RevMob – the worst ad network in the world

 Misc  4 Responses »
May 062013
 

RevMob is the worst ad network I ever used (at least for android)! They claim to provide $10 eCPM. I tried them for a week now and all I can say is that this is far far away from the truth. The CTR is very high indeed, somewhere around 30%, but they pay on installs and the IR is around 1.5% – 2%. Actually this wouldn’t be very bad if the installs where worth something. They advertise over a $1 for an install, all you get in reality is $0.02!!! I waited for a week to be sure, but now I am switching my interstitial ads to Airpush!

 Posted by at 19:23

Income stats – android apps – April 2013

 Income Stats  No Responses »
May 012013
 

What I did

I released my first 3D game – 3D Zombie Ant Smasher Ball. For this game I decided to use RevMob as monetization platform. I use the full screen ads, from this ads the user can download a game. In contrast to the other ads supplier RevMob pays only for actual downloads. The game didn’t generate any income yet, so I didn’t include it in the income stats.

This was my 10th android app, so before making another one I will consolidate my other apps.

Samsung has changed the terms and conditions for publishers, they don’t accept push ads anymore! They suspended my most downloaded apps – Orcs Invasion and Fart Saber of Light Force Free and I was forced to remove the push ads, to be able to resubmit them! This has some impact of the income as you can see below.

How did the apps performed

I didn’t reach my goal of having stable $500 income, so this goal remains for the next month!
The income dropped more than 20% in comparison to the previous month. I don’t want to speculate how much the Samsung terms and conditions change is to blame for this. The good news is that the income is almost evenly distributed between my apps.

And here are the numbers:

2013
Month Tetricorn Moon Racer Fart Revolver Orcs Invasion Spin The Bottle Star Flight Fart Saber 3D Tunnel 3D Gyroscope Sells Total
January $20.76 $49.24 $89.01 $13.19 $2.45 $44.51 $5.16 – – $78.48 $297.64
February $14.00 $32.26 $56.57 $147.25 $2.03 $54.32 $42.46 $0.27 – $43.52 $392.68
March $18.07 $48.92 $63.72 $126,76 $2.96 $75,83 $104.99 $24.34 $0.17 $51.65 $517.41
April $19.36 $45.82 $55.24 $74.69 $1.61 $62.61 $81.94 $24.86 $1.12 $17.43 $384.68
2013 $72.19 $176.24 $264.54 $361.89 $9.05 $237.27 $234.55 $49.47 $1.29 $191.08 $1597.57
All Time $162.74 $424.80 $2044.97 $411.66 $9.70 $238.01 $234.55 $49.47 $1.29 $348.33 $3925.52


What is it to come

For this month I plan to make only some small updates and finally bring my infrastructure there where I want it to be. Furthermore I am now learning OpenGL ES 2.0. I plan to use it in my next game.

Conclusion

This month wasn’t as good as the previous one, but I am happy with the results. I expect the next one to be better, and I am very curious how the RevMob ads in my new game will perform.

 Posted by at 14:07

3D Zombie Ants Killer Bay

 Misc  No Responses »
Apr 282013
 

I just released my first 3D game – 3D Zombie Ants Killer Bay. I decided to try some new strategy with this game. The paid version has 3 more achievements than the free version, furthermore there is no rate button in the menu. The rate button appear only after some game starts. I hope that in this way I will filter the users that don’t like the game and start it only once or twice!

This time I decided to try RevMob for the ads. I implemented only full screen ads at the end of a game and on exit. I want to try some different ad approaches, because it seems that the push ads are slowly banned from the different android markets…

Game description:

Zombie ants have invaded your mansion and are destroying and killing everything in their way! Everything looked hopeless for you until a new invention came along to save the day. The Killer Ball! Roll the Killer Ball and smash the zombies. Kill as many as you can before the time runs out! For every kill you will get extra time, so you can keep rolling the ball!

Features:

- First person view

- Top view

- Tilt or touch control

- Six achievements to unlock (three are available only in the paid version)

 Posted by at 18:04

Samsung bans the apps with push notification ads

 Misc  No Responses »
Apr 172013
 

Yesterday Samsung suspended tow of my apps without a reason (the reason field was left empty). After I contacted the Samsung support and asked why the apps where suspended they send me the following email:

 

Dear Customer,
Thank you for contacting us. We appreciate the opportunity to assist you.

Firstly, we are sincerely sorry for the inconvenience.

In answer to your query, we’d kindly like to inform you that the applications which contain “Push Notification Ads” have been suspended in Samsung Apps by SEC, according to the policy.

Notification email regarding this suspension has been sent to the seller or will be sent soon.
…

It’s interesting that they suspended only two of my apps and not all of them. Actually I have push notification in all of my apps… Anyway I will remove the push ads from this apps and resubmit them. As for the other apps I plan to wait until Samsung suspends them before I remove the push ads.

 Posted by at 12:43

Income stats – android apps – March 2013

 Income Stats  7 Responses »
Apr 012013
 

What I did

I released my new 3D live wallpaper – 3D Gyroscope Simulation LWP. For this live wallpaper I needed a model, so I decided to learn Blender first. I must say, I am very impressed with this software! There are lots of tutorials (and lots of video tutorials) out there and in no time i could create some relatively complex 3D objects. I will definitely use it for my future 3D apps!

I tried in vain registering my live wallpapers on samsung app store. It seems that samsung forbid apps with push ads on their store. The only meaningful way to integrate ads in a LWP is with push ads, so I decided not to register them with samsung at all. I don’t know why, but lately I get fewer installs from samsung store in comparison to the google play store. This is not a big problem though, because the installs from the play store are looking good :)

Last but not least i got a trademark infringement complain, so I had to remove all tetris references in Tetricorn! As I expected this leads to much fewer downloads… As you can see in the income stats Tetricorn isn’t a big factor, so this has no direct impact on my income, but it is very funny to see how the tetris corporation thinks that my little game is a threat to their beloved tetris empire…

How did the apps performed

I finally reached a state where the income is evenly distributed between my apps. This is very important, because if the income from one apps breaks (as it was the case with the Fart Revolver) the impact on my overall income will be almost insignificant.

And here are the numbers:

2013
Month Tetricorn Moon Racer Fart Revolver Orcs Invasion Spin The Bottle Star Flight Fart Saber 3D Tunnel 3D Gyroscope Sells Total
January $20.76 $49.24 $89.01 $13.19 $2.45 $44.51 $5.16 – – $78.48 $297.64
February $14.00 $32.26 $56.57 $147.25 $2.03 $54.32 $42.46 $0.27 – $43.52 $392.68
March $18.07 $48.92 $63.72 $126,76 $2.96 $75,83 $104.99 $24.34 $0.17 $51.65 $517.41
2013 $52.83 $130.42 $209.30 $287.20 $7.44 $174.66 $152.61 $24.61 $0.17 $173.65 $1212.89
All Time $143.71 $378.98 $1989.73 $336.97 $8.09 $175.40 $152.61 $24.61 $0.17 $330.90 $3551.52


What is it to come

I am now working on my first 3D game. I already created the 3D models (with blender of course ;) ). In a 3D game there are much more mathematical problems to solve, I already solved the most of them, so I hope I will be ready with the game sometime in April. This will be my 10nth app, so I will have something like a small anniversary :) .

Conclusion

This was my most successful month until now, so I am really happy with the results. I broke the $500 border for the second time and my aim for now will be to get stable income over $500 / month!

 Posted by at 13:26

Google play store and the supposed trademark infringements

 Misc  No Responses »
Mar 292013
 

Recently I received an email from Google that there is a trademark complain regarding one of my games. Reading the first sentence I already knew that this is about Tetricorn! Tetris is well known to try to squeeze every cent they can from Tetris and they often complain about trade mark violation by another companies / developers.

Here is the mail from google:

Google has received a trademark complaint regarding one of your applications, the details of which may be found at the end of this message. We have attached a copy of the original notice we received for your reference. 
We encourage you to resolve this matter with the complainant directly. If you are unable to resolve this issue with the complainant, we may need to suspend your application. If you have any further concerns about this issue, please address them directly to the complainant in the Trademark Infringement Notice provided.

The good news is that google didn’t just suspended Tetricorn. That is not the first time Tetris complained about trademark infringement by various google play store apps and in the past google automatically suspended the affected apps.

I contacted the tetris lawyer and cleared the problem. Tetricorn isn’t a tetris clone, it just borrow some ideas from tetris. The problem that the tetris dudes had was the name tetris used in the title and the description of Tetricorn. I removed this from my apps, so now there must be no more trademark violation problems.

Tetricorn wasn’t very successful, I got from the google play store around 15 install a day. Now I am very curious how removing tetris from the title and the description will affect this number!

 Posted by at 11:46

3D Mechanical Gyroscope Simulation LWP

 Misc  No Responses »
Mar 232013
 

I just released my new 3D live wallpaper – 3D Mechanical Gyroscope Simulation LWP. This is a real gyroscope simulation.

A gyroscope is a device for measuring or maintaining orientation, based on the principles of angular momentum. Mechanically, a gyroscope is a spinning wheel or disk in which the axle is free to assume any orientation. Although this orientation does not remain fixed, it changes in response to an external torque much less and in a different direction than it would without the large angular momentum associated with the disk’s high rate of spin and moment of inertia. The device’s orientation remains nearly fixed, regardless of the mounting platform’s motion, because mounting the device in a gimbal minimizes external torque.
This LWP uses the integrated gyroscope to point the spinning axes of the rotor always in the up direction.

Features:

  • Stable position (uses the integrated gyroscope / accelerometer)
  • Gimbal positions calculated using inverse kinematics
  • Gyroscope frame rotated on main screen scrolling
  • Hardware accelerated rendering (using libgdx)
 Posted by at 00:11

Income stats – android apps – February 2013

 Income Stats  No Responses »
Mar 012013
 

What I did

I released an update of Orcs Invasion. This was a major updated that resulted in lots of download on the play store. Furthermore i added trough AdMob mediation a new ads supplier – “Millennial Media”. The numbers are looking good so far, so I will expand it on my other apps also.

I also released yesterday my new live wallpaper – 3D Train Tunnel Simulation. This is my first 3D live wallpaper. The start on the play store look promising, so I hope the numbers will look good at the end of the month.

How did the apps performed

The biggest surprise was the performance of the Orcs Invasion. After the last update the downloads on the play store went crazy. This can be clearly seen in the income stats!

And here are the numbers:

2013
Month Tetricorn Moon Racer Fart Revolver Orcs Invasion Spin The Bottle Star Flight Fart Saber 3D Tunnel Sells Total
January $20.76 $49.24 $89.01 $13.19 $2.45 $44.51 $5.16 – $78.48 $297.64
February $14.00 $32.26 $56.57 $147.25 $2.03 $54.32 $42.46 $0.27 $43.52 $392.68
2013 $34.76 $81.50 $145.58 $160.44 $4.48 $98.83 $47.62 $0.27 $122 $690.32
All Time $125.64 $330.06 $1926.01 $210.21 $5.13 $99.57 $47.62 $0.27 $279.25 $3034.11


What is it to come

The new major updated for the Moon Racer and Russian Roulette Fart Revolver are almost ready and I will release them in the next few days. I am also now working on some new cool Orcs Invasion features. I hope that I will be able to release them sometime this month.

Conclusion

I am happy with the performance of my apps, I already have eight apps and I will definitely make more.

 Posted by at 22:40

3D Train Tunnel Simulation LWP

 Apps  No Responses »
Feb 272013
 

I just released my first 3D live wallpaper – 3D Train Tunnel Simulation LWP. This is a very customizable train tunnel simulation.

The supported features are:

  • Speed
  • Fog density (how far is the tunnel visible)
  • Brightness
  • Bends sharpness (how sharp are the bends)
  • Bends length (how long are the bends)
  • Bends probability (how often are there bends)
  • Maximal frames per second – (less fps – lower energy usage, more fps – smoother animation)
 Posted by at 22:44
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