How the app should make money

For developers, one of the hardest choices in developing apps is how to make the app profitable. In millions of apps, it's hard for users to find out about themselves, let alone consumers pay for it. Users are becoming more and more interested in free, ad-supported apps, and many developers are unsure how to choose between free and paid. Choosing when to charge and when to launch a model that supports advertising is the hardest decision a developer has to make.

You think there are four monetization strategies in the app, in fact there are only two of them.

There are several alternative monetization strategies for developers, but each has its own requirements and pitfalls. Before moving forward, developers should consider so many questions that they can answer the ultimate question: "How can my app make money?"

1, is my app attractive enough to make people use it often?

2, how strong is the user's willingness to prepay for my app?

3, how did my competitors make the app monetization, and how successful were their strategies?

When communicating with peers, new developers will usually be told the four choice question:

1, sell app in App Store;

2, provide free subscription to support the app;

3, provide free app, set up purchase in app;

4, to provide free, advertising-enabled app.

But the bottom line is that there are only two options: let users pay or advertise.

Who pays more: users or advertisers?

Most users of Android and iOS are resisting payments, whether they're buying apps or paying by advertising. And advertisers are more active, they also need to do their own products market promotion.

　How much can an app earn from advertising?

Advertising is growing in various forms on the desktop and mobile app. In 2011, mobile advertising revenue rose nearly 1.5 times times to a 1.6 billion-dollar high.

The future of app monetization is clearly the advertising support model. A recent study by Cambridge University found that 73% of apps in the Android Market were free, with 80% advertising as the main business model. Free apps are also more popular. Only 20% of the paid apps downloaded more than 100, and only 0.2% of the paid apps were downloaded more than 10,000 times. and 20% of the free apps have more than 10,000 downloads.

However, you can deploy a number of monetization strategies without missing every penny

Free apps are more likely to impress customers who are price-sensitive and unwilling to pay, but there are still a few users who are willing to charge to avoid advertising and buy a better version of the app.

So developers can cater to these two different users, both of which offer a free and paid version. This is also popular in the publishing industry. The Guardian, for example, is testing two apps: a free, ad-enabled Android version, a only paid iphone version. Echofon also offers a paid and free version of the Twitter app.

In short, before pushing app development, developers should also compare the ad support scheme to see CPMS (Thousands of presentation fees) or CPCS (single click Charges). But more than anything else, be sure to consider any changes in the user experience that support advertising might bring. After all, you want the ads to be integrated into the user experience rather than driving them away.