I've seen one report [1] of earning 4 cents per click on AdNob. If the same holds true for Rovio (and that's a big "if") that means 25 million clicks per month.
Apparently over 30 million downloads people spend 65 million minutes per day [2] playing Angry Birds. Assume 20% of this is on Android that's about 400 million minutes per month or one click per 16 minutes.
That seems rather high. If true I have to wonder how much of that is misclicks, which doesn't strike me as a sustainable model. Either you'll anno the users or the advertisers will wise up.
If you've never seen an Android advert before, it looks like clicking it will "dismiss" the advert and this seems even more prominent on Angry Birds. I know I misclicked the advert once. There were comments on the market saying that the adverts had been moved to block critical parts of the display, such as the score, possibly this was done to improve the chance of misclicks? I didn't play long enough to really know what part of the screen was important and what wasn't as AB ran so damn slow on my older phone that I uninstalled it right away.
With a paid model, the developer captures the sale and gets paid at the end of the billing cycle. With the ad-based model, the developer's revenue is dependent on ad impressions or clickthroughs, which means the developer's content must be compelling/interesting enough to keep the user's interest long enough for the app to pay for itself. But there are many other complementary products, and Pinch Media has shown that free app usage drops by 50% within 10 days[1]. Even though paid app usage is equally steep, the developer has already captured the revenue up-front.
So the takeaway from this is to make a well-timed paid release first, _THEN_ make it ad-driven after sales have tapered off to capture any remaining holdouts. Which, it would appear, seems to be the trend on the App Store. Apps that used to cost $0.99 are now routinely being made free.
Apparently over 30 million downloads people spend 65 million minutes per day [2] playing Angry Birds. Assume 20% of this is on Android that's about 400 million minutes per month or one click per 16 minutes.
That seems rather high. If true I have to wonder how much of that is misclicks, which doesn't strike me as a sustainable model. Either you'll anno the users or the advertisers will wise up.
[1]: http://www.androidsx.com/admob-vs-mobclix-2nd-round/
[2]: http://www.intomobile.com/2010/12/03/angry-birds-android-1-m...