Developer Income Report #16

I love seeing these posts every month. They're great inspiration for developers who might be thinking about going off on their own, and a reminder that Rome wasn't built in a day.

Congratulations kreci on reaching your income goal!

I'm curious what kind of boost you see just from posting these Developer Income Reports. Is this a Schrodinger's Income Report kind of thing where posting about the experiment affects the outcome of the experiment?

This may be off-topic, but where do you draw inspiration for your apps? I am a fairly decent programmer, would love to write some Android apps, but I'm sort of at a loss when it comes to what kind of apps I would want to write. It seems to be something you just have to draw out of thin air or get via spontaneous inspiration. Usually I think about what kinds of problems I want to solve, but there's almost always an app for that already!

Congratulations on achieving your target.

Is there any chance of you getting apps into the Amazon store or are they only allowing U.S. developers? I know techie bloggers aren't loving the Kindle Fire, but I know a ton of normal people buying them. That's a lot of Android tablets, none of which will ever see the main Android store.

I understand why the author is not willing to share much specifics (such as which free apps get him 4k+ a month in ad revenue) but he still at least could get a number of installs published.

I am skeptical because I know for a fact that some people don't tell the truth. We can only speculate about the reasons..maybe it's to generate more traffic or interest towards the non-free products they offer. I know a fellow (who used to publish a competing product to mine) who boasted online in an article about making quarter million dollars a year after just being a year in business. The same fellow just was trying to sell me his "quarter-million a year business" domain name for 1K a few months before:) In this case, numbers are much more moderate and believable, but still I am not taking this just at the face value, unless there are some facts I can verify, or compare against. The number of active users, for example, and in which countries (mostly) are generating 4K+ /month in ads?

As usual comments welcome and strongly desired! =)

Dear Kreci,

Thanks for all the reports and the book. It is a great read and full of good advises, I recomend it to anyone entering the mobile market.

I have a question for you. How do we go to redownload the book? I had a major crash here and lost the PDF. Can I give you the PayPal ID for the transaction and you will send it back to me?

I send you an email about this couple weeks ago as well.

Cheers and thanks for all the help Andre

Any idea why your iStockPhoto income dropped just for this period? It seems like a fluke / outlier, not a long-term trend.

Nice post. What country are you in?

Yet again an interesting post.

There's one thing I'd be interested in knowing: do you make more cash from your toy apps (x-Ray/cracked-window) or from the more useful ones such as your WordPress stats app?

Being in the app business for more than 2 years, like any other business, there's a cycle. It's a definite trend that mobile ad spending increases towards the end of the year and so publishers will see higher CPM and more impressions. Come January, that bump in ad revenue might reverse and newbie developers could be in for a surprise drop in their ad revenue.

The key metric to measure is DAU, and checking that you are generating more impressions from more active users.

It looks that some moderators do not like me. This post was on the main page and suddenly disappeared like many of my previous ones... Little not fair... Thanks...