This is tough. When webOS was announced I got into the early Palm developer's program and created an application. It was kinda neat but also not incredibly complex. After the Pre was released within about 6 months it had over 100,000 downloads (which, for a new OS and device, seemed kinda awesome!). It was a free app but I thought I could try to monetize it a little.

First step was to try ads. It went from highly rated to about 3 stars because everyone hated the ads (understandable). I tried putting them at the top, bottom, middle; nothing worked at all.

There were no in-app purchases for webOS (or really any platform at the time) so I did what everyone else started doing: when they launched being able to pay for apps I provided my app for $.99 with no ads. After 2 years of running I made $9.

Essentially I destroyed the user-base my app initially had by trying a couple of ways to monetize them that provided poor user experience. I'm not sure what the best solution is here but don't make my mistake and worsen your user experience to make money; it won't work.

FYI for anyone curious my app on webOS was a take on the tip calculator. I know I know "why would you try to charge for a TIP calculator!?" but I thought the spin I had was novel, you could rate different parts of your restaurant experience to get an exact amount to tip rather than dealing with percentages at all (it only showed you the percentage after it calculated the tip). I had done a ton of tip research at the time and thought the idea might be worth something (plus I was young and dumb). It even had bill splitting! But yeah in the end I really shouldn't have charged for it I mostly wanted to experiment to see if I could monetize it and I ended up completely destroying it. http://www.webosnation.com/dumb-waiter-free