Apple Squash - Realistic Ad Revenue Expectations

Last week I released a new game to the Windows Phone marketplace. It’s a simple action game that took around 2 weeks to create in my spare time. The game is called “Apple Squash” and you can find it on the Windows Phone marketplace here.

For this game I built a custom ad rotator that displays ads from PubCenter, MobFox and AdDuplex in that order. If ads were not available in the first network it would try the next and so on. PubCenter is Microsoft’s own advertising network and is regarded as one of the best for Windows Phone, particularly for ads served in the US. MobFox seems to perform better in Europe while AdDuplex generates no revenue but instead generates impressions to advertise your app in other apps that have the same control. 

Apple Squash has been on the marketplace for just over a week and I’d estimate has had around 2,000 downloads so far. In my opinion this is a fairly typical example of your average performing app. Below are the results of its first week live.

Take from these numbers what you will but the purpose of this blog post is not to dissuade you from building apps or from using the ad-based model, it’s purely just to share one developer’s experience so that you can add it to the experiences of others to come up with your own measure of success. There are plenty of examples of success stories out there for Windows Phone (see Taptitude or Krashlander), but for me this is the more realistic example of what you can and should expect.

Stay tuned for more blog posts on how Apple Squash performs after the "honeymoon" period.