From my experience, you really don't make much on ads from apps and they tend to drive people away. To do well on mobile app ads, you need a fairly massive audience and then you need to market your ad space directly. In particular, video ads on mobile can be very lucrative, but you'd need a very engaging app to keep people around when you start showing those kinds of ads.
More than likely the reason his free app did so well against the others is that the others likely had ads or nag screens or similar, while his was genuinely free.
Re:An App Store Experiment
by monkey_slap on Thursday June 20, 2013 @11:37AM
(#5912696)
My free app is seeing about 500 downloads/day. When it was featured in the "New & Noteworthy" it was about 1500/day. However my IAP conversion is holding at about 2% which, to me, is quite bad.
Another thing to point out is that the author has about 4k Twitter followers, so he does have an existing network of people to expose this app to. It's not much, but its a (free) start.
Is there some general "formula" on how much ad revenue one can expect from a (relatively straight forward) free app per 1000 users? Meaning some help on at what point would it make sense to move from sales based monetization to an ad based monetization model.