What's It Cost To Be A Top iPhone App? $1,875 A Day

If you plan to use advertising to promote your iPhone app, don't expect to break the top 100 without paying a pretty penny.

To do so, it will cost $1,875 a day, according to Adwhirl, which aggregates a handful of ad networks to help publishers monetize their apps on the iPhone. (If you remember, Adwhirl recently got attention for sparing with AdMob about its policies on aggregators).

Since paying that big sum is not practical, Adwhirl has another suggestion: develop a free iPhone app that will generate a large user base, and then leverage those users it to drive traffic to your paid app. The idea is not super original. Game companies commonly offer free versions to get people hooked in hopes of converting them over to paying customers. However, Adwhirl does a good job of explaining why. More on that after the jump....

Adwhirl writes in its blog that this approach works because it takes about only 2,500 downloads a day to become one of the most downloaded free apps for a particular category-which is more attainable than becoming a top paid app. "For us, the solution was simply to release a few free apps, which quickly gain many ?throwaway? users and offer an effective channel to advertise the apps that were important to us." But why are free apps easier to get users for? Because right now, only a quarter of all apps are free, even though they generate 95 percent of all downloads.

[via Washington Post]

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Sexy iGirl iPhone App Funds a Startup

The true story of how one goofball iPhone app saved a company and funded a new MMO game.

You can't really take iGirl seriously. It's a goofy (with an emphasis on sad and borderline creepy) iPhone app featuring a pasty-looking, scantily-clad virtual girlie that you can customize according to your...ahem...interests. "We get e-mail complaints from conservatives that think [iGirl] is too perverted while kids complain that there's no nudity," says Resistor Productions CEO, Toby Battan. But that 99-cent joke helped kick-start a company and fund a new MMO (massively multiplayer online) fighting game, Disciple.

In the past, I've spoken with a homebrew coder who built games on the side, but Battan's story is a little different. He's a serial entrepreneur who got tired of courting venture capitalists in pursuit of his browser-based fantasy fighter (and I'll get to that game in a few seconds, promise). "I loathed having to go around to VCs asking for money," says Battan.

Obviously the economy is hurting and people aren't as quick to part with piles of cash as they once were, but he paints a funny scenario: "It used to be that they'd invest if they saw a good plan on paper. Now VCs want to see a company that's profitable before they invest.... Why would I come back when I'm already profitable?" In the end, it's a painful six-month-plus process just to get money with a whole bunch of strings attached.

[via Washington Post]

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AdMob giving away $1,000,000 to iPhone App Developers

AdMob Makes Mobile Ads Suck Less. Will Give Away One Million Dollars Worth of Ads To iPhone App Developers.

On the iPhone, even the ads are cool. Mobile advertising network AdMob is launching a whole new set of customized ads for iPhone apps. As CEO Omar Hamoui explains in the video above, the ads are specifically designed for iPhone apps. Rather than the static text or image ads that make up most of its mobile ad inventory today, these take advantage of specific features of the iPhone.

For instance, an ad for a song can stream the audio or launch the page on iTunes where you can buy it. A movie ad can open up YouTube so you can watch the trailer. An ad for a retailer can find nearby stores on Google maps. Others call a number through the phone, or can take you to a specific Web page. And just like on Facebook,where many of the ads on apps are simply promotions for other apps, an ad for an iPhone app will launch the App Store. (See video below).

To get iPhone app developers to sign up for his new ads, Hamoui is giving away $1 million worth of advertising to the developers with the most compelling apps who apply here. Each developer who is selected will recieve $5,000 worth of free ads for their apps.

Admob already serves up 34 million mobile ads a month on the iPhone's Safari browser. But that is a mere one percent of the total that AdMob serves across all phones. Hamoui, however, believes that the new type of ads he is launching today will quickly make up the majority of his inventory. Some of the advertisers he's already lined up include Ford, Electronic Arts, Land Rover, Jaguar, "The Mummy," Loopt, AccuWeather.com, and MovieTickets.com.

Read the whole article @ Washington Post

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