Revenue from ads in your free games

So, how much money are you guys making with ads in your free games? Or do you rely only on IAP? Which services do you guys use?

 

We made 2 dollar in the last 1/2 year with IAP and Chartboost combined with our one title on the AppStore.

 

2 bucks? Really?

 

I dont know if this counts but, 3 dollars from kongregate ad revenue over the pass 1 1/2 years. Wasn't trying to make money in the first place though.

 

I've got 2 games on the Apple app store.
Not sure on exact figures but ninja pig has made less than £1k on iAds Admob combined. It did have IAP in but it was next to useless so I took it out in an update quite early on and focused on Ads.
Moto-x-racer has made around 10k on ads alone, much higher than the paid version I released which has come in at around 2k but the revenue for that was spread over a couple of years and its almost completely died now. Its currently making about £15 a month
Moto-x is a couple of years old now so these are old stats.

 

On Zombies vs. Knights on Kong I've made $5.63 in about two years. It seems our games are on roughly equal footing.

...Conversely, on Wooglie, my two games SHMUP: Orbital Combat and ZvK have earned me about 11 euros. I recommend Wooglie, needless to say.

On the other end of the spectrum from both of those is GameJolt - In two years, ZvK and SHMUP have raked in an enviable 0.78 cents (USD). They're just not a good source of ad revenue, sadly.

 

From Ads on all platforms, maybe £4 a day? You never going to become a millionaire from ads. But I have quite a few apps.

If you got a £1 for every 1000 downloads you would need a BILLION downloads!

My view is if the app is not worth £1 but is interesting enough to be downloaded then that's when you put ads in it. If it is worth a £1 charge £1.

 

Which service did you use for Moto-x? AdMob?

 

1,000 in the past year, ads are not really worth it imo unless you can generate millions of impressions.

 

iAds only for moto-x.
The last time I looked into it iAds gave the best revenue but I would always have a fall back to something else for future games.
Ninja Pig did iAds with a fallback to Admob.

 

out of curiosity,..

what are some examples of ya'lls IAP?

e.i. extra levels,..
cosmetics?

 

In the free version I had a single IAP which removed ads and unlocked extra game modes in Ninja Pig to bring it in line with the paid version so i guess the free version was try it and if you like it you can upgrade to full version. No IAP in full version.

 

I'm not sure if it's really worth the effort, adding IAP to a game. But, unfortunately, mobile seems to produce a very low income from ads.

 

On the larger side of the fence, generic ad income isn't that great either. It is some extra revenue, but not enough to support a game. If we use ads, they are usually though special programs or sponsored. IAP is the bulk of our revenue.

But thing about IAP, is that for it to really be successful, it takes a game with a constant flow of content and/or a mechanic that entices users to keep paying. A single shot purchase (like removing ads) isn't going pull in the Candy Crush bucks. IAP works because it lets a small amount of users pay a lot. Again, looking at Candy Crush, 30% of players are payers. About 5% are whales, who pay on on average about $50 a month. (super-whales can being spending $200-$1000+ a month). And those numbers are lower than other big games, CC just has many more players.

"Energy" is the most common IAP. Limiting or gating play time/progression in some way, but letting users spend money to bypass that an keep playing. Experience/powerups are other common ones, allowing players to spend money to skip ahead or progress faster, complete tasks easier or unlock features/characters. (that's a big one for our game). And by adding regular new content, it keeps players engaged, people are more willing spend money on a game if they know they are going to be playing it for a while.

 

Seriously guys, where are you placing you ads and how many users do you have...and do they actually use your game/app?

We have just launch Memrace on Windows Phone, iOS and Android about a month ago, we haven't done any real PR for it yet, as we need a lot of things to be done first, but we have already generated about 4£ in Ads and we don't even have ads on the Windows Phone version yet and generally we have very few downloads.
Currently:
- iOS around 500 downloads
- Android around 20 (!) downloads
- Windows Phone around 3000 downloads (we have been featured in some countries)

Again, we haven't really done any PR yet, except a few tweets and Facebook updates for friends and family - we will do much more when we have a more complete game.
But people are actually playing our game for about 4 min in average pr. session so we have a game people like and play on a regular basic.

So I'm pretty surprised about the low income most of you are telling about.

 

my game got around 3k DL on Android, with around 1.3k still installed
for the last 6 months I got around 20USD for admob, without IAP

looks like IAP is the better than ads....?

 

The only baseline I have is a small Android game I published 2 years ago, which has gotten around 500 downloads since then (embarrassing, I know). In those two years it has generated $8.22 in ad revenue. That's with a small ad that only shows up on the main menu.

The thing about ads is, it's a double whammy. Not only do you make money for each ad impression, but the value of your advertisement space goes up the more users you have. So there is a point where if you have enough users, you can make big bucks with ads alone. See Flappy Bird with its $50,000 of revenue per day from a single tiny ad.

 

Got 375 euros since 03/2012 from about 1.100.000 plays at wooglie
Could be much more as most of plays are from Brazil where ads pays less.

 

I made 15$ since february 3 with the alpha version of my game, I made only some free advertising on forums...

 

I just downloaded Memrace on my Windows Phone and I will definitely be keeping it downloaded! Solid game

 

To test out the market, I put up Clumsy Fin for iOS about 4 months ago using iAd. Somehow it got featured and in the first month made $35. In the past 3 months it has made a little over $10. Total downloads is slightly below 2k.

2 months ago I released it to Android, and it has made a little over $4 using AdMob with a total of 45 downloads.

This is all without a single bit of advertising, and it is currently making between 50c and $1 a week.

I plan to release it on Windows Phone in the next week or so, whenever I get a chance.

 

About $600-$800 per month using Admob alone.

 

First mobile game: android : created from asset store- airstrike starter kit

1 banner ad, I large ad.
AdMob - No Marketing at all..my proof of concept project.

Can I build an android game with leader boards, achievements, localization, Ads,etc??
that was my goal. Started in January with my first smart phone..20 version later..48 Mbs = $10,000 a year??

I seem to be at a steady $35.00-$55.00 a day...now I can afford unity /android pro. /amplify/Photon, etc!!

I have no idea how long it will last, or how much more time/money I should throw at it??

anyway my answer..........

Last 30 days : May 30, 2014 – Jun 28, 2014

Estimated earnings
Yesterday: $50.37 This month: $1,321.69

Sessions:
18,355: Last 7 days | Yesterday: 3,151 | This month: 76,545 | Last month: 25,686


Update:
Going down..45% drop on June 28th..
Same game :still no updates..or anything..(I am working on it..)

Just Ad Mob--2 ads

Jul 1, 2014 – Sept 5, 2014

Estimated earnings
$1,074.53

Page views
693,886

Clicks
10,979

Page RPM
$1.55

p-

 

Here is my advice: don't even bother doing ads _until_ you get at least 10K sessions per day. If you do it before that, then you will spend significant amount of time integrating ads and you might never recover your time investment. Time that you could have used to make your game better.

Also, don't rely solely on ads. If you do get 10K sessions per day, then there are other ways that have much better potential such as IAP. However, doing IAP right is an art. Pay to unlock levels is a terrible way to do it.

We are doing great in ads, but only because we have 80K impressions per day (shown at game bootup and nowhere else). But I am introducing IAP in the next version. One of the things I am doing is disabling ads if the user buys something, because I don't want to lose that one customer to other games.

 

First of all sorry about my english - it's not my primary language.

You need one hour (maybe two if you are not experienced) to integrate admob plugin and set everything up. Implementing IAP is way more harder. Like you said it's more like an art. No way to implement full IAP in short time (with planning, adding art for some powerups etc) and you have absolutely no guarantee that you will earn something with IAP.
Also (android) users don't care about ads, with 100 five-stars reviews you will get 3-5 bad reviews because of ads. Users won't uninstall your game because of ads, they will do that if your game is crap.
Another thing is that if you are planning adding ads to you game, you should do that before first relase - adding ads with some later update is the easiest way to enrage your users.
My advices:
1. Use interestitial ads from big players like admob, chartboost, mobileCore
2. Show ads couple of times during one session (but not too often). Placing ads in proper way may be hard, i am showing ads in 3minutes period (eg. after player death,when entering Options menu etc) and one ad when closing an app
3. iPhone users prefer 1$ apps without ads
4. Android user prefer free aps, and they dont care about ads
5. No users - no money! If you have 2000 total downloads and 500 active users nothing will help you.
6. Don't place ads in not-free apps
7. Implement ads with first relase, if you didn't do that - don't do that later.
P.J.

 

These assertions are extremely interesting to me. Can you share your sources?

 

I made 95 bucks in ads from chartboost it might not seem too good but i only got like a few thousand downloads and the game eventually died off. Even with a few thousand daily active users you could be laughing i think.

3,230 installs $95.09 revenue

 

Personally, I think they are quite inaccurate.

It all depends on how good your product is though.

 

Yes, I agree with some of the posters above. Unless your game is getting enough plays to be a significant source of ad revenue, its better to see the big picture and sacrifice this small amount.

All it will do, depending on the type of the Ad, is to annoy existing users of your game

 

Unimaginative clone games in saturated genres nobody notices, I imagine, but I digress.

It's like watching the flash era all over again, and it's agonizing.

Video games have always been a commercial enterprise, but Unity's spirit: that of making game design accessible to the artist: isn't one of "here's your opportunity to make cash"; but one of "here's your opportunity to make a game."

 

We make about 50/50 from ads and IAP in both our titles on iOS, Android ads perform a bit worse.

 

The data disagrees. 81% of iOS revenue comes from IAPs on free titles. Minecraft, the star of the Indie industry, is #55 at this moment. If you can figure out how to do it, do two things: 1) Release lots of games (# of titles directly correlated to income), and 2) make free games with Ads and/or iAP's. And plan both from day one.

Gigi

 

Hi, I made $35 from admob in two months with 1600 downloads and 200 active users. And recently integrated adbuddiz and applovin.

This is the game.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.BabDan.KitiCat

 

A friend of mine has a Yahtzee game made for IOS and Android that is free with ads. He is pulling in approx USD 10K a month.... for Yahtzee Make a great game for an eager audience and you will make money. Don't get caught up in the "We promote your game" marketing scams... was a lesson he passed on...

 

Is Wooglie put Ad in your game automatically or you have to implement Ad by yourself?

 

It's placed around your game automatically. They ensure that the ads shows even when iframed on another site.

 

Thanx for reply.

 

I have couple of apps on my account. Not doing any advertisement, just updating it once a month.

My revenue is under $30 a month.

 

kazap.io is powered by google adsense for games. It makes around $200 per month before server costs. Server costs are around $100 and we can make them much lower if we needed to. It has around 30k MAU, and CCUs range daily from 1-2 up to 50.

Multiplayer games earn 5x what single player games earn on average. Something to consider...

 

I published a game on AppStore for iOS devices Real Car Parking Game -Extreme , 5 months back. I earn about 5$-12$ a day. Monthly it makes around 350$ - 500$. It was ASO which led this sweet monthly passive earnings. I suggest everyone to take ASO courses or learn about ASO. It helps a lot.