Revenue Drop

Not good news. Yesterday was the worst day for net revenue in over two months. Sales have been steadily sliding this month and ad revenue is down. What's going on?

One possible explanation for the sales slip: the market is saturating, at least for my top games. Maybe most of the people who really wanted Dominoes have bought it by now. Sales for Golf Solitaire, on the other hand, are the highest they've ever been. There should have been an influx of new users from the Christmas holiday, but I've seen no evidence of a bump in sales due to holiday sales. Flurry has estimated Nexus One sales for the first week at about 20,000, which isn't that great, and as I mentioned in my last post, I'm not seeing many accesses to my free apps from Nexus One devices. Nevertheless, my rankings are staying fairly stable, which possibly suggests that everyone else is experiencing the same thing.

What about ads? Ironically, I'm experiencing higher and higher volumes of both views and clicks, but revenue is down. This could just be a result of lower rates for ads following the holiday season. Unlike sales, I would almost expect ad revenue to slide a bit after the holidays, though I was hoping the increase in views and clicks would offset the difference. I've got updates to both Golf Solitaire (now with a mulligan for each round!) and Spades (blind nil and multiple difficulty settings). Golf Solitaire will be updated this weekend, and Spades probably next week. Hopefully that will inject a little life into sales and ads for those two titles.

The numbers on both these sources will naturally fluctuate. The biggest dent currently is from the drop in sales of Dominoes. In the first 10 days of last month, I sold 353 copies of Dominoes. The first 10 days of this month, I sold 241. That's a pretty significant drop, despite the rating staying unchanged at 4 stars and the ranking holding steady at #2. At some point, if sales dip below double digits, I'll consider shifting the title to free/ad-supported, but we're not there yet.

Hopefully this will just be a dip before a generally larger surge. I don't necessarily anticipate that from the Nexus One, but the new Sony-Ericsson phone is coming out soon, plus a whole new bunch of phones from the likes of Acer and Dell. Plus, Android is coming to AT&T, so it will soon be all on carriers. Here's hoping that yesterday was the lowest it gets for the rest of the year.