How much does one earn from ads?

I was wondering, how much does one actually earn from ads (iAd etc)?
I was thinking of making my next game free with ads, but I have no idea if it actually is rational.

 

If you have billions of players, you earn some money.
If you do a little forum search you can find some more threads about this with interesting numbers...

 

Depends a lot on how you implement it, and which network you take.
But lets say you get an industry average of $2 eCPM in IOS and perhaps a little less in android.

What this means is that for every 1000 ads you show you earn about $2.

If you are starting from scratch, it will take you a long time to get to 1000 sessions per day, so it will be a while before you can actually start seeing some money. For this reason, I would not recommend you start with ads.
The only way to make anything with ads is if you have say 50000 sessions / day. But if you have that, there is a lot more potential to make money with microtransactions.

If you go to google play or the appstore, and see the top grossing, the votes are in, and the results are very clear: the most successful model is free to play with microtransactions, ads are nowhere to be found there, and paid games are also few in that list.

In addition, when the person does click an ad and installs the other app, you just sent a customer away, there is a chance he won't come back.

I would consider ads in only 1 situation (which I am in atm): You have a free app with millions of downloads already, but you are not monetizing it. You can add ads and get some revenue short term, while you work on moving to a F2P with MTX model, because adding ads is very easy to do.

Hope this helps.

 

The going rate for 1 million ad impressions is $2,000.

(The maths behind it: 1,000 impressions = $2. 1,000,000 impressions = $2,000)