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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).
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?
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.
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.
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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?
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.
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!
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.
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.