I have 2 companies in the professional photography space: http://bigfolio.com and http://aphotofolio.com . The first serves wedding and portrait photogs and the second high-end editorial, commercial, fashion. We provide website designs and a custom CMS for managing galleries. We get a setup fee (though that is going away soon) and monthly hosting. They aren't exactly equal but each is making in the low six figures pe…
That's very impressive - both in terms of revenues, and product development! Are you doing all the design and development work yourself?
I gross approximately 75k a month in RR, split between my business partner and I. 60k from IPhone apps and 15k from Android apps.
That sounds great! Can you expand on that? For instance, did you develop the apps, how many apps, what niche? Were you first-to-market?
I don't want to reveal the apps that I make, but I can answer your questions. I did develop the apps. There are 4 main apps that bring in all of the revenue. The apps are gaming and entertainment categories. None of the apps were first to market, but most of them did provide a much better experience than what was available at the time.
I make anywhere from $300 to $800/month on http://pizzacodes.com . About 3 or 4 months ago I switched domain names to make it more memorable, and I dropped out of search results for everything but my site name. Traffic has increased pretty substantially from other sources over the past few months, so I'm back just over $600/month again.
How do you make money? Some sort of affiliate deal?
$2000/month from free Android apps. I just copied existing apps on android like Logo Quiz, 4 pics 1 word etc. that were number 1 in the play store. Just took 24h to rebuild this apps, since they're quite simple. Did that around 10 times. Admob makes $500/month, Airpush $1,500/month. However, Google just shut down Airpush push notifications, so the latter is now gone. ha.
I hate to play Devil's advocate (please prove me wrong) but you have almost a million app downloads (more successful than most) and high school kids at Taco Bell make more than you. And that's before taxes. What will you owe the IRS if you're in the US? What are you paying in hosting? Is this really the "mobile revolution" glorified day after day in the news? So $500/month after Google pulled the rug from under you? Only "24 hours" but what about tech support, compatibility issues, the market research, artwork, learning to package the apps, complying with Google's rules, setting up your development environment? How many days does "24 hours" add up to, start to finish? But forget the money, at the end of the day this sounds like unrewarding work: ripping off other people's ideas. Which makes me wonder, you're obviously clever enough to get a million downloads, why such an uncreative approach? I'm just trying to understand the app market everyone is raving about. How many times have we all heard "the future is mobile, the future is mobile." Is making these apps (games?) really that enjoyable? I'm curious because I'm thinking of making an Android app. When I read stories like this, makes me think twice. What you're doing sounds really smart from a marketing perspective because 1. you're making games which are by far the most popular apps and 2. you're replicating the most popular games. So you should be killing it, making 100x more than all the other app developers who didn't sell out, the developers building interesting, original, useful apps. Yet, you're not. Am I over-analyzing this? Or is the "apps market" totally overrated?
$2000/month from free Android apps. I just copied existing apps on android like Logo Quiz, 4 pics 1 word etc. that were number 1 in the play store. Just took 24h to rebuild this apps, since they're quite simple. Did that around 10 times. Admob makes $500/month, Airpush $1,500/month. However, Google just shut down Airpush push notifications, so the latter is now gone. ha.
I hate to play Devil's advocate (please prove me wrong) but you have almost a million app downloads (more successful than most) and high school kids at Taco Bell make more than you. And that's before taxes. What will you owe the IRS if you're in the US? What are you paying in hosting? Is this really the "mobile revolution" glorified day after day in the news? So $500/month after Google pulled the rug from under you?…
These ideas were not original to start with; 4 pics 1 word (which is, imho, incredibly boring) somehow got a lot of attention, downloads and money but was never original. Then 100s of devs copied it in some way or another. All these 'games' look / work the same. I made one for a client and the 24 hours sounds plausible including artwork but excluding the actual levels. That would take around another day. Making a few $100 / month constant for a few days work is ok in my book, although it's not the work I would want to do; like you say, it's uncreative and actually boring.
However; for these kind of games there is no 'support'; people like it or don't like it, but you don't get support requests; people who experience issues with the software just uninstall it. It's not worth actually fixing it for a few outliers with crap white label phones. So you don't actually have any work with these things and that beats Taco Bell.
I think the reason he is not killing it is the nature of these games; they are very easy to make so there are 1000s of clones in the Play Store, people usually cheat (look up the answers) and those who like them have more than 10 installed on their phone. So the ad exposure is very short lived. Installs are not a very good metric; play time is; you're not going to keep apps like this active for a long time.
If you make an app which gives value to people or games with fresh content every week , you will make a lot more money. But that's not automatic; it's a job :)
It seems the big winner is Apple and Google. They passively collect 30% on the apps we spend months making.
Nothing about what Apple and Google provide for developers/App Store is "passive".
I disagree. Nobody at Google would have a job if it wasn't for Adsense/Adwords, which hasn't changed since the Goto.com days. It's a fancy click counter script paying everyone's salary. Search = content to sell clicks. You could fire 99% of everyone at Google and they wouldn't lose one penny of profit.
Last year I made a decent DJ application for Android. I probably invested a few thousand hours into it & the framework I built it on that could compile to Android, Blackberry Playbook, and HP Touchpad. I grossed just under $10k between sales on the three platforms, and advertising on Android. That works out to a few dollars per hour, last year. This year, I don't have time to work on it further but between advertisin…
:) It's not 0 hours investment, just 0 hours investment this year. All of that work last year was investment that's now paying off, bit by bit.
Your hourly rate from last year will look slightly better now if you add in this year's earnings...though it's still a rough game to play. Good luck!
I've usually read these threads without thinking about my own situation, but suddenly realized, I'm getting checks every month. It's not much, only $100-$250 per month, based on advertisements on my youtube channel, most coming from a 24 part series I made on locks & lockpicking a few years ago, but it's passive to the point that I literally forget about it. Unfortunately I'm the sort who is very uncomfortable asking…
I am a lot like you temperamentally and currently homeless, though the two things are not really directly related. I have thought a lot about it over the years. For me, part of it is that I was one of the smart kids in high school and got a lot of not subtle messages about how I owed the world benefit for my gifts and would be evil incarnate to try to, gasp, get rewarded for them. For me, I think gender also plays a…
I would recommend not being so open and candid, emotionally and concerning life events, on the internet. This is doubly true when your handle is linked to your photo, location, and real name.
I wouldn't hire you for freelance work due to your seemingly incredibly unstable situation.
Bit late to the boat but: Around $700/mo from a themeforest account. And the more interesting story, about £4.5k/mo from a cleaning business that i bought. I will at some point write the story up, but the TL:DR is: Spotted vastly under valued cleaning business with complete staff. Turnover of previous owner £190k a year. Profit of previous owner £18k. Yup, £18k.... Bought it for £13.5k. Still in the early stages and…
Hey all, i realise i'm much too late to this but if anyone checks, i setup a mailchimp list i'll blast out when i make a proper write up of my story: http://eepurl.com/FNvPr
I generate about $900/month of semi-passive income from http://algorithmic.ly , but the initial setup cost is high. In the future I want it to be the goto-company for adding generalized algorithms to apps, products and services (provided as a service), but while I validate the market there's a huge initial setup cost (about 10 hrs), spent on data modeling, cluster deployment and secure key generation.
The concept of "algorithms as a service" is really interesting to me. Basically implement complicated algorithms well and efficiently, hook them up to a web service, let people call the services.
Seems like a dream if you really just like programming, once you've got your funnel streamlined and your infrastructure banged out, you can add new algo's and consequently money to your service in a flash.