You must have been wondering that if you are creating a mobile application and providing its services for free then how will you earn money through it. Most of the time the users don’t even need to pay to download the app or to leverage its content or services.
There is no single figure answer to this question. It entirely depends on the services you are providing through your app, its capabilities, and the problem it is solving. If you check the average an entertainment app can earn nearly $4000 in a day, while the gaming apps are capable of $20,000. So, it is the genre of your app which will decide your cost.
Money Making Strategies for your App
Well, there are many other ways by which you can earn money from your app. Now let’s discuss these money-making strategies in more detail.
Advertising
Advertising is one of the most common strategies of receiving money in a free mobile application. Nearly, 70% of the mobile applications come with embedded commercials for generating payments per impression, click or installation. There are many different types of commercials you can observe on an application such as:
Banner: Banner ads are mostly placed at the top of the mobile application. These are quite less intrusive and have lower engagement rates (click-through rate). Also, the number of clicks on the ad also depends on brand recognition.
Video Ads: Generally the video ads are of 10-30 seconds. It plays automatically at any instance of the app. Sometimes, free apps include video ads for giving rewards such as points, coins, etc.
Native Ads: Native ads are naturally integrated into your mobile application either by your sponsors or for promotional purposes. These ads are the least irritating for the users hence are more popularization.
Interstitial Ad: Interstitial ads are full-screen ads that can pop-up at a specific instance of an application. Mostly these apps display when the app is closed or opened. A user can either close the ad or click on it.
In-App Purchases
In-app purchase models are a highly popular strategy and have more relevance for users’ perspectives. You can sell virtual as well as physical items through the in-app purchase strategy. You can also offer premium content, bonuses, new features, etc. From among the most popular mobile apps, more than 50% make use of in-app purchases to earn revenue. In the future, the number of such apps is only going to increase. It is a freemium model strategy in which you offer your app for free but it contains some additional features for which the users need to pay. There are 3 categories for in-app purchases:
Consumable: These are one-time use items such as in mobile games there is a digital currency or health points.
Non-consumable: Non-consumable features are permanent such as ad-blocking.
Subscription: It is the most popular in-app strategy where you provide premium content on a monthly or annual subscription.
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Subscription Model
As mentioned above, you can generate revenue from your app by offering premium content on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis. It is highly used by OTT platforms, cloud services, digital news portals and others. The customers get access to the plan as per the plan they have subscribed. It is not necessary that you provide all the content on a paid basis but can provide some content free and when the users find value in your content, they can upgrade to a paid subscription.
Paid Apps
If you are going through the mobile application development which consists of offering highly premium services right from the beginning such as a mobile game, or others, then you can ask your users to pay a price. The strategy is simple if you are expecting a million downloads for your app and charge just $1 per installation, then you are almost at a million-dollar milestone for app revenue.
The Sponsorship strategy works even before the beginning of the mobile application development. If you are an app owner, you need to find a sponsor with a similar or the same target market. After getting the sponsor, you can white-label the app and adapt a design to meet your sponsor’s brand.
You can work with your sponsor in two different ways:
- A revenue split
- Monthly Sponsorship fee
It works most when the brand is already having good recognition. You can get the benefit of the existing web traffic and brand loyalty that the sponsor has to offer.
Affiliate Program
An affiliate program works by bringing the mobile advertisers and affiliates on common ground. The advertisers can be the mobile app owners or a company which sells products or services through mobile applications.
By affiliate program, you would be advertising the products or services offered by your affiliates, and you can get a commission through it. This revenue can either be in the form of a cost per action where you can earn money every time someone clicks on their ad, installs their app, or carries out any other (desired) action.
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Wrapping Up
You don’t have to worry about the expenses you have to occur while developing your app. You would be able to recover all of the costs either by selling products or services and by the different revenue generation models. We at Amplework Software, are having expert mobile developers who can deliver you apps as per your business model.