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.
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".
I feel sorry for all those adwords users who don't realize they're opted into Google's mobile ad network.
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.
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.
On another note, big biz opportunities often exist in small niches, rather than trying to come up with the next facebook or whatever.