Windows Store In-App Ad Revenue Plummets 196
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."
As a customer... (Score:5, Insightful)
...I know I certainly don't want to see ads in Windows 8 apps.
Re:As a customer... (Score:4, Funny)
I'd watch an ad...
Not to see Windows 8!
And I run AdBlock Lite + Ghostery on everything!
don't want to see ads I pay for at all (Score:5, Informative)
dirty little secret: those ads loading are data you are charged for.
Re:don't want to see ads I pay for at all (Score:5, Interesting)
One more reason why people are not too keen on metered internet.
Unlike say a cell phone, I know if I use it for 30 minutes I have used, 30 minutes. Whereas if I visit a random website it might have multiple videos playing and will eat up a bunch of data, and I have no way of knowing this till the page has loaded.
Re:don't want to see ads I pay for at all (Score:4, Interesting)
This could be abused. Create a website taylored to appeal only to a particular social or political group your dislike, and hide somewhere an image tag - display size 1px by 1px, but actually referencing a two-gigabyte jpeg. While your victims are on your site browsing whatever you put up there, it's draining their credit with a ridiculously huge background download.
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This could be abused. Create a website taylored to appeal only to a particular social or political group your dislike, and hide somewhere an image tag - display size 1px by 1px, but actually referencing a two-gigabyte jpeg. While your victims are on your site browsing whatever you put up there, it's draining their credit with a ridiculously huge background download.
Just make that a picture of child pornography, then you'll actually have described some website defacing I've cleaned up multiple times before... Which is why it shouldn't be illegal to have 1's and 0's of any configuration "in your possession". Having bits doesn't even mean you've seen them.
You don't need a 2gig data file. A 3meg file is a "HD" JPEG, and serves the same purpose -- Just reload a new image each time the "onload" event of the element fires, which is what I observed the XSS exploit doing.
Re:don't want to see ads I pay for at all (Score:4, Informative)
Plenty of servers host really big image files... NASA, for example, has a handful of great ones.
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Your server is in a rack at a datacenter somewhere. They are on a mobile. 2GB is nothing to you, but a lot to them. Or just double your evil: Hotlink the image from another site run by someone you don't like. A little javascript and you can have the people visiting your fake pro-creationism blog sapping the bandwidth from scientology.org.
Now exacerbated by Firefox v20 ESC key disabling (Score:4, Informative)
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So they've now taken control away from the annoyed user who is going to cop entire page loads of crap.
You can download the source, change it back if you don't like it, isn't that the whole selling point of free software?
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I have, and gave up. I used to remember the details, but the installer alone was ridiculous. I tried debugging it for ReactOS, and it turned out to be a simple resource/image issue. Maybe things are better now, but I refuse to take a look.
I remember finding functions, only to see unused code in abandoned folders and not knowing which was actually part of the project. Not just a few, I estimated maybe 25% of the source distribution was dead code.
The build chain, considering that the UI is written in XUL,
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Perhaps if you are running Firefox you should consider this https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/smartvideo-for-youtube-mytube/ [mozilla.org]. It gives greater control of video stopping them from automatically running.
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That would be less of a problem than them being included in the Metro Apps provided as part of the OS. (Like the weather one).
Re:don't want to see ads I pay for at all (Score:5, Insightful)
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Microsoft seems to be using this product generation(at least on the consumer side, I'm told that their 'cloud' people have finally decided to get their shit together) as the "Make lots of onerous demands and changes, so that when we back down to what we actually wanted originally in version N+1, this is hailed as an improvement!" generation.
Re:don't want to see ads I pay for at all (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Microsoft's entire strategy for their metro screen and modern style apps was to get into what they thought was a massive cash cow. They saw Apple with the silly phone apps and wanted a piece of that. However the market is not the same; maybe a bit stereotypical here, but iPhone customers tend to be very enthusiastic and are willing to spend 99 cents on something that does nothing, and are proud to show off that they have dowloaded 100 apps. The typical Microsoft customer however is much more sedate, business users, people who hold very tightly into their wallet, IT professionals, etc. So saying "we've got a store too!" won't generate much profit.
What really kills it though is releasing it with a minimal set of applications, with almost all the built-in applications having usability problems, and the offerings in the store being pretty boring and uninspired, plus being required to make a microsoft account to spy on you merely to download a free app. Of course it's going to be a flop.
The apps on a phone have a bit more sense in a way. Someone might want to pay for an "is the person next to me an alien" novelty app, where they can just pretend to scan the person with a phone. Someone might want to pay for a better voice activated map program, since they take the phone on the road with them everywhere. This falls down using the same concept on a desktop though, where the users don't want to see $1.99 novelty programs they want to see actual mature $25-$250 productivity applications. And they're going to buy those applications through traditional sellers, not through a walled garden. Maybe there's a slight crossover with the tablet market, but the Windows 8 tablet market is overpriced and underselling.
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" iPhone customers tend to be very enthusiastic and are willing to spend 99 cents on something that does nothing, and are proud to show off that they have dowloaded 100 apps."
I sell crappy little apps that do nothing. I wish you were right.
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In summary, users want a Google home page type desktop, not an AOL type home page with blink tags everywhere. Makes sense.
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Would you rather pay for your apps? Most apps that I've looked at (admittedly this is very few; I find Metro to be largely useless) seem to have both paid (typically $1-$5) "Pro" versions and also free (ad-supported) versions. Sometimes the ad-supported version is simply the trial version of the paid app, other times it is listed as a separate app. The user has choices.
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Really? Other than Xbox(which I guess is a loss-leader, but fuck them anyways), I've never seen a double-dip Microsoft product. Which one are you referring to?
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Please list one or two. I have never seen a single Microsoft app that has advertisements, are "buggy as shit", or even require payment. Let alone all three!
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Free but have in app advertising + nickel & diming and have crashed on me or had some other significant bug:
- Monsters Love Candy
- Shuffle Party
Paid, have nickel and diming, and have crashed on me or had some other significant bug:
- Gunstringer Dead Man Running
- Fruit Ninja
- Gravity Guy
- Samurais vs Zombies
- Reckless Racing Ultimate Edition
Stuff from "Other Ocean" in general seems to be the most exploitative. Glu Games are horrid as well.
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Those aren't MS apps. Let's at least insult them for the right reasons. Those are 3rd party apps sold on an MS OS.
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Many of them are published by Microsoft Studios.
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Of the games you listed:
- Monsters Love Candy (Microsoft)
- Shuffle Party (Microsoft)
- Gunstringer Dead Man Running (Other Ocean)
- Fruit Ninja (Halfbrick Studios)
- Gravity Guy (Mini Clip)
- Samurais vs Zombies (Glu Games)
- Reckless Racing Ultimate Edition (Pixelbrite)
Only two were actually created by Microsoft.
And none of them have the combination of in-game
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The built in Windows 8 apps sometimes come with ads. Things like "Weather" or "Sports" and others with uninspired names. At first they were just stupid ads for Bing, but it's opened up and there are ads for Ford for example. Scroll all the way to the right to see some.
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Yes, but those are free apps and are quite stable.
Hardly the accusation in the post that I replied to.
Re:As a customer... (Score:4, Informative)
They're not free apps. You paid for them when you purchased Windows 8.
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They're not free apps. You paid for them when you purchased Windows 8.
So they're also not free ads. You paid for them when you purchased Windows 8.
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Hmm, I never thought of it that way. Another criticism of Windows 8 might be that the ads I paid for are low quality?
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I hear you. I use Ubuntu and it has no ads, only a powerful *feature* where stuff I search for also links to Amazon. So convenient!
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I hear you. I use Ubuntu and it has no ads, only a powerful *feature* where stuff I search for also links to Amazon. So convenient!
I use Xubuntu, which lacks this particular "feature".
Anyway, I suspect the Ubuntu in Finland would have to exchange shit with amazon.de or amazon.co.uk or similar, as shoveling it to amazon.com would be fairly useless. They certainly would not dump their load on amazon.fi (which predates the Bezos organization by a few decades and is unrelated to it commercially).
Re:As a customer... (Score:5, Interesting)
...I know I certainly don't want to see ads in Windows 8 apps.
Exactly right.
Screw them and their ads. Want to make money? Create something worthwhile and sell it. Want to make money from ads? Fuck You. I get bombarded with enough ads already.
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Sorry, you've grown too attached to your computer. You're no longer anything remotely respectful like customer. You're a consumer. You exist to have your time sold to other companies.
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And yet, as a customer you still get ads in your Windows 8 apps. Including the apps included with Windows 8 that you paid for.
Serves them right (Score:3, Insightful)
Trying to convert a general purpose computer to a phonelike environment has an inherent failure, that users recognized, then later advertisers recognized that users recognized it. I've heard windows 9 is planned to cede even more ground on the general purpose front. That would actually make me, a windows developer(currently), switch to Linux on as my main platform.
Re:Serves them right (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
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Well, it was a friend who's not as into tech news as I am, but I trusted them anyways. What they asserted in particular was that non-verified code wouldn't run at all, so everything had to come from the store, or a "trusted" vendor.
ARM is locked down more than x86 (Score:2)
What they asserted in particular was that non-verified code wouldn't run at all
This is true of Windows RT, the operating system on ARM-based Surface tablets. It hasn't been reported publicly with respect to any x86 product.
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It was also broken months ago; my RT device unlocks that restriction automatically upon bootup (company bought me one as a research target) which is how I'm able to get away with so little use of Metro.
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I doubt it. Even Microsoft isn't stupid enough to do that, they know they'd lose all their customers. It would be like Ford announcing that they no longer sell trucks.
Live tiles (Score:2)
The *only* difference between that (start screen) and OSX (launchpad) is that on OSX it isn't mandatory.
A Windows Store application on the Windows Start Screen can appear as a widget, or "live tile" in Microsoft parlance, that displays information that the application automatically downloads. Does Launchpad have live tiles? If so, are they locked down such that only applications from the Mac App Store can display information in its Launchpad icon?
and then linux and maybe mac os will go big (Score:2)
and then linux and maybe mac os will go big and apple may be forced to open mac os to all hardware.
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There's no actual restriction on what hardware you run OSX on, apart from the EULA.
True, OSX supports a restricted subset of hardware but there doesn't appear to be any custom stuff involved. Ask the Hackintosh guys.
On a related note, just what advantage would Apple get from this? Apple make their money from the hardware. It would be like Microsoft releasing their XBOX OS for other hardware makers.
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mac os has a good software base / lots of pro apps.
Apple can get more OS sales.
Apple needs a real desktop with out a build in screen with desktop parts and slots (at least a full size dual wide x16 slot for video cards) and maybe at min 1 more X4 or X16 slot for other IO cards.
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That's a Windows RT thing. That's intentionally designed to be limited, and any OEMs are contractually required to maintain the limitations. Whereas normal PC Windows 8 lets you run normal applications all you like.
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What it feels like using Windows 8 [imgur.com]
Yes, it is functional but only enjoyable to a small minority.
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Win8 has full kernel debugging (including "rewrite in memory" capability). Windows RT does not, but that didn't stop people from overwriting a kernel value in memory (how the "jailbreak" for RT devices works). You can also install your own drivers on Win8 (or on RT post-"Jailbreak" if you can find a copy of the RT DDK). I don't see any sign of either of those features going away for Win8; a disgusting number of software products require drivers for DRM, for example.
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Trying to convert a general purpose computer to a phonelike environment has an inherent failure, that users recognized, then later advertisers recognized that users recognized it. I've heard windows 9 is planned to cede even more ground on the general purpose front. That would actually make me, a windows developer(currently), switch to Linux on as my main platform.
citation?
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As I replied earlier in the thread, I heard from a friend and not a reputable source.
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I've heard windows 9 is planned to cede even more ground on the general purpose front.
To do otherwise would admit that what they were doing is wrong, which is for some reason worse than annoying customers.
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See, that comes down to who's making the decisions. There's some dumb VP in Microsoft who pushed for all the changes in Windows 8 to make a name for himself in the company. He still works there, but if he acknowledges that his changes were a bad idea, he'll be fired. If it's "market conditions", and his changes were still "good ideas", then he keeps his job. Microsoft doesn't make decisions that benefit them. They make decisions that benefit the decision makers in the company.
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Is it a problem if I hook my phone up to a 60" TV and use a bluetooth mouse and keyboard to control it, playing games and movies in HD on a TV?
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Huh? What's a general purpose computer? Does it include netbooks? Does it matter if someone loads Android on their Windows netbook? What's the differnce between an Android netbook and Android tablet with keyboard? Where are you drawing the line on this mythical "gp computer?"
Is it a problem if I hook my phone up to a 60" TV and use a bluetooth mouse and keyboard to control it, playing games and movies in HD on a TV?
If you reread the GP comment, it's clear that commenter was focused primarily on Win8/Metro (and maybe, sort of, OSX 10.8) - which has been "mobile-ized". Asus Transformers were doing a tablet OS on a "netbook" for years, and that model seems to work decently.
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You focused on where you think I didn't get it, and didn't even consider the possibility that I did get it. You need less slashdot and more time among competent and intelligent people. The "successful" mobile devices are based on GP desktop OSs. The unsuccessful mobile devices were often on dedicated OSs.
Kernel vs. GUI (Score:2)
So, putting a desktop OS on a mobile device is "bad". Good thing iOS isn't based on OSX (which was then based on an older desktop/server OS) and Android isn't based on Linux.
The kernel of Android is Linux with wake locks, but the GUI of Android isn't based on the GUIs commonly used on GNU/Linux when the Dream came out (GNOME 2 and KDE). What draws people's complaints in Windows 8 is the change to the GUI, not the kernel that has changed comparatively little since Windows Vista and Windows 7.
You don't have to (and shouldn't) use pubcenter (Score:5, Informative)
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Good, very good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good, very good (Score:5, Interesting)
So, I'm curious. What sort of revenue can you expect from adds from a user?
Say I use an app like the Slate.com app and read 6 articles a day. Plus the menu page, that's seven possible impressions. Maybe they'll be obnoxious and split some articles over two pages, so maybe 10 impressions. Let's say I'm religious about this app and use it every day. So you serve me 3,650 adverts per year.
Are you paid on ad views or clicks? What sort of revenue would you expect from one user who sees just shy of 4,000 adverts per year?
I'm trying to figure out what the value of a non-ad version of some popular free apps should be.
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Before The Times went behind a paywall, it was making about £1 per reader per year from advertising revenue. It had 10s of millions of readers.
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Re:Good, very good (Score:4, Informative)
I make 1 or 2 cents per user. Most ad networks pay on a click-through basis, and nobody clicks on ads. The ones that pay per impression pay pennies per 1000 impressions. If you have any costs its not a sustainable way to run a business. If you make an amazingly popular app, you may be able to pay for 1 developer for a year at US rates. You'd need to shotgun out an app every few weeks to really stay alive.
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Thanks, this is pretty much what I figured. Ad revenue is tiny.
I imagine the likes of slate, which obviously has a huge number of readers, it's possible to make money. But equally it should be profitable to sell an ad-free version very cheaply and still make more money.
What had me curious was the shift to pay-walls for newspapers. Many seem to have gone from trying to be ad supported to being a dollar or several dollars per week. The leap seems to be huge. Of course it may simply be that they were hugely lo
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Eh, its not easy to get people to pay for apps either- they aren't used to doing it. But yes, I make far more on paid apps with lower volume.
I think newspapers jumped up too much too quickly, and with too much reliance on the AP- why should I pay for news when every paper has the same damn articles and most are free? Really only the best papers can make money that way I suspect.
How much is an ad worth? (Score:2)
I've been on both sides - both purchasing ads and providing content on which ads were sold.
In the business, we track ad impressions with a metric called "CPM" or "cost per mille" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_mille [wikipedia.org]. So I read your question as "what can I expect for 4CPM/yr." Let's say I'm looking at a very targeted audience that frequently (2%) clicks on my ad for a $1K product, of which I know 25% of my clickers will start an eval and 20 of those will buy, and my ad budget is 10% of revenue. I
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Possibly a better question would be what is the ROI on all those Ad Views for the advertisers. It's possible there are less ads being served in some markets because the advertisers were not really making a profit against the expense of serving the ads.
Re:Good, very good (Score:4, Informative)
You're orders of magnitude too high. I made 4 cents on a click through yesterday through admob. It was the only click that day. I make nothing on an impression basis. There are a few networks that pay on an impression basis, but its pennies per 1000 impressions.
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Sometimes if the ads are localized, that may be suitable. But for nationwide or global advertisements, the 1 cent a view is massively overpriced (maybe ok per click though). This is one thing that killed the first dotcom "new economy", because they set the price per view online much more than the typical advertising rate and it wasn't sustainable.
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Perfectly accurate. Somehow we went from developing ad-aware and such to deal with this shit, to making it a fundamental part of new operating systems. At some point we just stopped fighting back, then we started losing.
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I think adware does make sense for trialware. About half the apps on my phone are free ones, because I barely use them, or because I'm testing them out. For test purposes, I'd rather have a full app with ads, than a neutered app that won't let me test the advanced features I'm probably most interested in. For apps I barely use... I understand the dev's need to make some money.
What I can't stand is pure adware apps, that don't let me pay up to get rid of the ads.
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These are essentially applications that no one would ever pay for. If the developer needs to make money then why can't they make money writing useful applications instead? Most of these app developers are just doing it as a hobby, this is not a sad sack story of starving developers, and advertising is not the economic foundation of the nation, so I won't feel guilty if I keep adblock on and I avoid any and all phone apps.
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This whole trend towards advertisement becoming a major top tier industry is just weird. If you went back to 1950 and listed the top 50 companies in terms of profits, I don't think there was even one company there that was primarily involved with advertisement. And yet today Google is number one and it's main revenue is ad based and people will vigorously defend the advertisement models on the web, some even calling adblock a crime. Advertisement used to be a minor side industry, it provided a necessary
Is that such a problem? (Score:2)
Could the explanation be that Windows RT users prefer to pay for apps rather than to be served -- and to click -- ads? That's certainly the case for me. I own a Windows RT tablet and spent about $10 on apps thus far, including on Book Bazaar Reader, GVoice, and IM+. When there's a way to get rid of ads by paying for an ad-free experience in apps I value, I do.
Microsoft is also encouraging more significant apps by setting the minimum price in its app store to $1.50. I can easily imagine that more significant
Minimum price is $1.50? (Score:2)
>> Microsoft is also encouraging more significant apps by setting the minimum price in its app store to $1.50
Are they stupid? Do they know that the dominant competing platform (starts with "i") sells millions of apps for 99 cents? Do they know how much easier it is to sell a 99 cent anything than a $1.50 anything better?
Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Informative)
Google, who seems to be running the advertising network that's actually doing well, makes around 98% of its money from selling ads.
FYI, Google does make the vast majority of its money from ads, but not 98%. Here are recent percentages (calculated from http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html [google.com]):
2011: 96.3%
2012: 94.9%
2013: 91.9% (Q1 only, obviously)
For Q1 2013, Google's non-advertising revenues saw 150% year-on-year growth and 27% quarter-on-quarter growth, to just over $1B for the quarter. At that rate, Google is on track to have ~6B in 2013 in non-advertising revenues, and for advertising revenues to drop to less than 90% of total revenues. Perhaps even more.
Note that none of the above includes Motorola Mobility revenues. If you count Motorola, Q1 advertising revenues were 85% of total revenues.
Also note that this isn't because Google's advertising business isn't doing well, it's because it's non-advertising business is doing even better (except for Motorola, which is still posting losses).
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but this is all public information.)
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Thanks for the info. I honestly pulled that number out of my head from something I heard a long time back, so I've very grateful to have better numbers posted, especially ones that are so detailed.
Thanks again!
That's really odd (Score:4, Funny)
I mean their phone was doing so well.
Ads in Apps vs iAd (Score:2)
Yes, if something, this is a feature to me. Both a Win8 tablet and phone without the intrusive behavior....
Let me introduce you to http://adsinapps.microsoft.com/ [microsoft.com] Ads in Apps or as Microsoft say "Start monetizing with advertising Ads in Apps for Windows 8 has the features that developers want."
For the Apple users amongst up http://advertising.apple.com/ [apple.com] iad "Every brand has a great story to tell. With iAd you can put that story into the hands of millions of iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users around the globe."
Clearly your not using Google ;)
How much money do devs make from ads? (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Monetizing Mantra (Score:2)
Executives in any industry tend to follow the lemming herd. Customers follow what works best.
Ad Network issue? (Score:2)
If this is part of its own ad network or a smaller network, it'd explain the problem. These apps can drive a lot of traffic, but it's not in a place the market particularly has interest from advertisers yet.
It'll probably clear itself up as time goes on. Either that or we'll see ad supported apps disappear from the Windows platform... and I wouldn't shed any tears over that.
They must pay you! (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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Really, android radicals? Like "DROID AKBAR"? Seems a bit crazy.
Re:My opinion on this will be unpopular (Score:4, Interesting)
Basing anything on ad revenue is a cursed way to make money, and in the long run, unsustainable. Google and other large ad companies, including Microsoft may be making money, but that income from ads is not sustainable forever. .
I don't know about that. The television networks have been doing it for 60 years. That seems pretty "sustainable" to me.
On the other hand I would agree that the idea of "anybody can make a buttload of money from ads on the Internet" is a flawed business model. I particularly like this one comment from the article:
"I used to have a good bit of impressions / day then it dropped to barely nothing last week and now we're essentially at zero. I do only free apps so this is killing me! How am I even supposed to cover my Windows Azure costs let alone all the labor invested!" wrote user "silverdollar."
Translation: I want free money and I'm pissed that I"m not getting it.
My opinion on this will also be unpopular. Not making enough money from ads? Boo-fuckking-hoo. Get a real job and stop annoying us with your bullshit ads.
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"Free" money? Those apps didn't write themselves. Nor is it free to provide the services that the apps rely upon. Do you expect that your so-called "real job" would come with a paycheck as compensation for the work, or would you say anybody who expects that just wants "free money" as well?
I can understand the hatred of in-app ads, although in the real world most people are less upset by ads than by the concept of actually *paying* for the software they use. You went a bit off the deep end when you went on y
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This is not a real full time job for most of these app writers, they write the apps on the side as a hobby. They already have a real job. And given the shoddy quality of most of these apps, maybe they're better off in a different field anyway?
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Radio and television had very few mass market alternatives till at least the 1970s.
You might as well say circa 1930 that steam locomotives have had a good 60 years, and they seem pretty sustainable.
Past trends do not necessarily translate into future successes.
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However things are a bit different with TV. First, they do lose viewers when the ads become obnoxious, so they avoid that. Users are allowed to leave the room while ads are playing, they are never forced to "click to continue" or wait 20 seconds. They have a much larger audience too and generate less per viewer than the typical ad-based web site expects to get per reader.
A better direct comparison with web sites would be traditional newspapers. There the ads were much more localized, and the regular sal
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Indeed. You should tell to guys that run rovio that all the ad money they've been bathing in is actually imaginary.
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The Skype app is good enough I haven't bothered to install a standalone one. The only others I use much are games. Pretty much all of the other "utility" apps are crap, and only a few of the apps offer any meaningful advantage over using the relevant site in a web browser.