I guess this is one of those stats that doesn't come as a huge surprise, but AdMob Metrics has released its May 2009 Mobile Metrics report. It shows that 54% of free iPhone apps that Admob serves up ads to have less then 1000 users, and only 5% have more than 100k users.
As a result, according to Silicon Insider (spotted via econsultancy), the money you make from these free apps is in most cases "not enough to buy a sandwich."
Though I'm most certainly not a software or games developer my take on this is that this is hardly a shock. If you expect to make money from a free app you are almost certainly on a hiding to nothing unless you develop something brilliant....in which case you can charge for it anyway.
Really where free apps work is as a form of 'app-vertising' (ie branded applications that try to ensnare target customers by providing some kind of value - see North Face as an example), or as a freemium kind of model where you give people a taster of what they could be getting if they paid full price for it.
- Apple App Store: Overpopulated with Apps Nobody Uses (mashable.com)
- There May Be 50,000 Apps For The iPhone, But Only A Select Few Become Popular (techcrunch.com)
- Google bringing AdSense to mobile apps (news.cnet.com)
- AdMob shuts off ad aggregators (venturebeat.com)
- Mobile Ad Platform AdMob Launches iPhone Download Exchange (mashable.com)
- New iPhone 3GS heats up smartphone wars (mycompuquest.blogspot.com)
- Japan's First iPhone Ad Network Arouses More Useful Free Apps (asiajin.com)
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