Paper Toss dev makes $500k per month with ads | Hacker News Reader

Paper Toss dev makes $500k per month with ads

develop-online.net

74 pointsscrrr37 comments

I have to wonder how many people are clicking (tapping?) on these ads by mistake. When you play Paper Toss, the ad is in a band across the top of the screen and you are moving your finger towards it every time you make a throw. The ads I saw were not very relevant. For example one was for storage rental in California when I live in Ohio.

The mobile ad space at the moment reminds me of when AdSense came out a few years ago and all these web site were making huge amounts of money. Eventually Google tightened the rules and advertisers got a better handle on the real value of the ads. Now it is much more difficult to make good money unless you have a very high traffic site.

For a click to register with the ad, the touch must both start and end within the ad banner. A swipe from the bottom up, even if it ends on the banner, will not trigger a click.

Really? I tried Paper Toss a few months ago and was entertained for about 15 seconds.

As an off-hours Android developer myself, I suppose it should be inspiring to hear these stories, but I can't help but be a little envious to hear about Paper Toss and iFart millionaires while my app income trickles in.

Ah well - good for them.

A lot of these games are geared towards a younger crowd (middle/high schoolers) who are much easier to entertain. They younger crowd also has more time on their hands to play these things.

Agree with the easier to entertain part - I don't get excited by games anymore, probably the same reason.

On another note, big biz opportunities often exist in small niches, rather than trying to come up with the next facebook or whatever.

When I let my kids play this game I usually hear a "Daaaaad" after two minutes because they are in the App Store after clicking the ad on accident and don't know what to do.

Same happens on the Fart apps.

I have a feeling that if you have a game simple enough that kids like it, and it has ads, you're getting a lot of "kid clicks".

This is exactly why the app ads goldrush will not last. I can only imagine that >90% of clicks are accidental, and the placement of ads right next to key game/app controls only exacerbates the situation.

I feel sorry for all those adwords users who don't realize they're opted into Google's mobile ad network.

I won't argue with you there. I've blown my $$ on mobile ads already and don't intend to do it again.

Ads need captchas. If an ad is clicked, it should popup a message that says, what's 2+2 or something. If I answer that, then I'm through, and THEN the advertiser pays.

..... pipe. dream.

Hey, anyone interested in creating a mobile ad network startup that caters to advertisers so when their ads are clicked, a captcha pops up, and if the captcha is answered, only then the advertiser pays?

As an advertiser, this would be interesting to me.

Captcha sounds like a bit of overkill. Simply a confirm prompt on the screen should be sufficient to stop 99% of the accidental clicks.

This model exists, although not yet in mobile - Solve Media does it as a way of monetizing already-existing captcha traffic. Instead of filling out a captcha at the end of a signup, you watch an ad and type out a phrase within the ad to move on.

I can't imagine this would perform well in places where the captcha wasn't already required - there'd be too much dropoff. So while it might be interesting to advertisers, no publishers would run it, unless you charged so much that it made up for that conversion dropoff, which would then cause it to no longer be interesting to advertisers.

Making an ad product that keeps both parties happy can be tricky.

If the clicks were accidental, we wouldn't see such strong conversion numbers when we advertise our own products with banner ads in our games.

I should point out that these numbers are aggregate across quite a few of our free applications, both on iOS and Android.

They mention between "600 and 800 million ad impressions a month", 60% of which "for third-party mobile ads". Using a 700 million average, that's 420 million impressions used for third party ads, which generated $500,000 in revues.

This amounts to an average $1.19 CPM, which sounds very very high for in-game advertisement. Mochiads in flash games are usually in the $0.1-0.2 CPM range.

Can the iPhone market really command such a high premium or is there something specific to Backflip Studio's games that I'm missing?

I get $4-$5 eCPM on iAds. My admob eCPM has been low (20c) but I know other devs that get $1-$2 eCPM with admob so it isn't out of the question. CTR is a big factor for a lot of mobile ad companies.

That's about right at the moment. Actually a bit on the low side if we assume Backflip is using a yield optimization tool and working with every ad network they possibly can.

Since ad networks always show their highest-paying ads first (this optimizes revenue for them, too), showing a user one ad each from five different networks is a hell of a lot more effective than showing five ads from one network. Cuts down on blanks, too.

When advertisers realize that 75% of their clicks are from children fat fingering their parents mobile devices, this well will dry up faster than you can say iAd.

Seems mobile is a good space to be in...

Indeed!

Anyone with insights into Backflip Studios? Number of people working full time, how much money spent building this range of games?

I've worked at Backflip for the last year. The company was started by a few friends of mine from a previous startup here in the Boulder area, and since then it has grown from 6 fulltime employees to 10. We're growing at a good rate and are still looking for great engineers (hint hint).

The amount of money we spend making a game for iOS or Android varies a lot depending on the scope of the project. A game like Paper Toss or Strike Knight is primarily art bound, so if you have a great in-house artist or two (we do) then you can figure out the cost based on 1-2 months of dev time for one engineer, 1 month for art, a few weeks for sound, and a few weeks for random QA/marketing/etc at whatever pay rate is applicable to your area. If you need to replace any of those components with contractors, your cost will definitely increase.

Thanks for the inside info! Always interesting to hear from inside companies like this.

You're on the wrong side of the Atlantic for me though :)

As with anything you see the success stories often because they are interesting which masks the fact that the vast majority of those developing mobile games have trouble just breaking even.

Without anything first hand experience I get the feeling that advertisers are paying to much at the moment for ad space in iphone apps, given that it's a relatively new advertising direction I don't think it's really stabilized yet and going forward it will probably become harder to pull the same kinds of number from that same traffic.

Good point - reminds me of the ridiculous amount of money Yahoo was making back in the early days of internet, probably not going to be sustainable.

I don't remember where I saw the study. But mean iPhone app makes 3K and median is $700. This is is total revenues, not monthly. So mobile is definitely a hit-driven industry, as you can see by the delta between the mean and median. The top guys make millions but most indie mobile devs barely make minimum wage.

From the title I thought this was for 1 game from 1 person, but this is across 5 or so games for the 6 person (according to Wikipedia) company.

The numbers:

.. more than 47.5 million installs on iOS devices to date, and 5.5 million on Android .. of games including Paper Toss, Ragdoll Blaster, Harbor Havoc 3D, NinJump and Buganoids .. 15 million monthly active users .. generating between 600 million and 800 million ad impressions a month across its free games

And the flood of Paper Toss clones began.

I just tested this out months ago on Android and don't remember the details, how are the ads placed? In-game ads or there is an ad in the rankings page?

I just can't figure out what the developer stands to gain from giving out such private and proprietary information... If you go around telling people that you make $500,000 in ads on a simple iPhone game that someone else could clone, you should expect to be hit with tons of clones and SEM trying to take traffic away. I don't get it.

There's no cost to download or play - what's the incentive to play a clone? Especially when all your friends are playing the real one.

> what's the incentive to play a clone?

The funny thing I noticed when I played the free version previously is that the developer actually manages to tell a story during the game and has little bits of humour in it. These things make a difference.

(The storyline includes traveling around the world playing competitively and when you return your waste basket is covered in country flag stickers. Then there's the audio feedback when you throw paper outside the screen.)

Ha! When we sit around and brainstorm ideas for new levels in Paper Toss or World Tour (or secret future projects) we always joke about how no one probably has any idea that there is a storyline behind it. That's pretty cool you noticed that :)

Pleased for you to know all that effort didn't go unnoticed. :)

Intrigued to see another tech company based in Boulder. I spent some time visiting a client there a few months ago. Seems like there's quite the tech community growing there.

They may be anticipating that the payoff from ads is about to decrease, so they're willing to trade short-term publicity (and an increased chance of acquisition) for the long-term risk of increased competition.

clones of mobile games don't seem to do well. Angry Birds is pretty much the #1 mobile game and I haven't seen any outright clones do well on the app store. If a game is popular and most people know about it, people will quickly recognize clones and avoid them.

I just downloaded it to see. On the iPhone the ads are placed at the top of the screen constantly while you play. They are also in other screens. So you constantly see ads throughout the use of the app, but they are not annoying, there is plenty of screen to play.

Reminds me of the the success of Tap Defense on the iPhone, which was (is?) a really successful, free, ad supported game. Its success funded tapjoy.com, which went on to even greater success and an exit.

Ben & Lee invested heavily in enabling virtual goods before iOS had any infrastructure for it - I think the Tap Defense revenue primarily came from people installing other applications in order to get an in-game feature, not from traditional ad networks like AdMob. And I'm pretty sure Tapjoy still did a seed round of ~$500K or so to get started, although I forget with who.

No arguing that they did have a nice exit, and it's somewhat telling that their acquirer, Offerpal Media, has now renamed themselves 'Tapjoy'. That doesn't happen very often.

Yeah, they eventually took a seed round, but the revenue from tap defense let Ben comfortably quit his day job at Google.

Didn't know that Offerpal had renamed themselves, cool!

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