Friday, December 21, 2012

The best ways to earn money with mobile apps

By Daniel Parks


The best ways to profit with mobile apps

What's the secret to success as a mobile developer?

Focus on offering customers a great value proposition. If you're making games, they should take highest advantage of the mobile experience. Angry Birds is the most efficient example of this. The gameplay is basic and you only need a couple of minutes to play to the next level. It's ideal for mobile. Sustaining results in digital media is a lot more complex, we've noticed large firms rise and fall in several short years. Being adjustable enough to evolve is key, but you also need to establish a strong sense of what works in digital and stay with it.

Whenever you have an idea that works, then what? Exactly how do you convert that into profit?

There are four solutions to profit with apps. The most common is through paid downloads, in which you put a fixed cost for your app, buyers purchase it, and then the order usually stops there. You could even find an exclusive promoter for your application. It's not the most economically sustainable approach of monetizing, however it can help you develop yourself sufficiently to create your next app a financial success. Then, there are the increasingly prominent in-app purchases, where your subscriber might not have to pay for anything at the start (free of cost), but will have the opportunity to make purchases within the app to enhance the experience.

You can offer marketing space within your app. Provided you have a great match between app and marketer and an installed base large enough to uphold the volume of impressions needed for revenue, this can actually make you even more money than you can with a pay-per-download model. I often recommend developers mix and match models to their specific app business. The additional money making techniques you can employ, the more money you will make.

What about promotion?

With well over one Million apps worldwide, levels of competition is intense. You can have the greatest app in the world, however if you cannot get the word out about it, no person's going to install it.

Should I stress over piracy?

If you're developing apps for iOS only, you wouldn't really need to stress over it. Apple is dedicated to copyright and has produced a good job at guarding the eco-system. Of course Apple isn't the only player in the game, and piracy is becoming an issue with Android apps. If you don't create for Android you're missing out on a large segment of the market place. In a current Mobile Insights Study, which covered August through October of 2011, we found that 31.1 % of mobile ads were shown on an Android device. Piracy is also not an issue if you ad supported apps. In addition, unlike iOS apps, Android apps are accessible through many different stores globally, so your possibility for exposure can really be even higher.




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