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Windows Store In-App Ad Revenue Plummets
jfruh writes "One of the hooks Microsoft has used to get developers to build apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 has been pubCenter, an ad network that's easy to add to apps and provides revenue back to publishers. But many developers found that on April 1 that revenue abruptly dropped by an order of magnitude, with most potential ad impressions going unsold; one developer reported only 160,000 ads served to 60 million requests, a fill rate of less than 0.3%. Since many of the ads before April 1 had been for Bing, this may be a sign that Microsoft is no longer willing to subsidize its developers — and that advertisers aren't that interested in buying ads in Windows 8 apps."
...I know I certainly don't want to see ads in Windows 8 apps.
Trying to convert a general purpose computer to a phonelike environment has an inherent failure, that users recognized, then later advertisers recognized that users recognized it. I've heard windows 9 is planned to cede even more ground on the general purpose front. That would actually make me, a windows developer(currently), switch to Linux on as my main platform.
ok, so ad networks (as search business) are winner takes it all. Because of the dynamics of the bidding engine when you get volume. Any ad developer that have a business guy worth his salt would go for one of the leading ad network opportunities over the small me-too player that Microsoft pubcenter is, also when you develop apps for Windows 8 (contrary to what the summary might seem to apply, Windows 8 app developers are in no way limited to pubcenter).
".... and that advertisers aren't that interested in buying ads in Windows 8 apps."
Of course. Advertisers won't place billboards in Antarctica either. Why is this news?
60 million requests? how?
There may be no "I" in team, but there's also no "F" in way.
dirty little secret: those ads loading are data you are charged for.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Azure.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Both as a developer for nearly all platforms, and as a consumer, I despise software monetization through ads. Sure, I understand that not all apps have a clear method of monetization, and so many developers rely on ad revenue to offset their development time/costs, but I personally won't touch their adware, period, meaning they lost the opportunity to monetize me at all. Adware wasn't acceptable to me in the 2000s with ad supported Windows software, and it's never been acceptable to me on iOS, Android, or Metro, or any other platform since then. It seems to me that ad supported software was largely rejected by consumers up until the proliferation of smart phones, but I still reject them and refuse to support a business model that under the hood is really after collecting consumer data. From my prospective, adware is spyware, albeit less innocuous, but still privacy invading, unwanted, and annoying.
What they asserted in particular was that non-verified code wouldn't run at all
This is true of Windows RT, the operating system on ARM-based Surface tablets. It hasn't been reported publicly with respect to any x86 product.
Could the explanation be that Windows RT users prefer to pay for apps rather than to be served -- and to click -- ads? That's certainly the case for me. I own a Windows RT tablet and spent about $10 on apps thus far, including on Book Bazaar Reader, GVoice, and IM+. When there's a way to get rid of ads by paying for an ad-free experience in apps I value, I do.
Microsoft is also encouraging more significant apps by setting the minimum price in its app store to $1.50. I can easily imagine that more significant apps are more tempting to buy outright rather than to live with ads.
Apple has run into similar issues with their iAd advertising network that they run for iOS devices. It had an initial rush of advertisers who spent big money placing orders for "premium" ad space, followed up by results that didn't justify the additional costs. Apple extended the program to developers who wanted to advertise their apps in other apps, offering them a smaller minimum ad impression order size compared to general advertisers. That minimum was later reduced, and then reduced again, and I believe reduced yet again, along with the rates involved, indicating that interest has been weak and weakening. It seems to have finally stabilized, but it's FAR cheaper than it once was, with minimum orders that are significantly lower than they used to be.
Meanwhile, Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 have been seeing worse-than-expected sales since their launch, so I don't exactly find it surprising that an advertising network focusing solely on them would be faring worse than the one on a platform that is doing quite well. Not to mention that both Apple and Microsoft make their money from selling products to customers, whereas Google, who seems to be running the advertising network that's actually doing well, makes around 98% of its money from selling ads. Small surprise that they'd manage to succeed here as well.
I mean their phone was doing so well.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Really, android radicals? Like "DROID AKBAR"? Seems a bit crazy.
I never am able to get a straight answer - if you put out a popular indie game, for example, and you decided to make it free and ad supported, for example, let's say you get 100k people to download it, and 10k people are playing it regularly what kind of money do you make? $100/month, $1000/month, $10k/month? anybody know?
Hulu Plus is the only Windows 8 app I ever use. The others are just... bad.
Executives in any industry tend to follow the lemming herd. Customers follow what works best.
Basing anything on ad revenue is a cursed way to make money, and in the long run, unsustainable. Google and other large ad companies, including Microsoft may be making money, but that income from ads is not sustainable forever. .
I don't know about that. The television networks have been doing it for 60 years. That seems pretty "sustainable" to me.
On the other hand I would agree that the idea of "anybody can make a buttload of money from ads on the Internet" is a flawed business model. I particularly like this one comment from the article:
"I used to have a good bit of impressions / day then it dropped to barely nothing last week and now we're essentially at zero. I do only free apps so this is killing me! How am I even supposed to cover my Windows Azure costs let alone all the labor invested!" wrote user "silverdollar."
Translation: I want free money and I'm pissed that I"m not getting it.
My opinion on this will also be unpopular. Not making enough money from ads? Boo-fuckking-hoo. Get a real job and stop annoying us with your bullshit ads.
If this is part of its own ad network or a smaller network, it'd explain the problem. These apps can drive a lot of traffic, but it's not in a place the market particularly has interest from advertisers yet.
It'll probably clear itself up as time goes on. Either that or we'll see ad supported apps disappear from the Windows platform... and I wouldn't shed any tears over that.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Wait, Windows has an app store? Even more surprising is that anyone bothered to advertise there.
It seems to me that for this "revenue" to plummet from $0, it must mean they're paying businesses to advertise on their site. Sounds good. Sign me up!
Indeed. You should tell to guys that run rovio that all the ad money they've been bathing in is actually imaginary.
I've been on both sides - both purchasing ads and providing content on which ads were sold.
In the business, we track ad impressions with a metric called "CPM" or "cost per mille" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_mille. So I read your question as "what can I expect for 4CPM/yr." Let's say I'm looking at a very targeted audience that frequently (2%) clicks on my ad for a $1K product, of which I know 25% of my clickers will start an eval and 20 of those will buy, and my ad budget is 10% of revenue. In that situation I might pay as much as .02 x ($1000/10) x 0.25 x 0.2 = $.10 per impression, or $100 CPM. So lets say your top-end "worth" is 4x$100 = $400. However, click rates usually aren't that good (I've had a smart phone for years - still waiting to see the first ad I willingly click on), prices aren't that high, targeting is often poor and conversion rates may not be that good either. So...I'd figure that your time is probably worth more like a tenth or twentieth of that, say $20-40/yr?
>> Microsoft is also encouraging more significant apps by setting the minimum price in its app store to $1.50
Are they stupid? Do they know that the dominant competing platform (starts with "i") sells millions of apps for 99 cents? Do they know how much easier it is to sell a 99 cent anything than a $1.50 anything better?
Yes, if something, this is a feature to me. Both a Win8 tablet and phone without the intrusive behavior....
Let me introduce you to http://adsinapps.microsoft.com/ Ads in Apps or as Microsoft say "Start monetizing with advertising Ads in Apps for Windows 8 has the features that developers want."
For the Apple users amongst up http://advertising.apple.com/ iad "Every brand has a great story to tell. With iAd you can put that story into the hands of millions of iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users around the globe."
Clearly your not using Google ;)
"Free" money? Those apps didn't write themselves. Nor is it free to provide the services that the apps rely upon. Do you expect that your so-called "real job" would come with a paycheck as compensation for the work, or would you say anybody who expects that just wants "free money" as well?
I can understand the hatred of in-app ads, although in the real world most people are less upset by ads than by the concept of actually *paying* for the software they use. You went a bit off the deep end when you went on your rant about developers of ad-supported apps, though. Nobody is entitled to successful business or anything like that, but the user you quoted has a perfectly legitimate concern: through no fault of their own, the monetization strategy they were using fell through. Would you tell somebody to "get a real job [with job security and pensions]" if they complained about suddenly being part of a massive layoff?
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Mozilla in their 'wisdom' decided to disable the ESC key that a lot of people used to stop animated gifs running https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=614304/. It also stopped the page loading - dead in its tracks - which I personally loved. However some Mozilla devs didn't like it (as scripts etc may not be loaded properly). So they've now taken control away from the annoyed user who is going to cop entire page loads of crap.
Radio and television had very few mass market alternatives till at least the 1970s.
You might as well say circa 1930 that steam locomotives have had a good 60 years, and they seem pretty sustainable.
Past trends do not necessarily translate into future successes.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
However things are a bit different with TV. First, they do lose viewers when the ads become obnoxious, so they avoid that. Users are allowed to leave the room while ads are playing, they are never forced to "click to continue" or wait 20 seconds. They have a much larger audience too and generate less per viewer than the typical ad-based web site expects to get per reader.
A better direct comparison with web sites would be traditional newspapers. There the ads were much more localized, and the regular sales insert for the local grocery store that had coupons was very often looked forward to by many readers. The ads in newspapers very often will inform the user that a certain business in town actually exists. Those ads drove a lot of people to the businesses, more than most web based ads could only dream of. A global internet doesn't work that way, and with privacy concerns many people don't want to allow the spying that lets the ads attempt to figure out your interests. Newspapers ads also never whined petulantly when someone turned the page instead of reading the ads, or picked up a left over paper and left the ad section behind.
This is not a real full time job for most of these app writers, they write the apps on the side as a hobby. They already have a real job. And given the shoddy quality of most of these apps, maybe they're better off in a different field anyway?
and then linux and maybe mac os will go big and apple may be forced to open mac os to all hardware.
So they've now taken control away from the annoyed user who is going to cop entire page loads of crap.
You can download the source, change it back if you don't like it, isn't that the whole selling point of free software?
You gonna do that for every single Firefox update? Or are you gonna make a fork for just one issue and maintain it indefinitely?
Your solution is not practical. An extension that brings this feature back though, is. Extensions are what brought back the status bar and the "Send Link" functionality which were both removed for dubious reasons.
Yeah I agree with you, the whole concept that open source gives control to the user is true in theory but in practice it is mostly completely impractical for solving problems like this anyway.
Have you ever tried to set up the toolchain to compile FireFox? It's been a couple years, but it was ridiculously hard.
FWIW, I wasn't have a go at you. I have downloaded the code for smaller projects and made modifications to suit my own needs (e.g. converting some tools designed for GNOME to integrate properly in MATE). It's just that for something like Firefox, with regular updates and mammoth code bases that take ages to compile anyway, it's easier to just use the existing extension framework to make changes. Your point still stands though.
Nah that's cool, I understand. Certainly i've done the same thing with smaller projects, adapting them to my needs, but for the larger ones like Firefox I certainly agree with you that unless it's something you can do within the provided frameworks (in this case extensions) the job of patching changes into new releases that seem to come out ever more frequently is not practical.
No I haven't, I didn't mean to come across as though that's the answer, it was more that I see that espoused as the great thing about open source - that it puts control in the hands of the user but all to often - as you rightfully point out in this case - actually exercising that control is impractical anyway.
I have, and gave up. I used to remember the details, but the installer alone was ridiculous. I tried debugging it for ReactOS, and it turned out to be a simple resource/image issue. Maybe things are better now, but I refuse to take a look.
I remember finding functions, only to see unused code in abandoned folders and not knowing which was actually part of the project. Not just a few, I estimated maybe 25% of the source distribution was dead code.
The build chain, considering that the UI is written in XUL, requires a full build of XUL, followed by the actual browser build.
Maybe things have improved, but I'm not going anywhere near it now. You could not pay me to alter a spelling mistake and build the result.
However things are a bit different with TV. First, they do lose viewers when the ads become obnoxious, so they avoid that. Users are allowed to leave the room while ads are playing, they are never forced to "click to continue" or wait 20 seconds.
Actually, that's not quite true. Firstly, broadcasters turn up the volume during ad breaks. That way you still hear the ads, even though you're out of the room.
They have a much larger audience too and generate less per viewer than the typical ad-based web site expects to get per reader.
That's completely untrue. Revenue is way higher on TV than web/mobile, when measured on a media consumption basis. Mobile figures are completely in the toilet - is's a factor of 16 difference. Here's a link to KPCB's Mary Meeker's State of the Internet report if you're interested in a more in-depth analysis: http://www.kpcb.com/file/kpcb-internet-trends-2012. Slide 17 is the relevant one.
The problem (as far as I can see it, anyway) is that more and more snake oil is being applied in digital advertising, *trying* to work out your interests, whereas the advertisers overlook the blindingly obvious matter of context.
I'm currently here on slashdot, which means that I'm probably going to be quite receptive to tech advertisements. When I'm reading a cooking blog, I'll probably be quite receptive to food advertisements. But start pushing me food ads on Slashdot, and tech ads on food blogs, and you'll creep me out. I switch interests on a momentary basis, but give you all the clues in the content I'm consuming. The only targeting information you need is to turn global into local. i.e. where in the world I am.
Full disclosure: We're actually building an ad platform, but from the perspective of the developer and the end user. We come from TV and Videogames backgrounds, so are in a somewhat OK position to try to understand and address some of the (many) shortcomings of existing ad solutions.
The *only* difference between that (start screen) and OSX (launchpad) is that on OSX it isn't mandatory.
A Windows Store application on the Windows Start Screen can appear as a widget, or "live tile" in Microsoft parlance, that displays information that the application automatically downloads. Does Launchpad have live tiles? If so, are they locked down such that only applications from the Mac App Store can display information in its Launchpad icon?
So, putting a desktop OS on a mobile device is "bad". Good thing iOS isn't based on OSX (which was then based on an older desktop/server OS) and Android isn't based on Linux.
The kernel of Android is Linux with wake locks, but the GUI of Android isn't based on the GUIs commonly used on GNU/Linux when the Dream came out (GNOME 2 and KDE). What draws people's complaints in Windows 8 is the change to the GUI, not the kernel that has changed comparatively little since Windows Vista and Windows 7.
What's a general purpose computer?
A computer for which an end user can in theory write and run code with no more limitations than the applications that come with the device. An iPhone or Windows Phone becomes general-purpose only by paying the manufacturer a recurring fee. It's based on whether one can, even if (as I acknowledge) 99 percent of the population happens not to do. Even if the average user does not compile applications from source, the mere fact that one can acts as a check against the platform suffering from blanket bans on application categories, as the iPhone suffers from lack of (say) wireless network troubleshooting tools.
Does it include netbooks?
I'm typing this on a Dell Inspiron mini 1012 that I routinely use to write applications in Python and in 6502 assembly language and on which I have used GCC. So yes.
Does it matter if someone loads Android on their Windows netbook?
Like other operating systems whose user interface began on phones, Android is oriented toward full-screen applications, and some tasks become more difficult with an always-maximized policy. But it's still at least a general-purpose computer as long as the distribution of Android can load applications from unknown sources.
What's the differnce between an Android netbook and Android tablet with keyboard?
A netbook is more likely to include a touchpad, which I've found to be more precise than a capacitive touch screen in some cases. It's also more likely to have full-size USB ports to plug in mice and storage devices.
Is it a problem if I hook my phone up to a 60" TV and use a bluetooth mouse and keyboard to control it, playing games and movies in HD on a TV?
If you've docked your phone to a large monitor, external keyboard, and external mouse, it's still a general-purpose computer if it allows users to write code and send it to the device. If it's an iPhone, turning it into a general-purpose computer costs about $748 (Mac mini + developer program membership) for the first year and $99 for each additional year. Android, on the other hand, doesn't impose a recurring fee and lets one run Eclipse on a $300 Walmart computer if one wants.
Or you could just use a browser that hasn't been user-hostile for a few years now.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
> It was actually a she with a he signing off on it all, the :facepalm:
> he is gone, the she now heads windows dev.
First there was Melinda Gates with Microsoft Bob. 'Nuff said.
Now it's Julie Larson-Green, who is twice as bad. She also pushed through the MS-Office Ribbon Interface http://www.microsoft.com/about/technicalrecognition/julie-larson-green.aspx in addition to her latest "triumph", the Metro interface.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
does that mean a PS3 with [a particular firmware version] is a GP PC, but the same hardware with newer firmaware isn't?
Yes. The 3.21 update changed the PlayStation 3 from a general-purpose computer into no longer a general-purpose computer.
It seems silly that the definition of the hardware depends on the software running on it.
A "general-purpose" machine is capable of purposes that the machine's manufacturer has not anticipated. Case in point: If a machine is thoroughly locked down to run only a single program, it isn't a "general-purpose computer" unless that program can be replaced.