Admob is a waste of space

We’ve been using admob to try and monetize our free apps for a little while now, and the results are pretty conclusive: admob is a complete waste of time, both from the advertiser’s perspective and from the publisher’s.

As an advertiser:

We put in $100 worth of ads, just to test the waters. I wanted to see if it was worthwhile to run a more serious campaign. The first thing that pissed me off was that admob suggests a bid price about 7x what you should actually be bidding. The typical bid is $0.03, but the default suggested bid in the form is $0.20. This is a pretty transparent cash grab, and in general a really shitty thing to do.

For our $100 we got 115,000 impressions. Of these we got 400 clicks (a 0.35% conversion rate.) For those 400 clicks we got precisely 0 sales of our $0.99 app. Based on reading about the experiences of other people using admob, this can be explained by the fact that even that 0.35% conversion rate we got was almost entirely made up of accidental clicks. Other reports suggest that the download rate for free apps is about 13%.

So the conclusion we’ve reached is that if you’re advertising a paid app – don’t. If you’re advertising a free app you’ll be paying about $0.25 per download. To get to the top 100 in the US store for a free app will cost you about $10,000-$20,000. I’m not sure what you’re going to do once you’re there – sell ads? good luck with that. If you’re advertising the lite version of your paid app, the conversion rates for lite-to-pay version of your app is about 1% (usually less – around 0.25%) so you’re certainly not going to make your money back there.

As a publisher:

Admob pays out about $0.01 – 0.03 per click. Yeah.

With a conversion rate of 0.5% (which is above average) you would need about 1,000,000 impressions per day to get revenues of $100 a day. That would require an install base of about 5-10x that. So in other words, unless about 25% of the entire iPhone + iPod market has installed your app, you couldn’t possibly make enough to support even one developer at a shitty salary.

The exciting conclusion:

There is no reason at all to use admob, unless you really want that $3 a day in revenues for a popular app. We’re going to implement a part of our app on a mobile site and use google adsense. It couldn’t possibly give worse results than admob.

Here’s a rule of thumb I’ve come up with:

if( self->studio_type == big_name_studio )
	self->make_app_store_apps();
else
	self->do_something_useful();

Oh wait, what am I doing? that obviously should be done in Cocoa Objective-C

NSString *myStudioNameString = [[NSStudio currentStudio] studioNameStringForCurrentStudio];
NSStudioCompare *myStudioComparison = [[NSStudioCompare alloc] initWithCompasionType:kCFStudioComparisonDefault withStudioType: kCFStudioComparisonBigNameStudio];

if( [myStudioComparison compareToStudioWithName:myStudioNameString withObject:nil withTarget:nil withDelegate:nil withRandomBullshit:nil, nil, nil, NULL, nil] == kCFStudioComparisonResultTrue ) //be sure to put nil, nil, nil, NULL, nil or else inexplicable crash occurs
{
	[self.studioComparisonResultDictionary setObject:[NSNumber numberWithBool:YES] forKey:@"studioComparisonResult"];
	[self.studioComparison setDelegate:self];
	[self.studioComparison commitStudioComparisonCompare withSelector:@selector(studioComparisonDidComplete:)];
}
else
{
	//this has to be performed on the main thread or it does nothing and gives no error!
	[self.studioComparison performSelectorOnMainThread:@selector(studioComparisonResultFalse:::::) withObject:nil withObject:nil withOneMoreObjectJustForFun:NULL withUntilDone:NO];
}

[myStudioComparison release];

//TODO: there is a memory leak somwhere in this function! debugger is useless.

There! now that’s how real programmers code. Of course that’s just the stub. There’s another 300 lines implementing the NSStudioComparisonResultDelegate protocol. Obviously.