Odd paid app downloads

 My pricing experiment continues to run, I’m through the first month now and I’ve noticed some odd things.  My paid settings are Monday through Thursday of every week, but I’m showing paid downloads in Apple’s Trends for Sundays.  Maybe it’s a timezone thing on their end but you would think that a big company like Apple could handle something like that.  Obviously the price is being set/unset somehow.

 Another odd thing is that the spike on my free days seems to have leveled out.  Basically it looks like I got a bump after the first paid cycle and it has leveled out since.  It also looks like my paid downloads have increased in an inverse pattern.  GhostTalk is now bringing in about $200/month in paid downloads on top of the ad revenue.  In fact, that is almost 4 times the ad revenue which makes me think that at some point it might be worth scrapping the ads because they are not growing as fast as the paid downloads.  For now I am just going to watch how things progress.

 I also noticed that Flight Alert is my second most used application.  I have 14.7k impressions (with an average of 6 minutes) in the past 30 days which is amazing given that there are only 470 total installs at this point.  I went soft on the ads in this app because I wanted to see how users behaved before trying to decide how to approach advertising.  Basically there are banner ads as every fourth item in the list of flights being observed.  AdMob is showing 6 requests for ad displays for the past month with zero interaction.  Banner ads just don’t work unless you place them where they may accidentally be tapped which is the same trick you have to use for the web.  In the mean time paid downloads have generated $13 over the past 90 days.  Nothing to retire on but the app is less than 90 days old so it is impressive that users are willing to pay for it at all.

 For this one I may look into my first direct affiliate deal to be able to link users directly to the flights they are interested in.  I think that being able to show 1,470 hours of use from 470 users in a month (3.1 hours per user) is a great sales pitch.  But the one thing that all of these numbers confirm is that Push Notifications work!  This entire app is push notification based and right now it’s every 6 hours.  I could simply update my crontab and send the notifications more often to generate more impressions.