort. So far the answer is "no", at least if we take into account only the money. What else did I gain? Experience in Android programming; some apps I can show my family, friends and... prospective employers; I got to know other interesting people from the business; I received a free license for TexturePacker, PhysicsEditor and tPacker; finally I feel very proud that people download my apps and find them useful and fun - it's a great feeling and it gives me a sense of purpose.

Will I continue making apps? Of course I will! I still quite enjoy it and I feel that every time I make one, it's much better than my previous creations. As to the money factor, I could probably improve it by trying different ad networks and replacing (at least to some extent) AdMob - which isn't always the best option when it comes to generating revenue. I should also update my old apps, because they use old ad API's and display banners/interstitials in very inefficient ways (CPM=$0.07 is definitely very bad). As a matter of fact, I'm planning to release a big update to my metro app in a couple of days. It will feature some cool improvements and I'm really excited to see what will happen afterwards. I can't wait to give you more details about it, but unfortunately it's out of the scope of this post, so you'll have to wait a little bit more.

Before I finish, I'd like to wish you Happy Easter! Spend some time offline with your friends and family, and have a break from whatever you do on the everyday basis. I'll see you in a while- relaxed and ready for new challenges.