söndag 26 augusti 2012

Statistics, marketing and revenue

DiceFeud has now been public for three days. From now on, I thought I'd update the blog from time to time with statistics of downloads, played games and - most importantly - how the app is doing financially.
Before I started writing DiceFeud, I was interrested to see if there were any money to be made on the Windows Phone platform. Either there was very little information to be found on the subject or I wasn't very good at finding it.
So, if others are looking for that kind of information I'll try to write here about how the app is doing, and if I can figure out how to increase the revenue, I'll share that too.

Parameters

The current parameters are these:
-DiceFeud is only available on Windows Phone.
-Today is the third day DiceFeud has been available for download on Marketplace.
-It is published in all available countries. That's about 60 countries right now.
-It is available in a free version, with one ad in it, and a premium version priced at two dollars (15.90 SEK)
-The ads are served from Microsoft PubCenter through the ad control which you just drag onto your project.

Here are som other facts of interest:
-I have spent about 130 hours on development.
-I have bought an SSL certificate for about 167 dollars.
-The web hotel costs me 9 dollars a month.

Revenue

Over the last three days, 170 players have registered. That's more than I had hoped for.
The Marketplace statistics on how the app is doing are trailing a few days so I can't really see how many people have bought the premium version, but four players (yes, three of them are friends of mine) have told me they did. That's 8 dollars. A qualified guess is that all other players are using the free version.

The most interesting part is of course how much ad revenue the free version brings in. This data is available in real-time on Microsoft pubCenter and here is the verdict:
In three days, I have made 12.27 SEK. That's 1.5 dollars.

Now, when you set up your ads, you choose up to three categories and "These categories set the general guidelines for what types of ads appear in your ad unit."

I don't really understand what this means. Should I categorize my app, or tell the system what ads I want in my app? I had only set up one category, and I added two more an hour ago. We'll see if that boosts the earnings.
Anyhow, the bottom line is that you seem to need one hell of a lot of users to make a living on ad revenue. On the other hand, you need a pretty good app to be able to sell it.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if the game was available on iOS and Android as well. Since it is a game where you play againts your friends, the app would really benefit from being cross-platform. I'll start on an iOS version shortly and hope I can make time to finish it. 

Marketing

The only marketing I have done is on a swedish Windows Phone group Facebook, where people have been very friendly and supportive, and on Twitter where I have 8  followers. (Yes, eight. HardConsulting is the worst twitterer ever). I would need to figure out a way to reach out to a wider audience but I am not sure how. Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

More to come on this subject...

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