Okay, so today's my first day back in the office. I've been trying all day to get
back into the swing of things, you know, getting in on time, getting up early,
working with the team, getting in touch with all my clients, all that kind of
stuff. So, I'm a little bit rusty on this too, so, please, please, please bear with me.
Just a second... (sigh!)
Hi! This is the Daily Overpass! My name is Eric and I make apps. Now today, I want to
answer my favorite question: "Can you actually make money with apps?"
Okay so, back in the UK, back in the office today. But it feels really good to be back to
work, like when you're working for somebody else and you come back from vacation or
from holiday and you go back to work. It always feels like it's
so depressing, go sit back at that desk, just slave away, but when
you work for yourself, it's actually kind of fun. You're gonna catch up on all the
kind of stuff that you did missed out on even when it's dealing with
clients, making sure that everybody's happy, thank everybody for
being patient for the past few weeks, we catch up with that guys up and you know,
taking a look at our own app revenue and all that kind of stuff. So, it's
really nice to be back. Hopefully the videos get a little bit
better, a little bit more interesting. If you have any questions, of course, send
them through or try to ask those, you know, to the best of my ability, to
best of my experience, I guess. I'm not an expert on anything in this
app market. But today, I wanted to talk about something that I get asked
a lot especially by friends and family, who I haven't seen in a while to
say, so what you've been up to lately? And when I tell them I'm an app
developer, they'll either tell me there's their super secret app idea, don't steal
my idea now, or they'll tell me or they'll ask the question, "Can you
actually make money? Can you actually make money being an app
developer?" Which i think is, it's such an open-ended question. It's like, if
you were musician and somebody says, "Can you actually make money being a musician?"
You say, "Well, yeah." Look at Jay-z, look at all
these big stars, but then, there's also people working in the bars, they're just
making a living and there's people who make nothing. I think in the
same way about the app market. When people say can you actually make money
doing that, what I hear is, "Can you easily make money?"
Okay, so I never liked asked to answer that question, but yeah, you can.
So, what I thought I'd do today, will show you some of my revenue from
like the passive revenue today. The other day, I talked about passive and
active revenue. So, we have client work which brings in active revenue, but we
also have the passive revenue that comes in, based on work that we've done
a long time ago or, you know, we still keep putting apps out, but
it's the the few key ones still exceed to be making the money. So,
have a look at my screen over here which is kind of- I want to compare
the last month, so July of 2017 with July of 2016. I have the spreadsheet here
which we've been keeping up since the end of 2014 of the daily
revenue. So, we just kind of have an idea of how much money is being made each day.
So, it's not- so, you see here that it's not a huge amount. If
it was just me, like, if I just decided I wanted to just sack everyone
and just live off the the revenue from the apps, I could do. but that's like -
that's not- I still want to see myself at the bottom of this ladder.
I want to be bigger than it is now. So, we have a look here at this
report and this takes the different revenue streams that we have. There's
the ad networks and iTunes, Google Play, all that kind of
stuff. You see here, just go to July of- July 1st of last year, it was
made of 157.38 that day, this is in pounds. And even last year, pounds
used to be a lot more- worth a lot more than they are now.
You know, after Brexit, the value of the pound dropped, dropped a bit. I
think it's gonna drop some more. Maybe, I need to start looking for US clients.
Alright, so you can see here, last year was you know AdMob was
eighty pounds, you know, 109.. We were doing really well with Google
payments, with Google Wallet payments and also with iTunes. So, you see here, we got
iTunes which comes in USD, but we can convert it to GBP. We got AppLovin,
we were doing pretty well with AppLovin and last year too. So yeah, that was
actually a pretty good contender with AdMob. They were working
really well together. And then we've got- that's in GBP and then Facebook.
And for Facebook, it's always been, you know, I don't think it's been very rare
to make more than ten pounds a day in Facebook. A lot of times, it's like two
or three, but it's still- it's enough to put onto the spreadsheet. There's
other ad networks like Smaato, you know, Vungle, Vungle-
we've been serving so many apps through Vungle. I made pennies through Vungle.
I don't even check it anymore because it's just
such a low eCPM we have on that. And also the Facebook and then
I also have a column here for contracting. So, you know, I haven't done any
contracting for quite a while. And by the way, contracting blows all
the rest of it out of the water. So, you don't say- through the app revenue, I
could make you 200 pounds in a day, let through contracting, I could make you
have four or five, four to six hundred a day. But that's also
putting on the suit, going into an office and doing something or you know doing
some work for somebody else for like the entire day. Which is, you know,
sometimes, that's the hard bit about doing this stuff on your own.
It's never quite so sure and you're thinking there's always there. If I
if I just was not so concerned with my own
happiness, I could just go off there and do that. But, you know that's-
it's also not scalable. So, yeah, last year was going pretty well.
These colors over here- so, basically, I have this conditional thing here, if it's
over 200 which is a really good day, it's green. If it's below
150, then it's red, if it's between 180 and 200, then it's yellow. So,
last July, we're doing pretty well, but August we did really well. August-
everything's shot up. To most days were above 200, so like, this is why
I'm concerned now with this. So, let's shoot over to today. This is July of-
this past July, and you see most days here we're in the red. So we're talking
about 144, 145 and it's mainly AdMob, the AdMob has
got so much lower but also you have Facebook and AppLovin are much lower
than they used to be, at least in my opinion. It's something that, you know,
I'd be interested to see what you, guys, said. There's one thing - I'm trying not
to show you, guys, my RPMs coz I'm not supposed to show you my RPMs but I could
show you just these values, so just being really generic here. If I show you
August is even worse. August is like every day has been below 150. But I'm
hoping things shoot up. And it's mainly because AdMob. Alright, so this is one of
things I'm thinking about switching ad networks. But still, when you think
about it, this is all for apps- from work that has been done a long time ago.
We haven't invested in ads in a while. We haven't done, you know, we do
a little bit of marketing. Like my team does a bit of marketing on it, but mostly
we've been focused lately on client work. So, it's really nice that still
comes in. But if I go back to- if I go back to my early reports last year
back to like through the end of 2014, you see, mostly it was all red. It's
something like this gradual growth kind of thing. The reason I'm showing
you this is not to brag. It's just to show you that, yes, you can make
money with apps but it depends on how much time and effort you put into
it. And also, there's a lot of luck involved
there too. I think- what I think about is you've probably never
heard of any of my apps like on the App Store, but the most likely, is you've
heard me talk about the apps. So, if you know about any my apps, it's because I've
talked about them, right? Maybe you found the YouTube videos. And then I
talked about Ear Spy, I talked about the language learning apps, all this
kind of stuff. I don't have huge apps, but we do have like quite a bit of
downloads and they do grow incrementally. So, we're always thinking about how could
we change some keywords. The problem I had in the early days is always changed
keywords and then like if I didn't have immediate results, I would just change
them again. And one of the nice things about client work is not so much
there's a revenue from client work, but is that just gets me away from tinkering
with the apps with the keywords and screenshots, all this kind of stuff. So,
lets think just sort of, you know, germinate there for a while before
doing something else and I come back and look at,
"Hey, that's working!" or "Hey, that's not working!" That's may take a nosedive,
that kind of stuff. So anyway, the short answer to question is, "Can you make
money with apps?" is YES. You absolutely can. You could be one
of the big guys who you know- could be the Jay-z of the app
world. You could be the Candy Crush, the Flappy birds or whatever. And you're
making that big killing or you could be someone like me who's just
scraping by, it"s just, you know, making a living from it. It's a nice
little supplement to my income or you could be somebody who's not
making anything because you've tried it and you think it's not working. It's just
not worth doing, but you just need to put a little bit more effort into it.
Think more about the marketing, tink around with us, with those keywords,
try re-skinning your apps, all this kind of stuff. Just if one
market's not working,try to take your application and re-skin it to a new
theme or something like that. See if you can get a bit more traction and get in
front of the right people. It is possible and sometimes it might feel
like it's not possible and some of the young people will tell me is that, "Oh,
yeah, you really can't make money with apps anymore. You used to be able to, but
now you can't." You can. It's just not as easy as everyone makes
it out to be. But I don't think anything is. I know if you want to
become a YouTube star and I think that's as easy. I don't think if you want to become a
best-selling ebook author, I don't think that's as easy as people make it sound.
You know, I don't think- if you want to do Facebook, sorry, the FBA Amazon stuff, you
fulfilled by Amazon, I don't think this is easy as people make it up to me.
And when people say can you make money doing that, yeah, you can. But it's not
easy money. It's just, you know, it's like every other market, at least
that's my opinion. Anyway, that's it for today. I will talk to you, guys, tomorrow.