5 Ways To Make Money From Apps Instead Of Ads

Monetization is not an easy job for mobile developers, especially if you are from India. The most common methods developers use are advertisements, paid installs and in-app purchases. But there are a lot of other innovative methods you can use to monetize your app. Check it out.

1. Use the Freemium model

If you are starting out, instead of charging for installs, you can use the freemium model. Offer your app for free and give something extra (read valuable) to those who need more by charging a small fee.

Many apps today incorporate this method. You might have a health app which users can download for free. Thus, casual users also get the advantage of using your app. For more advanced and serious users, you can provide better benefits and high quality content.

2. Licensing & Merchandising

Now, this is something difficult to pull off if you are a developer who has just started out. This method will particularly work if you app is highly popular and has a lot of installs which could be free installs as well.

Consider the case of Angry Birds by Rovio. Rovio has very successfully marketed its brand with its more than 200 licensing partners selling T-shirts, plush toys, phone cases, water bottles, pens, bed sheets, snacks, drinks, and a theme park in the works. Rovio said it makes 30% of its revenue through merchandise selling.

3. Use Gaming to engage users

This might be a little hard to understand and employ. You must be thinking why would you making an extra gaming app. Although you might be right in your inquisitiveness, but in reality gaming can actually help you engage your users and help you make revenue as well.

Consider the case of Line, a popular messaging app in Japan which is similar to WhatsApp. They have more than 80 million users and the app is free to download and use. Here’s what they did. To maintain its massive user base, LINE turned to gaming. It launched a puzzle game called LINE Pop, which garnered more than one million installs in one day and 10 million installs and $1 million in revenue in less than two weeks.

4. Go International

A lot of app developers don’t think beyond boundaries. One needs to understand that some people are more willing to pay than others, so is the case with countries. Hence, developers need to think global.

According to Distimo’s report on the fastest-growing countries for App Store revenue, countries like Japan, Russia, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Brazil, Mexico, and Korea all showed a higher year-over-year growth in revenue than the U.S., which ranked 13th with a growth rate of 44 percent.

Now you know that there are so many other countries you need to tap!

5. Make Advertising Fun

If at all you are using advertising, please think of something better than the boring banner ads. Here is a special case of Outfit7 which is the creator of the hugely popular Talking Tomcat app.

When they were approached by Dreamworks for an advertisement wanting to integrate the Madagascar experience in to Talking Tomcat, they had figured out display advertising will not work with their users. Instead they thought of making the process interactive. They allowed the user to activate the Madagascar experience by beating Talking Tomcat five times. Once activated, a Madagascar dream cloud would appear and the game background would change completely.

This story-telling interactive method helped them gain a CTC of over 9%.

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If you have any innovative ideas to monetize apps, do share with us.