So I've worked on this game for a while. In my humble opinion, it's great; people who like this type of game are going to really like it, and keep it on the phone for weeks or months (forever, if it wasn't for the damn 'space getting low'). Yes, I know it's possible I'm completely wrong about it.

Now, I'd like as many people as possible to enjoy it - BUT I'd also like to make a bit of money from it. Not a lot, you see. The problem is that those two goals of course contradict each other.

I think a great solution would be to do what some music folk do - download the game, pay as much as it's worth to you, even after downloading (before downloading, you can't tell what it's worth to you!). Android Market, though, does not support this feature.

Maybe there are different ways around it - somehow get a sponsorship from some company, so the game is free for everybody.

Maybe some kind of embedded ads - really, how much can you get per click?

Maybe offer the exact same all on Market four times, at different price points (one of which would be free). Could you even do that? Same package name (so the player progress would be saved if you switch), same everything, just a different price?

Maybe there's a completely different solution.

One solution could be to add ads in your game.

That is what I've done with "Word Prospector".

As I'm from France, I can't sell any application for the moment ( and I'm not sure it would be a good idea ), so I tried this way to get some money from my free game.

My revenues are not that high ( about 1$ / day ) but I heard some people here are getting a lot more from ads...

For the ads, I use Admob : they give a Android Sdk with a specific widget that display the ad, so it's easy to do.

Yeah, AdMob is a good solution for the moment.

Admob SDK is decent. Lately I'm getting about $.60 per 1000 impressions.

You could also consider having a "Lite" and "Full"/"Pro" version, where you have a less-functional version available for free and the complete version cost money.

ErnestoGuevara wrote:Admob SDK is decent. Lately I'm getting about $.60 per 1000 impressions.

Sounds nice, but how do you define 'impression' ? Does a user need to click on an ad and is he taken away to a webpage? Or does the ad only need to be displayed?

Impression is an industry-standard term meaning that an ad is shown.
Your app won't necessarily be able to show an ad every time you ask for one (for instance, a user that has played for the last hour may have already seen all of the ads relevant to him/her), so there's a distinction between "Ad Requests" and "Impressions." But both are very different from "clicks."

Clicks with the admob SDK generally net you between 1c and 12c.

ErnestoGuevara wrote:Clicks with the admob SDK generally net you between 1c and 12c.

Ok, thanks. For a moment I thought admob also paid out for every impression, but the user needs to click through the ad before you make any money.

Are you happy with the content of the ads? Personally I'd rather have more targeted ads, now it seems they are all about ringtones and wallpapers.

Ringtones, wallpapers ... don't forget babes, prayers, and quizzes.

Admob's system can do some light targeting (based on the keywords you give it), but in practice they don't have enough advertisers, and enough quality advertisers, to give you more than the ads listed above. I've found this to be true for every mobile advertiser except Google, and they don't want anything to do with "applications" (even web pages reached from an application). Trust me, I've already been banned.

It's frustrating, but it's about the best we've got (if you're going to do ad-based monetization).

You could also consider giving a free "lite" version and a priced full version and avoid the ads altogether.

Another option is to sell the app on the Android Market and give it away on another website (like your own). This is the model I'm trying now, but I just started it so I can't say how good it is.

It's a way for people to choose whether to pay to support you (which is also the easier option because the Buy link is right there) or they can be cheap and get it for free. The catch is you have to be sure the user knows in the Market that they could get it for free also, otherwise they'll be pissed when they find out. It also won't work if you want to charge a lot for the app.

Maybe the best name for this model is the "RealPlayer model"--try to push the user into buying and make it more difficult to get it free. The difference is I hope your app (and mine) will be received better than RealPlayer was!