Ask HN: Is there any relation between number of users and ad revenue? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there any relation between number of users and ad revenue?

3 pointsajaxguy5 comments

Just to understand more of an app revenues. Say, a simple mobile utility app or game is used by certain number of users. How would that be related to the revenue from that app. I am not looking for any social side of the app to generate more revenue. I am only looking for ads that display on the app while users are interacting with the app. Can we guess something like if the app has 100K users, it will have revenues like 100bucks per month? I know this is a very dumb calculation, but want to know the criteria that derives ad revenue. Here are couple of things pop out from me. Is it the number of users? Is it the amount of time users interact with your app? Is it the frequency of users that come back to app in a day? Any others?

If so, how much weightage can be given to each of these?

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Different advertising providers pay according to different schemes. Some pay every time an ad is shown to a user. This is the cost-per-impression model. Some pay every time an ad is clicked. This is the cost-per-click model. And some pay every time an ad is clicked and then an action occurs (like a signup or a purchase). This is the cost-per-action model.

Here's some criteria you could use to estimate ad revenue: number of users, number of times an ad is shown to a user per session, number of sessions per user, the model your advertising provider's using, the average cost-per-impression, cost-per-click, or cost-per-action, the click rate on your ads (if it's a cost-per-click or cost-per-action model), the conversion rate on the advertiser's site (if it's a cost-per-action model), the fill rate (you're not likely to get ads 100% of the time you ask for one, primarily due to users being located somewhere underserved by your ad provider), and so on.

There's so many variables, whatever estimate you get is likely to be a wild-ass guess - and not valid for long, since mobile advertising is a fast-developing industry and rates aren't always stable. (To complicate matters, advertising in general is very seasonal.)

It might be easier to just ask some developers you know with ad-supported apps for a rough revenue per user number, and take the average. Or talk to a rep at an advertising provider and try and get an honest guess out of him.

Thanks for your response and got to know somethings like cost-per-xxxxxx models. When you say advertising providers here, can you name some them in mobile space. What are the other many variables you were mentioning above, name some of them at least. I agree it is probably more appropriate to check some other developers who has done this kind of stuff to get real picture.

There is a thread discussing i-Ad revenue here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1022402

There are a lot of mobile advertising networks. A lot of the analytics companies have ad networks connected with them (Flurry, Mobclix), a lot just are ad networks (Ad Mob, In Mobi). There are tons of advertising providers. Tons. Ask around, see who has used what and how they like them.

good, that has enough information what I was looking for initially.

One of the other factors is your niche, and the amount of ads targeting your niche. For instance, I think icanhascheezburger gets very high ad click throughs and impression rates, because of how targeted they are. I can't find the article, but I think most of their ads are for pet products, since people looking at cute cats (and dogs, for their sister site) are predisposed to owning, or looking to own a pet.

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