I have been exploring the reality of smartphone apps as a business. There is no question that we consumers love to download apps, in particular free apps. But is there business in it. I did the first major study of the economics of smartphone apps on this blog, which focused on the futility of the paid apps, as soon as we had enough data to be able to deo it. That blog has been widely referenced as a landmark study to expose some myths in smartphone apps.
However, we did not have the data yet on the advertising side. Perhaps there is real money in the advertising in smartphone apps. I am on the look-out for metrics and stats. And I can report now on a particular case study of an early super-hit of the smartphone free apps space in gaming. In fact the game that earned Apple's awars for the best free iPhone game of 2009. This is the case study of advertising on Smartphone Apps: How much ad money out of 10 Million game downloads?
This is the busy time in consulting and speaking and I rapidly collect a vast library of new lessons learned and interesting stories to share. This was something quite extraordinary we learned when I was presenting in Helsinki at the excellent Mobile Developer Camp a few weeks ago, in late February. I want to share with you a stunning case study of the effectiveness and the revenues of in-game advertising on smartphone apps.
10 MILLION DOWNLOADS
Finnish game developer Elias Pietila is the founder of Qvik and he developed the incredibly successful "Wooden Labyrinth 3D" game for which he won the game design award from Apple's iPhone App Store in 2009. The game is now on all other major platforms as well, like Android and Ovi, and has achieved over 10 million total downloads. The game is free and is highly rated and popular.
Elias spoke at the Mobile Developer Camp and gave very candid numbers and facts, about how they were able to monetize the game, through advertising. I think this speaks volumes about the overall opportunity of advertising in smartphone apps - or the lack thereof.
So Qvik had that rare beast, a chart-topping game on the Apple iPhone App Store. They were achieving millions of downloads. But the game was free. So how to monetize that? Advertising sounded like a good idea. So for 2010 Qvik launched in-game advertising. Now we have the numbers. How did it go?
108 MILLION ADS SERVED
Well, for ads served, out of the total user base of 10 million Wooden Labyrinth 3D game users, they served a total of 108 million ads. Almost 11 ads served per game player on average. Looks good so far.
What of the gamers, did they like the ads? Did they click on the ads? Here is where in-game advertising gets tricky - it is intrusive to the gaming experience. But yes, Elias shared with us the total number of clicks. 1.1 Million. Yes. 1 percent click-through rate! Only. Only one percent. For all that interruption of the gaming experience it would mean 99 ignored ads, for every one actually clicked upon. And Qvik was only paid for those ads that had click-through.
So right from the start - while in-game advertising is fresh and new and 'novel' - and may have novelty value - the performance is so poor it is nearly as bad as internet web banner ads. Worse than search word ads. I think we already have learned a very valuable lesson here. If all those millions of game developers enable in-game advertising, we will see monsterous amounts of ads 'served' while extremely few are actually achieving anything we could possibly consider 'interactivity' or 'engagement' or anything meaningful in terms of digital advertising platform success. As this is a case study, we have to monitor these facts and see, but this kind of bombardment of audiences can explain why the numbers of mobile ads exploded last year by all the major ad networks like Admob etc.
30,000 DOLLARS IN TOTAL AD REVENUE
But what of Qvik and its revenues? Now the painful part. Out of 108 million ads served, Qvik earned a total massive income of... 24,000 Euros (about 30,000 US dollars). So in terms of ads served, Qvik's income was zero point zero two cents per ad. 0.02 cents. Not 0.02 Euros, 0.0002 Euros per ad served! Over 100 million ads sent, 30,000 US dollars earned. That is an awefully lot of pain, for an awefully little amount of gain. Yes, for a game developer who had a free game, it is 'better than nothing' but only barely so. Remember this income arrives years after the game is developed and launched, only if it achieves the millions-of-downloads level of exceptional game success..
If we calculate it across the total number of Wooden Labyrinth 3D games downloaded, Qvik has earned a "massive" 0.24 Euro cents (0.3 US cents) per game download. One quarter of one Euro cent, or almost one third of one US cent, per downloaded game. Thats your business case right there.
So lets take a lesson out of this. Last year Supercollider blog did the analysis of 'average' and 'median' for app downloads including free apps. This math is skewed very heavily by the few hits like Angry Birds, Bewelled 2 and Wooden Labyrinth 3D who score in the millions. So while the average downloads is 25,000 that is not the median. In fact, Supercollider reported that 54% of all apps receive less than 1,000 downloads.
WHAT OF REAL WORLD IF YOUR APP IS NOT HIT
If you are lucky to be better than half, and you achieve 1,000 total downloads of your cool free game - you are ahead of the curve! You are a 'success' while modest one. You are better than the half-point. And now, if you achieve 30 US cents per download through your in-game advertising, the ad revenue you can hope to achieve is If your game reaches modest levels of 'success' and you monetize that, and if you are as successful at it, as the highly popular game Wooden Labyrinth 3D was back in 2010, then you would be lucky to earn... 3 US dollars out of in-game advertising.
Remember - half of all apps created get less downloads than that. And if advertising is your model, you could earn 3 dollars per year. If your game was developed at the very bottom range of what is reported (top end being about 50,000 US dollars, typical costs reported in the 25,000-35,000 dollar range, the very bottom at 12,000 dollars per smartphone app) - so if you developed the game very cheaply, it cost you only 12,000 dollars, and you made no updates to it during its lifespan, and you achieved the 54th percentile downloads (1,000 downloads) and you monetized that through in-game ads, you would break even in... 4,000 years. I think we need some developments in human life-spans to be able to enjoy the fruits of our labor, if this is the method..
EARLY METRICS
So the metrics out of this early case study. In-game advertising for exceptionally successful multi-million download free game in smartphone apps - for all in-game ads served, you might get 1% click-through rates. For all ads served, you might get 0.02 cents - 0.0002 Euros/Dollars - per ad. And if measured by game downloads, you might earn a massive 0.3 US cents per game downloaded - or to put it in another way, you need 300 game downloads to earn one dollar. For advertisers, this is a horribly bad 'copy' of the failing banner ad concept from the internet. For the free app developers, the reality of advertising is exposing yet another aspect of this as a myth. There is no magical eldorado (currently) in smartphone apps. Not by paid apps, not by advertising either. It may become a relevant market opportunity in the future; it is not so today.
Thank you Elias for excellent insights out of your great success as a game developer, and modest success as a smartphone app game entrepreneour.
Further reading. If you are involved in the smartphone apps space, and have not read it, please take the time to read the analysis of smarpthone app economics. The blog is from last year and I will eventually do a total rewrite and update of it, but the logic is 100% sound and no new facts have emerged to discredit any major conclusion of that landmark blog. And if you are from the advertising side, please consider this blog article about mobile marketing (beyond smarpthone apps) and where response rates of 25%-45% are the norm, if done the 'right way' using the most advanced methods today. Yes, you can have great mobile advertising but today, that is not via free smartphone apps.
And if you want to read a real book on the mobile industry including a chapter on the smartphone apps space, my 10th book is the only one of my 11 books that is totally free, you can download it now from Lulu. It is called the Insider's Guide to Mobile and runs 350 pages. It even has a foreword by the CEO of today's hottest topic and company in mobile, Raimo van der Klein who runs Layar the Augmented Reality company. Download the unrestricted pdf file at this link from Lulu: Tomi Ahonen Insider's Guide to Mobile.
Tanks for sharing those data with us Tomi. It makes perfect sense that advertising (especially if paid based on click through) is not the right to monetize a free game, because The ads simple get in The way Of The gameplay. However, it doesn't completely dismiss The case for free games, because there's still The in App purchase opportunity. Any hard Data on this subject, Tomi ?
Posted by: Romain | March 17, 2011 at 02:23 PM
I'm in agreement here and on paid apps, but you really have to look into freemium games, in-app purchases, and break down the economics there. Here's a neat link on the NGMoco acquisition: http://dlr-law.com/blog111/Entries/2010/12/6_Valuing_ngmoco_-_Part_2__Revenue.html
That acquisition was probably overvalued (as have been most of the acquisitions in the social game space), however the non-trivial revenues are there.
Posted by: Patrick | March 17, 2011 at 02:50 PM
Dear Tomi,
I would've liked it if you had considered the game angry birds as well for your analysis. This analysis, though solid it definitely is, can give the impression that you are picking on someone with a poor monetization strategy.
Posted by: Arun | March 18, 2011 at 04:44 AM
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/03/angry-birds-android-1-million-advertising/
Angry birds is making 1 million dollars per month on android phones alone via advertising.
Posted by: Bob | March 18, 2011 at 08:54 AM
Thanks for the mention Tomi! To lessen the pain of the ad model, I have to admit that there is a full version of WL3D that costs $2.99 which has been downloaded a solid 180 000 times. So fortunately, there was still money to be found in the game. It just has been painfully apparent that the AdMob/Mobclix advertising isn't paying the bills. A company I'm involved with - GameBook Inc. - is based partly on ad revenue as well, but these ads are sold straight to the brands. The quality of the ads, and the value to both parties is much higher in this case.
I should probably sell the ad space in Wooden Labyrinth 3D straight and solely to toy manufacturers ...
Posted by: Elias Pietilä | March 18, 2011 at 10:12 AM
I like the strategy Tomi. First, spend 3 1/2 years saying that iPhone will fail and after having failed in that pursuit, now, turn your sights to the App Store.
Splendid. Good luck with that.
Posted by: Trav | March 19, 2011 at 05:22 PM
@Bob,
The techcrunch article states:
"we project earnings of over $1 million per month with the ad-supported version of Angry Birds,”"
There is a difference between a "projection" and how much they are really making.....
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Posted by: ed hardy caps prices | March 21, 2011 at 08:31 AM
Not just through ads, though; Apple's subscription model for iPhone applications takes cuts from the developers. Put the fact that they keep everything in-house on top of that.
Posted by: MicroSourcing | March 22, 2011 at 06:57 AM
Without any real data, I just felt that free apps doesn't do much money. Now, we have the data.
Developers of Angry Birds makes their money from paid downloads, and that's a lesson to learn: If you want to see the cash, do a good app and charge real money for it.
Posted by: Blog de carti | March 22, 2011 at 05:03 PM
It just has been painfully apparent that the AdMob/Mobclix advertising isn't paying the bills. A company I'm involved with - GameBook Inc. - is based partly on ad revenue as well, but these ads are sold straight to the brands.
Posted by: Mulberry | March 23, 2011 at 04:36 AM
This analysis, though solid it definitely is, can give the impression that you are picking on someone with a poor monetization strategy.
Posted by: Mulberry | March 23, 2011 at 12:06 PM
So this game made $400.000 overall, despite the fact that it was only one of the more prominent me-toos of Spotify's original Labyrinth game and never topped any charts I can remember. Labyrinth surely must have made millions then, also on a paid model. A place in the AppStore Top 100 of free downloads will give you between 10.000 and 500.000 downloads per day. It's up to your business model if you can monetize that. The audience is there.
Posted by: Tom Ross | March 25, 2011 at 05:53 PM
Correction: The developer of Labyrinth is called Codify, not Spotify.
Posted by: Tom Ross | March 25, 2011 at 05:55 PM
It is proven that advertising could really attract customers. People were convinced to buy a product because of the advertisement brought by media services. And through this, companies were also encouraged to do such advertisements to promote their products.
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