Hi! This is A Minute Of Overpass. My name
is Eric and I make apps. Now this week I
wanna talk about which one is better
for revenue? Android or iPhone?
Okay, this week I wanna focus on
revenue. Now as I've said many times
before, my main source of revenue is my
apps. We do work for clients too, which is
nice to have a little bit more extra
revenue coming in, but most of the
revenue for Overpass is through
applications. So it's either through ads
or in-app purchases or sales, right? So
that's the livelihood and I
know a lot of people out there that's
your livelihood too. So a few years
ago, I can remember speaking with
somebody, a developer and we have
this mastermind group of developers that
you know and we all kind of share
information and quite a few people said
the same thing. They only did
iPhone development and didn't do
Android because they couldn't make any
money on Android or the amount of money
made on Android was like a lot
lower than they made on iOS so they
completely ignored Android, and strangely
a few weeks ago I met another developer
at a Google event who said he doesn't do
iPhone at all. He only does Android. So it
was kinda the opposite of where it
was a few years ago.
So what I thought I would do this week
is gonna show you some of my stats and
and how Apple compares to the Android
platform or more specifically how the
App store compares to Google Play, in
terms of revenue, impressions, downloads
and all that kind of stuff. Now my strong
belief, after looking at all the
details just to cut to the quick, is that
Apple still pays a lot more than Android
does, but Android you get a lot more
visibility, a lot more downloads and that
kind of stuff.
Alright, so let's go through these stats
real quick. Now what I've done
is I've compiled it just for the month
of September. So for September 1st to
the 30th. So I'm not doing a
lifetime thing just one month.
Now just so you know, these are
my apps. They're my ad placements. They're my
RPM values, all that kind of stuff. So you
know it's going to vary for everybody
else, and a lot of people have been
asking me lately, how
do they increase their RPMs? And the
truth is I don't know. It's different for
every app. You have to try different
things.
Try different placements and all that
kind of stuff.
And I might not be getting as high
as I could be, but again let me just show
you how we've
done. So for the month of
September on Google Play,
we've had 119,813
downloads across all of our apps. Now
for Apple, we've had 23,083 downloads. So
we have a lot more on Android as you can
see. Now in terms of revenue, now this is
just sales, right? Sales and in-app
purchases together. For the month of
September, for Google Play
we've made in terms of sales £1,108.35p,
and for Apple we've made
£662.65p. Now I'm
talking about pounds you know
GBP just because that's what I deal with,
and because ever since Brexit, the
pound is going up and down and I don't want to
have to convert it all to dollars, so I
apologize about that. But you can do your
own calculations how you like. Now we're
going to split that out in terms of
sales and in-app purchases and again I
got this data, it's easiest to get it from
App Annie. For sales, for Google Play
it was a £856.48 and in-app
purchases was £251.87. So in-app
purchases don't do too bad. I mean, it's
worth doing. On Apple, we've had for sales
£646.46 have been in sales and
in-app purchases only been £16.19,
so in-app purchase is not working a
great deal on there. Now to be honest
when it comes to our Apple apps, most of
our in-app purchases do one thing which
is just it remove ads. So it's not
the most compelling, you know you're
goinna reach forward and really
well you know. Well, we hope that people
will purchase that but they don't always
do that.
Now if you break this down, now so by
looking at the stats, you can see that we
make more from Android. But if you break
this down based on the number of
downloads and the number of new users we
get every month, you can see that for
Google Play, we get about
1p per user, but it's actually lower
than 1p per user that's rounded up. It's
actually £0.00925607 etc etc per-user. So
we don't make a whole lot through
sales. Now if you compare that to Apple
because we have a lower number of sales
but higher number of revenue per sales,
we're actually making £0.0287 or just
about 3 cents per user or 3 pence per
user. So if downloads are equal, we
could come to the conclusion
that Apple would pay more, and that is
one of the things where I think we
talked about ignoring one market over
another. I think it's you know
you kind of want to cover both bases. It
might be different for you and a fact
you know it'd be great if you could
share some of your experiences in the
comments because I'm always interested
in how other developers are doing. But
you know in terms of there goes, you know
if we put something into the app
store, we know we'll get more per user
but we're getting less downloads. And to
be honest with you, most of
my marketing efforts go towards
Google Play. So okay, that's the
sales part, right? So just full
transparency, month of September.
Month of September was actually
pretty good for us. So it's you know it
was you know we're going to be going up
and up and up. We were releasing new
apps every week. So now we look at ad
revenue. Ad revenue is where we really
start, we start to kill it. Now this is...
there was a stat thrown out at Google
event I went to a few few weeks ago
where they talk about the amount of
paying users is actually really low, so
like only 2% of users or app users
actually will buy things or make in-app
purchases or buy applications, and for
me for my experience, it's actually much
lower than that for my app. So you know
kind of wish it was 2%, but it
does show you that when you're releasing
an app, you have to think a
lot about that free version and how you
can actually monetize the free version.
Can you entice them into in-app
purchases? Can you get them to actually
you know make that leap? Some
people have commented in reviews, they
say that they've made a purchase to
support the developer and you know which
is nice but yeah kinda think
I've much rather than make the
purchase to get added
functionality or to remove the ads or to
enjoy the experience more rather than
like you know it's a charity thing or
whatever, but you know it's still
nice that people do that to
support the developer, but I don't think
you should rely on that as a strategy. Okay
so let's go to ads, so the free apps
which most of our stuff goes through. So
same number of downloads obviously, but
in terms of advertisements, we've had
a lot more impressions on Android.
So on Google Play, on our Google
Play apps for Android we've had
1,194,146 Ad impressions. So
like as I said before, we just serve a
lot of ads. Of that we made an RPM of
£3.63 on Android which is
really good. For Apple, we've only
had 443,518 Ad impressions, and that
came to an RPM of £2.27. So per
user we make about 3 pence
per user on Android and about
4 pence per user on iPhone. So it's
still really low numbers. I mean I talk
to other people talk about having it a
lifetime value per user of like you know
3 pounds or 2 pounds or
1 pound, for me it's really really low
but that's why we have to keep those
keep those numbers up. So and even here
we have a lower RPM on Apple. Now in
the past, we've had a much higher RPM in
Apple, and that one fluctuates,
that goes up and down. Some months
Apple is higher. Some months
Android is higher and that all
depends on the advertisers and
and all that kind of stuff. So
there's no predictability
in the ad networks. You kinda
just put them out there, serve as many as
you can and hope so.
So that's it. It's really just being very
transparent about how much money you can
make from that. How we're doing at the
moment, and so you can look at your own
finances as well. Think about you know
look at
how much you're making money per
month or per day from the ad networks
and from sales divide that by the number
of users and look at how can
you improve that.
How can you entice people into making
those purchases. When it comes to
purchases and that's when I was taking
those numbers for purchases, that's
revenue and not sales. So you know as we
say Google and Apple both
take that 30% off the top
so you need to look at the revenue not
so much to sales, and sometimes it takes
awhile to to calculate that especially
with Google wallet, but
in terms of we're making
real revenue with apps, my whole strategy
has always been you release a free
version and a paid version. Don't just do
a paid version and, although we've tried
that before, and don't just do a free
version,
because you do have to monetize it.
So it's good to have some in-app
purchases that actually help
improve the user experience. Now in the
past we've only did
a lot of our apps were just, the in-app
purchase was remove ads which is not
very compelling. So lately, we'd
like our language apps started adding
more add-on, so like you get to say 12
categories and then if you purchase then
you get like another 50 so something
like that. So just something that you
know it gives a little bit more in
terms of that in-app purchase, but
again it's still feel everyday is
an experiment and we try all kinds of
new things. So anyway, I hope this has
been helpful.
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I'll talk to you next week!