Over a year ago, I wrote a blog indicating no interest in following the advertising model for getting income. I have taken a lot of heat over that one (being called old-fashion or out-of-date primarily). Well, to try and "keep up with the times", I decided we will do an experiment and try out Apple's iAd program with the mobile version of wineCellar.
As seen in our News/Events section, wineCellarAd has been launched on the App Store and is an iAd sponsored version of wineCellar. We did this quietly a couple of weeks ago to see how the whole system works (remember, we are new to this ad-based approach).
Watching the ad statistics has been, well, disappointing. Here are some current stats:
- Though there are ad requests coming from many countries from wineCellarAd, only two are being served any ads at all: US and UK. Everyone else gets to use wineCellarAd ad-free (so much for being ad-sponsored!)
- In the US and UK, we are only getting between a 40% and 50% fill rate. That means that even in countries which are getting ads, less than half the times the app asks for an ad is it getting one.
- The overall fill rate, taking into account all countries, is only 8%.
- Click-through rate is currently sitting at 0%!!! That means no one who has received an ad has clicked on it.
- Let's be honest: a wine cellar app is not nearly as popular as say a fart app or flashlight app so getting an ad rate into the thousands is very difficult. Add in a fill rate of only 8%, and getting to even 1000 impressions is near impossible.
The lesson for me here: as I wrote before, the ad model is certainly not for everyone. If you are a viral or popular app, then yes you can make some money from being ad sponsored. If you are a niche market such as we are, then ads may not even buy you a latte.
Developing a quality product takes time and support (and latte's). This is especially true in a niche market such as ours. Using an ad-based model not only does not provide much/any income to support development, it is actually quite demoralizing to see all those zeros on Apple's iAd stats page while you are trying to help someone requiring support.
With this said, I will leave wineCellarAd on the App Store for 1 more month. If things do not improve, I will be forced to pull it. So if you are interested in giving iPhone wineCellar a try for free, now is the time to do so as it will most likely be a limited time offer.