Making money with iAds? Not so easy | Hacker News Reader

Making money with iAds? Not so easy

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13 pointsblackmac11 comments

iAds has its issues. But this blog post isn't the reason not to use or rely on them. Just because this guy who has a very unpopular app hasn't made much on iAds doesn't extrapolate out to iAds or ads in general not being useful for mobile.

15,382 downloads for a free app is a low download number. An unpopular app is simply not going to make you money no matter what monetization you try.

Imagine a blog post saying "Making money with Adsense? Not so easy" and then someone proceeds to detail how his site which gets 5 hits a day isn't making much, so he concludes that there's no money in websites using ads. And I suspect if this app had started as a paid app, he would have also made a piddling amount and would have written a comparable blog post about how you can't make money selling apps.

That said, iAds aren't doing well. Apple seems to be having trouble filling them. I think mobile ads are down across the board, so you do need to use multiple networks as people have mentioned.

Which begs the bigger question, why hasn't any single ad network dominated the mobile space, like Adsense did for non-mobile space?

Ads on mobile is going to be a marginal business compared to the web. Screen real estate is at an absolute premium, alternative revenue models exist (such as charging your users directly), and there's a high barrier to any call to action (such as signing up to your service on a mobile keyboard).

I doubt that any ad network will gain the traction to dominate the space.

I think it comes back to active daily use. The author mentions revenue spikes coinciding with installs, so I think its reasonable to conclude that users used the app after they installed and did not return again.

You should generally speaking use something like AdWhirl, (which will also show iAd's when they're available), because it will show other adds when your iAds don't fill.

Or www.mopub.com - that's what we use - really good stuff, I have been meaning to do a write-up for HN.

I'd love to see it - been considering them myself.

Thanks, I'd wanted alternatives.

Can you link an app that uses it?

Sure, this one does: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gaia-gps-lite-offline-topo/id...

I am mostly just running house ads now, but Mopub is great for being able to promote sales and mix in back-fill ads too.

It's nice that it's all open source too.

I've actually been very happy with iAd for my Zazen Suite lite version, which is a free meditation app for iPhone.

The only problem is that the fill rate is low, and I've been horrible at adding something to backfill. Good reminder to do that.

I suggest you to look into AdWhirl (https://www.adwhirl.com/), that let you use multiple ad networks at the same time.

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