Posted by keithjs on 6/3/2012 11:59:00 AM (view original):
Posted by Crump123 on 6/3/2012 6:02:00 AM (view original):
No it wouldn't. There aren't enough users to justify paying outright for ad space (which in turn justifies the development cost of the app as a revenue tool), which means you're left with a banner ad, and when do you ever click on a banner ad?
If you assume you have 2000 users, and a $20,000 development cost of the app, and you get $0.01 for each click through, you need 2,000,000 click-throughs to get back your developemt cost, assuming 20% of users actually click on the link (and thats unrealistically high), that's 400 active user clicks. It would take those 400 people 13+ years of clicking on that link everyday to generate the revenue to cover the development cost.
Unrealistic.
In-app advertising revenue is earned more through impressions than click throughs. This ain't Google. Between all of the screens in HBD, you will probably generate hundreds of impressions all by yourself today.
And $20,000 for an app is way high...do you think that the 9 million apps in the app store all cost $20,000 to build? Most companies build apps for less than $10,000 and many build them in house using existing resources.
Also, with a subscription model like HBD, apps are often built just to support the user base, which is younger and on the go and has to access their team multiple times per day...an ideal user base for an app. Retention itself makes it worth the investment.
But what do I know. I only do this for a living,
I generate 0 impressions, since I have 0 ads in my browser, therefore i'm irrelevant to advertisers because I don't look at them anyway.
It's called opportunity cost, even if they use existing resource, that resource is being shifted from doing their normal function, that has a cost, it's not free just because it isn't contracted out.
It's a web based game, it's always available on the go.
Anyway, back to why ad revenue can't justify the development cost...
Assume you can get $2.50 per mille (Which is probably generous), assume total cost to develop is $10,000, thats still 4,000,000 impressions, to cover your development cost. That's 4,000,000 distinct pages loads, since you're not getting a new impression registered for a page save/user action as that's effectively a reload. That's 4 million pages for say 1000 users using the app. It doesn't add up.
Not to mention that you have too much information to display in the app anyway, and that the advertising would take up valuable space. You can't charge users for the app, since it's a subscription game, thats also a reason you cant really use advertising, but even if you could, it's not beneficial in the short to medium term, and there is no real need to pull people off other developments to create something that won;t see a lot of use.
Realistically the only reason to go from a web screen to an app screen for HBD is to bridge the gap in screen size, and usability between different devices. The HBD screens are pretty ideal, in as far as the information they display and the function they perform, but compressing that information so it's more user friendly to a phone screen, either means removing data entirely, which most users will find intolerable, or putting sub screens in between function screen and player cards, which makes it less user friendly, and defeats the purpose of creating the app in the first place.