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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.
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.
Where have you heard that? Considering that Win8 is fully functional as a general-purpose OS (and indeed adds many distinctly non-tablet features, such as Client Hyper-V, the Win+X / right-click-on-Start menu, Windows To Go, improvements to Task Manager, and so on), and that Windows "Blue" (which may or may not be Win9) is probably (based on the leaked early builds) adding back the ability to display the Start button at all times and to boot straight to the desktop, I'm not sure how much less ground it could lose on the general purpose front...
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
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.
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!
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?
I googled and posted this above, meant to post it to you. From GigaOM, 10/4/2012:
Most app developers make less than $500 a month (chart) By Rani Molla - Oct. 4, 2012
We know that not every app is Angry Birds and not every app developer is Rovio. But just how tough are things for the workaday app developer? In a recent GigaOM Pro study (subscription required) of app developers, more than half of the respondents say they make less than $500 a month from their paid apps (see chart below). Perhaps not surprisingly, app development isn’t a full-time job for most of them. Some 75% of 352 respondents either hold another job or do app development only as a portion of their main job. (The picture is even grimmer for developers of advertising-dependent apps — a third of those developers make less than $100 a month in ad revenue, according to the study.)
On the high (and much more rare) end of the spectrum, about 5 percent of app developers in the survey make over $20,000 a month. These developers tend to be part of big app firms. (see chart at linked page)
http://gigaom.com/2012/10/04/most-app-developers-make-less-than-500-a-month-chart/