eBay Made $400 Million This Year From Its Free iPhone App

According to eBay CEO John Donahoe, shoppers have already spent about $400 million on the popular commerce site using the company’s free iPhone application.

The number pales in comparison with eBay’s total sales figure ($59.7 billion last year), but it’s fairly significant considering the fact that the iPhone has a relatively small market share – about 15% of the smartphone segment – and mobile payment transactions are still new to many. Who would have predicted around half a billion dollar in sales a year would be recorded through the eBay iPhone app when it debuted on the App Store last year?

According to this report by the Financial Times, some wealthy people have used the mobile app to buy a Lamborghini, a Bentley and a $150,000 boat. And if Mobile Marketer heard Donahoe right when he talked numbers at a summit in Las Vegas, the Lamborghini went for $350,000. Talk about being at ease with making purchases from mobile devices.

Most likely, these are the high-profile exceptions to the rule and most people use the app to buy books, clothing and electronics much like regular eBay shoppers do. In total, approximately 4.6 million iPhone owners have downloaded and installed the app to date.

[via Tech Crunch]

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Free iPhone Apps make more money than you think

Earlier this year Pinch Media released a report on the state of the App Store, describing some of the trends it had seen as developers tried to monetize their apps. The verdict: advertising on free applications simply can’t match the payoff from even the least expensive ‘paid’ applications, and would require an unobtainable $8.75 CPM to reach the same income per install.

AdWhirl, the iPhone advertising platform formerly known as Adrollo, begs to differ. Since launching last month, the company has signed on over 10% of the top 50 applications in the App Store and is serving 250 million ad impressions per month. And their data tells a different tale.

According to co-founder Sam Yam, one of the fundamental flaws in the Pinch Media report is that it assumes that applications only show a single ad impression per user interaction (in other words, every time you open a free app, you only see one ad). Yam says that applications actually tend to serve 3-5 impressions each time a customer interacts with them, with even higher figures for some especially engaging applications. And when you divide that $8.75 CPM by 5, things become much more reasonable.

The AdWhirl report, embedded below, says that applications that crack the top 100 in the Free Apps list make $400-$5000 a day - a wide range to be sure, but even at the low end that works out to around $12,000 a month. Among these top apps, AdWhirl is reporting an impressive $1.90 eCPM and 2.6% CTR. And while applications that do reach the peak position in the App Store eventually lose steam, revenue tends to remain consistent over time after the initial dip (see the graph below). Of course, making it to the top of the Free Apps list is easier said than done, and most developers make far less than $400 a day. But the same is true of the vast majority of paid applications too - in fact, there’s actually less competition on the Free side of the store.

Read it @ Tech Crunch

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Stanford Students Release A Cool Batch Of Free iPhone Apps

Students from Stanford’s Fall 1008 iPhone class CS193P created a nice crop of apps that are now available or will be soon for the iPhone (see our Stanford Facebook apps posts here and here).

A list of them is here, and some of them I’m going to keep on my phone. My favorite is iDiscover, which gives you random content you think will be interesting (text, videos, apps). You rate them and it teaches the app to refine what it sends you in the future. It’s a sort of StumbleUpon for the iPhone, and its addicting. iDiscover is free. Air Guitar, a $1.99 app, looks like it might be another winner but I’m having issues downloading it.

Among the yet-to-be-approved apps, Site Saver looks like a useful way to store web content locally. I tend to take a screen shot of whatever I’m looking at, but this looks like a better solution if it saves the whole web page rather than just what’s on the screen. And Heydar, a location-based dating application, is being released at the perfect time.

The complete list is below.

Read the whole article @ Tech Crunch

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Many More Free iPhone Apps Coming Soon Thanks to LiveRail

Since the launch of Apple’s App Store, developers have faced an ongoing dillema: “For Free, or Not For Free”? Putting a price on an application to generate some revenue obviously adds a significant barrier to entry, especially when there are so many free apps available. But it also adds a level of credibility - many people assume that because free apps aren’t earning money, the developers probably haven’t put much effort into them.

Today sees the launch of LiveRail for the iPhone, an advertising platform that could help change this paradigm entirely by allowing free applications to still monetize effectively. LiveRail allows iPhone application developers to embed brief video advertisements into their applications, which play immediately after launching an app (developers get paid on a CPM basis). CEO Mark Trefgame says that the platform is plug-and-play, allowing developers to implement it with a minimal amount of effort and only a few lines of code.

The technology behind the application is impressive - this isn’t just a single video that’s embedded into the application.

Read the whole article @ Tech Crunch

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