The question always arises of how to make money from a mobile app. is there a way for a mobile app to stand on its own? Cover the costs of development, deployment & maintenance? the answer is YES!
Although there are many ways to monetize a mobile app, there are 5 common alternatives that can be used separately or together:
1) Sell it – Both the iTunes Store and Android Marketplace let you put a price tag on downloading your app. for Apple the minimum price is $0.99, with 70% revenue share of sales to the developer.
2) Sell Advertising – Use the home page or banners to sell ad space. There are a number of mobile advertising aggregators from which you could obtain an advertising feed under a revenue share agreement. Usually any advertising that you source and sell yourself will be more profitable that a 3rd party advertising feed, but such aggregator feeds are useful to supplement your own ads with additional ad inventory.
3) Sell Alerts & Notifications – Remember that the app platform is still in essence a mobile phone benefiting from a communications link to the platform’s user. Mobile is an immediate reaction platform, as can be seen by the popularity of SMS Calls to Action, such as for events & mobile giving. this means that you could capitalize on the ability to send timely and time specific mobile offers & reminders for events, appearances, specials and the like, to your captive app audience.
4) Sell Offer Feeds – you could set up an in-app category specific to offers and promotions in the nature of an ongoing feed, much like a news feed, and essentially sell access to this in-app channel.
5) Sell Subscriptions – By selling a time defined subscription for access to your app, you can develop an ongoing revenue stream.
6) Sell Content Tags – you can also monetize the content within your app by way of integrating advertising into audio tags, video pre and ante rolls.
While these monetization alternatives can defray the cost of an app, a proper marketing plan that views the app as mobile communications channel could really take advantage of the opportunities of delivering media to consumers while on the go. in this way the app as a channel differs from television, radio and print, which differences can be leveraged to increase the value of the monetization alternatives in comparison to those traditional media outlets. so consider using a mobile app as your content delivery tool, that when purposed as a mobile channel has the enhanced ability to pay for itself and much more!