I am a developer too. I’m wondering what kind of advertising did you do? (when you talked about the Marketing team and outsourcing it).

From my own experience, the success of an app isn’t always tied directly to the work you put in it. Some of my apps required more work than others but brought little benefit. For example my Fearless Brain game, which is pretty simple but still took some days to build and has its own website, is definitely a total flop (as in 0-2 sales a day now and max 10-15 a day upon launch). One could argue that if the game was more elaborate it could sell more, but it could also be additional wasted time. It’s always hard to know if you should be betting more or stop the losses. I ended up making it available for free (with only one additional ad but keeping full functionality). The ads on the free version also get me a buck or two a day (for a rather low total of 6k free downloads).

The most valuable thing I got from this app is the enjoyment to see how some players from Asia have an suprisingly good memory and a will to beat their own score which never ceases to amaze me.

But at that rate that app will basically never get me back the virtual money I have put in it (a few evenings of hard work coding and designing the app and the website).

I have been writing several apps during my free time (as seen on smallte.ch), all intentionnally rather simple because I didn’t want to waste 20k worth of developement on any project while I didn’t have any experience with the possible returns, not to mention it’s better while learning an API not to start with a huge project since once is bound to make mistakes.

So far my experience has been similar to yours, sadly with lower numbers however. I have found also that advertising is much more sustainable than sales in the long run. That said avertising of course is only viable for apps that get used on a daily/weekly basis. With all my apps I now get about 20-25$ a day from advertising, most coming from apps that require daily usage or at least regular usage. Anyway 20$ is about twice what I now get from constantly declining sales (most coming from my Convert Any app). This top selling app has now brought 1784$ total since its launch in December. It’s still less than the virtual amount it cost to develop originally and sales are just getting lower and lower everyday. Ad revenue on admob on the other hand has been steadily increasing.

iLaugh lite is great in terms of advertising because it has a recurring usage, much like a weather application. If you want to go for advertising try to pick a subject with changing information to which people will come back every day.

Another thing about advertising is that you never know which one will have a high click rate. For some reasons one of my apps gets a click rate of around 4% while another gets about 0.5%. As a result one of them is viable even though it has less traffic than the other.