If you think that Apple was making empty promises to App Store developers about their new iAd program, just ask Jason Ting -- he’s racked up an impressive $1,400 in just one day from his free app.
MacRumors is reporting that iAd appears to be off to a boffo start for App Store developers, if Jason Ting is any indication. The small developer released data on his iAd revenue from the first day of sales alone, which puts almost $1,400 in his pocket from a simple app called LED Light for iPhone 4 Free. Also available in a paid, ad-free version, the app simply does one thing: Allows you to use the iPhone 4’s LED light on the rear of the handset as a quick flashlight.
As you can see from the chart above, Ting’s exact revenue for the first day is $1,372.20, which is based on the CPM (or “cost per mille,” which is Latin for “thousand”), what MacRumors calls “a commonly-used metric in advertising used to benchmark the relative cost of ads per thousand “impressions,” or times the ad is loaded.”
In the case of Apple’s iAd program, they used a modified metric called “eCPM” or “Effective CPM,” which uses tiered ad rates based on how the user interacts with any given iAd. For example, one rate to show the ad, another rate for clicking into the ad or actually purchasing the product -- Apple has a “premium initial base CPM of $10 for the iAd platform, with an additional $2 charged per click-through by users and 60 percent of the total revenue passed along to developers.”
MacRumors calls Ting’s eCPM of $147.55 “in the neighborhood of an order of magnitude or even much more above typical solid ad performance,” with a CTR (click-through rate) of nearly 12 percent.
While this is all good news for one developer, MacRumors cautions that most developers won’t have the same success. In the case of Jason Ting, the developer “is benefitting not only from the high-profile launch of the initial wave of iPhone 4 flashlight applications but also from the novelty of the iAd program.” But one thing is for sure: If not gold, there’s certainly money to be found in them thar hills…
Update: mocoNews.net is reporting that another iPhone developer, Kenneth Ballenegger, is putting a little additional perspective on Ting’s iAd revenue claims. The creator of such apps as iLaugh, Ballenegger says that “the reality is iAd generates less revenue than my previous first option, Google AdSense for mobile.” He claims that his apps have been running iAd on “relatively high traffic since day one,” yet his eCPM is between $10 and $15 -- much lower than Ting’s, but still on the high end of the scale. Ballenegger also notes that the almost $1,400 Ting is reporting is likely before Apple takes their 40 percent slice of the pie, which means the developer is likely to receive closer to $800 when the dust settles. Finally, Ballenegger considers iAd’s fill rates “appallingly low” -- below 10 percent, although they are improving as time goes on. His suggestion to fellow developers? “Run iAd as a first option, but fall back to another network for failed requests.”
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(iAd data chart courtesy of MacRumors)
