Every coder dreams of making the “next great app.” There will be millions of downloads, talk show appearances, and the adulation of the multitudes. The reality, though, is that those successes are exceedingly rare. Most often, app designers have some success but aren’t household names. It’s easy to earn income from a blazing success with a million downloads, but most designers will have to earn that income through other means.
1. Placing Relevant Ads in Your App
As long as you do the right kind of research into the preferences of your target demographic, you can provide your users with ads for products and services that matter to them. By enticing them to click for more information, you can collect clicks, click-throughs, and other impressions. Then, the companies whose ads you feature will compensate you for those impressions. In some cases, you might not even have to do the research. Let’s say that your app is a game. You can offer in-game bonuses and power-ups to the players through watching video content. The players get their swag, and you get paid for having the players watch companies’ videos in your game.
2. In-App Purchases
This is where you offer premium content for users and keep the earnings for yourself. For example, consider a game that you create and that people can play for free. However, you only provide about 70% of the game’s full content for free. Players have to buy access to advanced parts of the game. Another way you can collect is to offer the full game but have people “pay to be impatient.” As an example, let’s say that a player has to complete a certain task 500 times to get a particular in-game item. The player can certainly do the 500 reps, but for “just $4.99,” the player can get the item right away. Be careful, though, of “pay-to-win” strategies where free players cannot compete. That will be a huge turnoff.
3. Subscriptions
This is similar to IAPs, but instead of one-time bonuses and/or items, users get benefits for a period of time. Often, this is by the month or by the year. Subscriptions are a great way to make a mobile app profitable because they offer consistency to the revenue schedule.
4. Creating Partnerships and Sponsorships
Let’s say that your creation is a fitness app. You could partner with a shoe company. Not only would ads from that shoe company appear in videos within your app, but there could also be links to the shoe company’s website within your app. Further, users could receive discounts on shoes or other materials by accessing the shoe company’s website from your app. You make residual earnings through these partnerships.
5. Merch
To advertise your app, you can offer T-shirts, pens, ball caps, beach towels, or just about anything that has your app’s logo on it. You can also incorporate the other strategies listed here into the merchandising: something like, “Buy this power-up, and you’ll get this nifty sweatshirt.” Also, if it becomes part of your partnership or sponsorship agreement, you could incorporate the other company’s logo as well. That will increase brand recognition for both of you.