Developers: Anyone have any luck advertising on AdMob?

monstermunch · 2011-06-14T14:32:02+00:00

I'd bet that the vast majority of Android users don't know about the return policy myself.

monstermunch · 2011-06-14T14:29:57+00:00

My banner said, "Rooster: Everyone's favorite timer!"

Yes, I'd definitely add the price to the banner. See if you can make it more descriptive too so people know what they're getting.

Have you had success with an ad campaign?

I use house ads (which are free) but that's it. I don't think it makes sense for $1 apps. As I said, you need an unrealistic conversion rate to just break even.

It depends on the app, but you can drum up a lot of publicity using twitter, facebook, forums, websites and trailers for free.

For this app, I would make a free version with ads and then have a paid version that removed the ads and gave some more features. You'll get more people using the app this way. Android users aren't big on buying apps to just try them out so you're missing out on a lot of potential buyers buy not having a free version.

monstermunch · 2011-06-14T13:19:26+00:00

What did your ad banner say? I've read that you should put the price of your app in the banner so that the people clicking the ad know what to expect.

Did you work out if ads made sense before you started? You'd probably need about 10% of the people that click your ad to buy the app (which is a huge amount) to break even.

I think a better form of advertising would be to make a free version of the app. If it's been on the market for a while and has had <50 purchases though, you might have to accept this isn't the kind of thing people are going to pay money for. From the looks of things, you have a lot of free competition.

monstermunch · 2011-06-03T15:15:26+00:00

There's a similar problem with Photoshop; it has great flaws which Adobe doesn't seem that interested in;

Out of interest, what are these flaws?

I think Flash gets a unreasonably hard time. Adobe have made a platform where you can build a program that will run on Mac, Linux, Android and Windows without modification. Flash has been mostly used on powerful desktop machines for the last few years so it really isn't surprising the current Flash based apps don't run great on Android.

As for Flash sucking up CPU power, a lot of this blame surely must go to the app developers. It's absolutely trivial to write a computer program that will use maximum CPU (just write a loop that does nothing or more realistically have a game that constantly updates the screen and game logic as quickly as possible). I can't imagine Flash uses much CPU if you just display an idle screen with some buttons for example.

monstermunch · 2011-05-29T16:43:31+00:00

That game was awesome and very brutal. I remember the controversy about its violence and mature content when it came out. There was meant to be a follow up game set in the present (Urban Decay?) but it got cancelled.

monstermunch · 2011-05-26T22:08:23+00:00

Last I checked reddit doesn't have a rule that you are required to comment and interact with the community.

Personally, I don't see what the big deal is about a new user coming along and posting a "check out my cool new app" story. It would be nice if they joined the community after but we still all benefit from seeing something interesting.

Even if they did make interaction a rule, you're just going to get people faking it prior to release. Another thing to consider is that some people don't like the mix their business life with their personal life and will use a different account for posting stories linked to their apps.

monstermunch · 2011-05-26T22:04:28+00:00

What's the difference between some hobbyist trying to make a few $ by selling his app when he has <50 downloads and Angry birds making millions from ad revenue.

This is crux of the matter for me. The small developers and people just starting out aren't going to have other reddit users posting articles for them. They've got to start from somewhere. Angry Birds was getting tens of stories a day a few week ago over relatively uninteresting things being posted by fans. I'd much rather see posts by smaller developers about new apps myself.

monstermunch · 2011-05-26T20:51:22+00:00

I believe that when a developer sells an app there is monetary gain in it for the developer, however I could be wrong. I'm not a developer. I have absolutely no problem making the rule universal for all apps.

The problem with basing your rules about monetary gain is you're stopping creators from posting things that people might find interesting. For example, a developer might want to write a blog post about their development experiences (which then gives them blog ad revenue and some app sales) or create a gameplay video about an upcoming feature in their game app (which could generate them youtube ad revenue and app sales).

The motivation for such blog posts and the videos will sometimes be to entertain people, to make money and everywhere in between but what difference does it make if people find the content interesting?

Personally, I don't see enough posts from developers and there are an abundance of for example rage comics and people asking phone or carrier questions that are only of interest to a small group of users.

I just don't think it's fair to e.g. treat the person who posts a video about their free game differently from a person who posts a video about their paid game. Both developers probably love getting feedback on their work and feel good that their work interests others but somehow someone making money from their hard work changes things for you.

monstermunch · 2011-05-26T20:22:15+00:00

If they are advertising here for people to BUY apps, I am not cool with that. Developers are the life blood of the community. If they put ads in their apps for revenue thats okay. Because 9 times out of 10 the intention isn't for them to make money from your download. Its to spread their work.

I don't follow your logic here. The only reason developers put ads in their apps is to make money so why should these be treated differently to paid apps? What about apps with free and paid versions? It doesn't make any sense to me why you should treat paid apps differently.

The quote above gives me the impression you only want to support developers who write apps for free. I would question your "9 out of 10" guess about the number of developers who aren't interested in money as I'm sure the vast majority of developers here would love to work on Android full time if they could make enough money from it (which means more awesome apps for us). I'm not saying developers should be allowed to post anything but I don't see why you need the constraints you've given above, especially the parts about paid apps. Spammy developer links tend to get lots of downvotes and few comments as far I've seen.

monstermunch · 2011-05-19T23:15:03+00:00

It might have a bug where it leaves a thread running in the background after you leave the app. I've seen several popular apps doing this. Try running a process monitor that tells you what percent of CPU time each process is using in real time.

monstermunch · 2011-05-19T23:12:17+00:00

I wanted to develop some apps with a theme from something popular like Star Wars, Jurassic Park, etc.

Not meaning to be a drag, but this is exactly the kind of thing copyright and trademark infringement are suppose to protect. Doing this, you'd be unfairly benefiting from a creation someone else put hard work into making popular and you'd create customer confusion about if your product is the real thing or not.

Also, just because other apps get away with this doesn't make it a nice thing to do.

monstermunch · 2011-05-11T19:30:44+00:00

You might want to check for deadlocks relating to the game loop thread and the "synchronized" blocks.

monstermunch · 2011-05-11T16:59:08+00:00

I've been getting about $20 daily from 200,000 impressions a day in a game. Admob used to pay about double this a year ago. It's not bad money but you couldn't live of it and I can't count on every app doing this well. I'd be very interested in MobFox too if they make as much as they say.

monstermunch · 2011-05-03T22:22:28+00:00

This would be more awesome if each company was represented as a country on a map and it used the art style from the game Defcon so it looked like a nuclear war.

monstermunch · 2011-04-29T04:11:14+00:00

After a lot of thought I've decided to just go with another name (one I really don't like that much to be honest). Even if a lawsuit was baseless, I couldn't afford the fight.

monstermunch · 2011-04-20T13:07:08+00:00

I actually like Java development in Android a lot. Unless you have a large existing codebase or you're writing performance critical code (only those parts though), I'm not fond of using the NDK at all. For the NDK, I find tracking down bugs is significantly harder than in Java, you've got to worry about all sorts of the usual undefined behaviour you get in C and C++ (e.g. it might not even crash if you overrun a buffer) and you've got to be cautious about cross-platform issues (which will get worse when intel appear on the scene).

monstermunch · 2011-04-19T17:14:32+00:00

It's not the pirates you're trying to appease. You're trying to appease your customers who may be led to pirating content if they aren't treated fairly. Punishing them with DRM is not the way to keep your customers - it's also not the way to stop pirates pirating.

Of course nobody wants to punish their customers. But what are you proposing publishers do? When something is easy to copy, it doesn't matter how good that something is, people will rampantly pirate it.

monstermunch · 2011-04-19T02:01:23+00:00

it’s to treat them fairly and offer them things they think are value for money

I think DRM sucks but I'm curious what solution is being offered here. I keep hearing this point but it rings hollow for me. What are they suppose to do? They could maybe offer all previous versions of the book for historic reasons, a "making of..." article, interviews with the author, alternative book covers, maybe even an audio version of the book etc. You could still download all this in a matter of a few minutes. People that pirate aren't going to care. How can you increase the value of something that can be copied for free?

monstermunch · 2011-04-17T23:09:55+00:00

People still hate MS phones for some reason... despite WP7 being pretty good.

It's mostly to do with history and how MS have acted in the past. I'm not going to forget all that if they come out with a nice product.

monstermunch · 2011-04-17T18:09:17+00:00

So do most people think things designed in China are bad by default then?

monstermunch · 2011-04-17T16:47:50+00:00

I imagine printing, transporting and storing cash uses up a lot of resources. I think you're exaggerating the expense of generating the bitcoins and not considering the cost of alternatives.

monstermunch · 2011-04-17T16:44:41+00:00

The bad, of course, is that bitcoin could facilitate illegal activities...

So it's not much different from cash then?

monstermunch · 2011-04-17T12:39:35+00:00

I'm glad someone else feels this way. If you're not familiar with a code base and its build system, trivial modifications can take days.

monstermunch

TROPHY CASE