Never really thought about that buy yeah, if you aren’t going to buy a 69p app you’re probably not going to buy a new sky contract or whatever!

Great post!

But how do you let a creator of a free ad-sponsored app know you’d rather pay for the app and not have the ads? I loath the ads in Angry Birds for Android, but there’s no paid version available (that’s ad-free).

I think trying to advertise a phone app via an “app ad” (if that makes any sense) might be silly.. the viewer may not value apps enough to pay for them.

But I disagree that using the free version of an app reflects general spending habits. One may not purchase apps, but would happily pay money for the food/car/laptop they see advertised.

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”? Not that I’m suggesting apps are trash, more that what is worth spending money on is down to the individual.

When it’s floating around in conversation this sounds like a big problem, but when you try to nail it down, it seems like most publishing media have dealt with this and survived. Broadcast, ad-supported TV vs. paid, ad-free movie channels, for example.

It’s not so much that ‘the entire industry of app developers needs to surmount the problem’ as it is ‘some publishers will find sweet spots and some developers won’t’.

The last few blog posts are sounding a little different…got a new writer?

funny post… and true
it all depends on the conversion rate i guess

I don’t think this is really an issue. Advertising is known to be effective – it wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t. And just because someone doesn’t want to pay for a 69p iPhone app doesn’t mean they won’t be willing to pay for anything else either – they have, after all, bought an expensive phone on which to use their free apps.

People’s willingness to pay for something isn’t based on absolute value (ie, what it costs compared to other things), it’s based on perceived value (ie, what it costs compared to what the buyer perceives it to be worth). A lot of phone apps are disposable; they have little lasting value to the user and hence people are reluctant to pay even 69p for them. But the things being advertised on those apps are not necessarily the same, many of them are products or services which do have perceived value and hence will attract paying customers.

The other point is that most phone advertising is cost-per-click, so there’s no wasted expenditure – if someone isn’t interested in the ad, then they don’t click on it and it costs the advertiser nothing to show it to them. The advertiser only pays for the small number of people who are interested enough to click, and it only takes a relatively small proportion of those to turn into paying customers to justify the ad expenditure.

With so much poor quality out there having the opportunity to judge and try before you buy is appealing. Web users are becoming used to waiting while a few seconds of there life is wasted watching a dancing soda can or a singing cow try to sell them cheese before being allowed to view a free article of sometimes dubious quality. Sometimes the ads are more entertaining than the content.

Getting more and more relevant everyday.

Getting people to pay for apps isn’t the key. Its the advertising you send them with the first update. Paying for addons etc is were the cash is.

It’s an interesting point. However, with a popular game like angry birds, millions of people play it every day. If only a small percentage go to ads (say 0.2%), then they make a large sum.

Also, there should be more pay-per-impression ads with free software. For example, between levels, you could show an ad for 2-5 seconds. This would especially would work with well known brands.