My results with Revmob

NOTE: After several months of revmob, my opinion has changed on Revmob. See a more recent post here:

My Results with Various Ad Networks: Revmob, Admob, iAd, Adcolony, Chartboost, AppLovin, AppFlurry and PlayHaven / Upsight, StartApp

It has been 4 days since plugging in Revmob to my amazing iPhone game, unFed unDead!. Before I made the decision to try this advertising network out in my app, I read various reviews on it and had a very mixed impression. People reported very high eCPMs and I was intrigued. Well, after trying it out, here are my thoughts.

First- set up was incredibly easy. Kudos for ease of integration! Drop the framework in, add a line of code with an import statement and boom, you are running your ads.

Now, in general Revmob is a bit different than other ad networks I have worked with, namely admob and iAd. Unlike these networks, which promote any generic ad and pay you per click, Revmob is specifically promoting free iOS apps. You can use their network through a variety of ways. I used it in the following ways:
– add a popup on launch that will show the user an AlertDialog asking “Do you want a FREE game?” yes or no?
– add a full screen ad periodically during game play to say “Get a free game!”, or press X to close.
– add a banner ad which says “click here to get a free game” to my play screen.
– add a button to a settings screen saying “Support us by clicking and downloading a free game”, or something along those lines.

This gives you a variety of ways to tell people, click and… GET A FREE GAME!

The intent is that people are intrigued and say… hmm, well what free game? And they click to find out more. My results show that this is in fact successful. I see roughly a 40% click through rate. That is amazing, right? Kind of….

Where the service is failing so far is in installs. Of the 3K people I had who clicked on the ad, I only had 3 installs. If my math is right that is like .01%. Since the service only pays per install, that means that for all those thousands of clicks, I made about $6. Were the install rate more like 50%, I could have made a few grand in a few days and would be in LOVE with this ad service.

Perhaps the games which are being advertised need to be better screened so that only games that users will actually want to install when they click will be shown to them. Perhaps I should be able to tell the service that I want to show word games, or some other specific information about the type of app the user could be interested in. Perhaps the service should pay for clicks… even though the user didn’t choose to install the app, they did still view it, and that has to be worth something.

Anyways, I am going to keep my eyes on this for a bit. It’s only been 4 days, so maybe whatever stale games are being advertised now will soon be replaced by something that people will like and that will get me paid. If not, I will be removing this service from my app.

Thanks for reading! Please check out my game, unFed unDead!

UPDATE 1/20/13

I have now had Revmob in my games for several months, which include one holiday season. I am happy to say that Revmob has become an important piece of my ad revenue. On some days, my Revmob ad revenue is even beating out my admob and iAd revenue combined. Note that this still is no HUGE amount of money, we are talking in the range of $20 a day or so… but that adds up.
I am using revmob through two Methods, the first is to occasionally show the user full screen ads. These full screen ads make up about 70% of my revmob revenue. I am also rewarding the user for checking out the revmob free game. While we cannot determine if the user installs the game, we can at least reward the user for looking.

To answer user’s questions below of ‘did you get paid’? Yes, their payment reporting is not top notch, but they do email you monthly to alert you of your payments and I have received payments via paypal. Note that payments are about 2 months back dated.