It's a factor of many things including click through, rotation frequency, ad category, user demographics, etc.
I don't have experience with other platforms, but I've heard that pubCenter is one of the better ad networks.
Comparatively we get $5-10 eCPMs from AdSense on websites.
Wow, this is very interesting. I was always under the impression that the smartphone crowd always synced their phone to their computer first. Maybe the way apple does it has ruined my perspective.
I sync with my computer every night now, but isn't a big stretch to imagine lots of people doing what I used to do.
The situation is made worse, in my opinion, because of the Metro design aesthetic; after all that whitespace there is room for only 3 app icons in the 'games' tab on my Lumia 710. If you drill down via games->genres, there is room for 5.5 app icons. And the first two tabs in games->genres are 'Xbox live' (all XBL titles) and 'top' (again, all XBL titles).
That being said, I don't believe its possible for a small indie studio like ours to compete with Zynga types on iOS either due to the delta in marketing budgets.
Our reason for disclosing our data is to show indie studios that they may be missing an opporunity on windows phone.
I wonder what the revenue numbers for the top free iPhone and Android games are? Tapitude looks like it's doing about $3,000 a week / $400-500 a day. (Am I reading their chart right?) Didn't we hear plenty of stories about how Draw Something was doing $100,000 a day (now that's probably combining ad revenue and in-app purchases from the free version plus the sales of the paid version).
I'm not saying that there isn't money to be made on Windows Phone, but if the top free game is only doing $400 / day, it's orders of magnitude less than on iOS. Is it worth it to have your app in the "smaller pond" of a less-crowded app store? Maybe.
I suspect their huge spike over the past 2-3 weeks is due to the Lumia 900 - everyone trying out some new apps on their new phone. Time will tell if this is the phone that really sells the public on Windows Phone, but it's clearly their best success yet (top selling phone on Amazon).
Hi ja27, thanks for your questions. We are currently doing $1,400/day and our data indicates we're still growing. As a part time hobby project, we consider this a success.
Yes, the top iOS games make much more, but that's not the point. Our game would never succeed on iOS because the market is too crowded. We feel there are great opportunities on windows phone that small indies may be overlooking.
Sure, not iOS, but considering the size of the market this isn't really unexpected either.
Also, totally unrelated, but the development environment is ridiculously nice. It's very pleasant to work in.
Devs, have you considered microtransaction for Taptitude? You did mention "coins to purchase game updates." Maybe some users prefer to pay for those updates instead? Congratulations on the success!
