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Comment by benologist | Hacker News Reader

Amazon recently launched a new app store that pays developers by the minute in lieu of all other monetization techniques, it's great if you can come up with engaging apps.

https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/underground

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One success story of a small company on Amazon Underground - https://medium.com/@PuzzleBoss/actionable-steps-to-make-mone...

TL;DR: they have a Jigsaw Puzzle Android App and make shitloads of money on Amazon Underground.

That's me. I now have a Sudoku app launched too, and a new 1200 piece jigsaw to launch this month, and a word search next month.

Thanks for writing that post!

I love the symmetry with AWS. I pay them for one minute of compute, they pay me for one minute of eyeballs.

"it's great if you can come up with engaging apps" ...and the Amazon app marketplace has a miraculous recovery and somehow because a legitimate revenue source. It probably speaks volumes how badly their device sales are on how likely that is.

It's not an App Store where someone could get a billion downloads, probably not even a million except maybe dragged out over a year.

But I netted $8k last month on Underground against 38k downloads, that's pretty decent.

Pretty decent indeed! How many apps made up that 38k?

It's a line of jigsaw puzzles, an engine packaged with distinct content as separate apps. On average about one a week gets released.

Am I understanding correctly that Amazon is only monetizing Underground through interstitials at app launch time? If so, I'm impressed.

For now yeah that's all they do, and the 'underground app' itself is tied in with your amazon.com searches advertising stuff you've been browsing.

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