I played with Admob a couple of times the last week. Admob displays advertisements on the iPhone (mostly in free apps).

You pay for the number of times someone clicks (taps?) on your ad. Advertisements for iPhone app on the iPhone are restricted to an icon + text, which is great because it keeps everything simple. You bid a price and the more you bid the more likely you ad is to be viewed. The whole system is a simplified version of Google's Adwords.

Anyway, I decided to play with $500 for Strip Designer -- Not exactly a stellar budget for an ad campaign. Campaigns require a budget of at least $50 per day and minimum bids in the US are $0.05 per click.

I started off with a world wide campaign. I set the budget to $125 day and I decided to let it last for 4 days. The $125 was spend in less than 2 hours, but I had set the bid to $0.10. That was way too high. I read somewhere, that Admob is supposed to divide the display of advertisements equally over the day, but I guess it can be a bit difficult to predict how often someone will tap on an advertisement and if the purpose of the bidding system is to show high-bidding ads more often, then doesn't that work against the "distribute over the course of a day"?

After two hours I got what I thought was a good amount of clicks and impressions. 2000 clicks and about 200000 impressions. That is a click through rate of 1%.

After that, I started to think about what I wanted to achieve. The myth on the iPhone app store is that the higher you get on the top-ranking lists the more money you make because you increase your visibility. So I thought it would be best to burn all the money in a short amount of time.

I did various experiments both on the same day as the first campaign, a couple of days later for US only, and again a couple of days after that. In total I got around 1000000 impressions and just under 8000 clicks (CTR 0.8%). I don't really see any reason to optimize the CTR since the money was quickly spend anyway, and I got the clicks I wanted. The total click price was slightly higher than the bid I gave. I would also note that impressions were better divided over the entire day during the second and third runs of the app which could indicate that Admob becomes better at predicting. I guess they need to predict your CTR.

I would say that it is naive to think that you'll get anywhere with a $500 budget. If you pay $0.05 per click (which is minimum) you get around 10000 clicks. Most of those people will not *buy* or download your app even if it is free. They'll quickly click away. Let's assume 2% actually buy it; That is 200 downloads. That will get you to top 25 of the photography section, but probably not top 10 or anywhere near the top 100 paid apps. And that'll only work if you get 200 downloads in a specific region. On top of that, there is probably a fair share of click fraud involved.

How much gain did I see? I saw a few additional downloads in some countries of Europa and Asia that I cannot attribute to anything else, but it was nowhere near an additional 100. Maybe 50. When I restricted the campaign to the US, the extra downloads got completely lost in the noise.

What I learned from this is that you either have to bet a lot more money or you should advertise for a free app, which is more likely to get downloaded. My feel is that typically, 4% of those that download a free app will also buy the full version. So if you can get e.g. 10% of your clickers to get the free app then you end up with 0.4% new buyers. For $500 that will give you 40 new buyers. That is in the same order of magnitude as I think I got.
That is something think about. If you want to get into the top 100 you need to get at least 1000-2000 new buyers so you might be looking at spending $10000-$25000. Of course you can potentially get a lot of that back again, if the app your are advertising for is Admob based.

Basically, I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you have a lot of cash for PR that you want to burn. Perhaps a complete strategy with advertisement(s) + discount offer + free app for a period of 3-7 days might work.

I got this email yesterday.

Apparently, you can pay to get someone to review your apps. There is no end to the way people seek to make money on the iPhone.

It is true that I experimented with advertisement on admob a couple of days ago, but I wish the guy had taken his time and checked that we already have approximately 25 reviews (not 3), and that the reason he only saw 3 was because Apple only shows the reviews since last update on the iPhone.

What's the point of paying $40 for 20 reviews, when I got more than 20 reviews for free?

BTW. Reviews do not really help all that much. Ratings help occasionally. I must admit that I would be tempted to this, if it wasn't for the fact that there are promo codes that you can give away for free. I suggest doing that instead. You'll get more attention, the "winners" will think better of your product, their reviews (if any) will be non-biased, and some of the people you give them to actually provide you with useful (non-biased) feedback, that you can use to improve your product.

Thanks for undermining Apple's review system. I am sure both Apple, its users, competing developers, and even all the developers that pay money for your reviews are pleased.

I put Strip Designer on a sale to boost its position on the charts (primarily in the US). When I looked at Majic Rank (which is a desktop OS X app that ranks your apps in all app stores) this morning, I noticed that Strip Designer is now number 50 in the top 100 paid apps on the Japanese store. Great! Yesterday's number of sales in Japan was... 8... But, I can tell that these were bought at the old price not the discounted price, so today's sales are not included. It will be interesting to look at the numbers tomorrow.

I put Strip Designer on sale 12 hours ago, and it was wasn't picked as Staff Favorite in Japan (at least not this week maybe some prior week), so I am not sure how it got this big a boost from such a short discount period.

Maybe this gave some additional PR. Good to see that people like to install fonts.

... I hope that UTF encoding (forwards and backwards) works throughout the app though.

Update 1: Number 42 now.

Update 2: Was all the way up at number 24 for while. I raised the price this morning again, and it's position has already dropped to 32. The number of sales yesterday in Japan was about 250 -- So that is what it takes to get into the top 50 spot in Japan. Interesting! It will also be interesting to see how fast I drop out again, and how many sales I'll get today.

Update 3: Looks like another approximately 250 downloads in Japan can be attributed to the discount offer from friday, and therefore caused the rise to spot 24. So I guess spot 24 on the top Paid in Japan could give somewhere between 250 and 500 downloads per day. Unfortunately, Strip Designed has plummeted to number 82 since I raised the price.

Eyestorm was one sale for one week. More than 6000 people downloaded it during that week and during the first 3 days it quickly reached spot 69 on the free iPhone action games list (US store). By the end of the week Eyestorm-on-sale was old news and the daily downloads were in the double digits. I raised the price to $1.99 and the daily purchases are now in the single digits just like before the sale. I am not really sure what was accomplished. The intention was to create more awareness of the app, but in reality it seems like the majority just grabbed it, played with it for a few minutes, and went on to the next free app. One thing that was interesting though was to see Eyestorm listed as the best free app of the day (here (www.theappsmachine.com)).

I am not really sure if we'll ever find a formula that works for Eyestorm, but at least 6000 people got it for free so far.

So here we are. It is March 4 and we still don't know when the iPad will be out (except by the end of March) and we don't know when we can submit apps for it. From a developer point of view all we have is the SDK in beta 3.

While a lot better than beta 1, beta 3 still has couple of rough edges here and there -- Like the "Upgrade target for iPad" menu option which is simply dimmed out for me, so I had to do it manually by changing the project settings to support both iPad and iPhone and create a new main xib file. For some reason my old main window xib files created a main window of iPhone size, so the app started in the upper left 320x480 pixels of the iPad simulator. Took me a good 30 minutes to figure out what was wrong. Anyway, beta 3 really feels a lot better.

The software is not the issue, it is the hardware.

The 1st and 2nd generation iPhone and iPod touch had only 128 MB of RAM while the third generation has 256 MB. Afaik all models have only 12 MB of shared video ram which is barely sufficient to have four 1024x1024x16 bit textures uploaded (8 MB ), additional textures and a few core animation layers. With full screen and modal uiviews significantly larger on the iPad, does it have more shared video RAM or does Apple expect us to manage with 12 MB?

Then there is the CPU question. The 1st and 2nd generation iPhone/iPod touches were not really fast enough to do >15 fps screen updates involving quartz painting -- Especially, when scaling and rotating images. The newest generation devices are faster, but only about 2x. I am guessing the iPad processor to be even faster, but will it be fast enough that I can do more screen rendering using quartz or do we still have to jump through hoops with Core Animation or OpenGL even for 2D graphics?

Then there is the UI. On the iPhone/iPod having the toolbars in the bottom of the screen makes sense, because they are close to the fingers. Apple places the toolbars in their iWork apps in the upper right corner of the screen. Is that really the right place for them? Sometimes following Apple is the right thing, but is it always? Hard to tell without the hardware, although a cardboard mockup helps.

While you are developing a lot of questions pop up, and not having the hardware is incredible frustrating when trying to plan, what *needs* to be done to port apps from iPhone to iPad. Will the OpenGL rendering be fast enough for what we do on the 768x1024 display? What sort of extra capability can we add given the CPU? How do we test that e.g. orientation changes are handled correctly? What is our deadline? Do we have 2 or 4 weeks?

I wonder how many developers will postpone porting until after the launch... I'll keep working blindfolded, but I bet that a lot of users will be disappointed with the first generation of universal iPad/iPhone applications.