ManiacDev.Com

Many months ago I wrote an article about how advertising really wasn’t viable yet.  It appears that at the time there was a bottoming out in CPM (the price paid by advertisers for 1000 ad impressions), and for many app creators things have turned around.  I found this great story about how one developer has earned millions from advertising.  It really provides insight into what types of apps can work with advertising.

The app that is generating the incredible results is eBuddy, and you can read the article about their profits here: eBuddy mobile profit.  This is one of the few examples I’ve seen of successfully monetizing an app through advertising that hasn’t simply been printed in a case study by an ad provider.

If you haven’t used eBuddy, it is a very high quality IM app that provides both an advertising supported free version, and an ad-free pay version with the advertised version earning approximately $1 mill and counting.  This is a great example of the sort of app that can succeed with advertising, as Carla White mentioned in her book iPhone app secrets, her “sticky” app, a twitter client was doing well with advertising.  While few developers have the financing of eBuddy (reported at $11.5 million euro), there alot of smaller social niche apps (just look at apps on Facebook) that haven’t been implemented on the iPhone.

It really looks like advertising can be a good model for sticky apps, which makes me wonder, why so many developers place ads in cheesy apps that they know that no one will run more than a couple of times.. It seems as though there is a fear of asking for a price on the apps.

If you’re interested in showing advertising in your apps you will want to check these sites out:

Ad Optimizers

These allow you to display ads from multiple providers, and automatically optimize to maximize your revenue.

MobClix
Ad Whirl

Ad Providers

Ad Mob – Now Google owned ad network
Quattro Wireless – Now owned by Apple
Google Adsense – Leader in internet advertising, now providing mobile ads

I’d love to hear any comments, and about any iPhone ad successes/failures.  From what I’ve seen advertising really doesn’t work in your typical app, but it clearly can with “sticky” apps.