Soon I plan to do a recap of my first year selling apps in the Android Market (whew!), but for now I'll just stick to recapping last month...
Unfortunately I'm going to start getting a little vague and cagey about hard numbers. This is because I've started to make deals with other developers, and those deals don't necessarily include publicly disclosing sales and revenue figures.
But I can say that February was Polyclef's best month to date, revenue-wise. The Android Market ranking shuffle didn't have a big impact, keeping my top-performing apps in the top five in their category. Ad revenue has stayed mostly flat, while sales have increased. Historically, ad and sales revenue had been about 50/50, but February saw a shift to over 60% of my revenue coming from sales. I'd prefer that most of my revenue come from ads...ad-based apps are a better defense against piracy, and I don't have to worry about finding the best price points, etc. But I'll take the revenue how ever it wants to come.
I'm not doing nearly as well as Edward Kim (see the last post), but I'm getting there. Instead of having a single, high-profile app, I've got a variety of about 20 apps, and I'm using a mixed strategy for revenue. This has led to, and will hopefully continue to lead to, robust, sustained growth.
Stay tuned for the yearly recap, where I'll talk about how far Polyclef has come and what the plans are for the next year...obviously I'm optimistic.
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Hi James,
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for this blog. I was really down about Android and was looking at iPhone for my next adventure (coming from Palm OS game dev) Your results (thanks a lot of sharing your sales data and experience) made me a little bit more optimistic about Android now. I have started learning about Android and love the OS but was not convince you can make any money doing app for it. Your example shows at least it is possible and that's all I needed it to continue learning/developing about Android.
THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!
Mo,
Great blog! Very impressive numbers :)
ReplyDeleteI was wondering, what do you use for mobile advertising? Google Adsense for mobile phones? I cannot seem to get anywhere close to your numbers?
@Mo: Glad to hear you're optimistic about Android. Make some cool apps and let me and others know about them. :)
ReplyDelete@noblemaster: I started out using AdMob, then in September '09 I was accepted to the Google AdSense beta. That's what I predominantly use now, though I have dabbled a bit with MobClix also. My best advice would be to try to fill an existing gap where there is likely to be strong demand. Incumbency is also a big advantage. Remember, I'm still in the middle/upper middle. Most downloads for one of my apps is 114K, but there are apps out there that have hundreds of thousands of downloads!