Mobile applications are a lousy business. More than 60% of applications earn less than $500 per month. And the market is getting worse every day. By 2018, Gartner predicts that less than .01% of mobile applications will be financially successful. As developers grow increasingly desperate for monetization, Amazon (which runs its own app store in 200 countries) identified success factors of the Top 50 applications.

Median revenue per app

I. More Time = More Money

Getting people to download the app is only the first step toward monetization. 62% of revenue occurs after the first 7 days and 35% of revenue occurs after the first 30 days. Your app needs to create a habit. The Crafting Contagious Workbook by Jonah Berger provides some tips (pdf).

Mobile session time is the multiplier

II. Advertising is growing but In App Purchases (IAP) dominates. 

In-app purchases generated 53% of revenue in Apple’s US App Store in January 2012. One year later, it generated a record 76% of all mobile revenue . For ad-based apps, the two most common models are cost per click (CPC) and cost per thousands impressions (CPM)

CTR by Ad Format

III. In-Store Promotion Drives Awareness and Downloads

The Top 50 apps, on average, invested more toward marketing and promotion within the App Store.  Campaign bursts, carefully tested and measured, actually achieve a noticeable increase in downloads.

Mobile app promotion

The Lead Evangelist for the Amazon Appstore, Mike Hines, is in Israel this week to present at the Amazon Developer Day.

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Levi Shapiro
Managing Partner at JIMMI Fund
Levi Shapiro is the Managing Partner at the JIMMI Fund, a corporate venture investment fund, and concurrently Partner at TMT Strategic Advisors. He is also the organizer of Marketing & Ad:Tech Israel (www.adtechsummit.com), Israel's largest conference for digital advertising.

During a 20 year career inmedia and technology, including 7 years in Asia, Levi launched new business units(IBM), new products (Toyota) and new startups (TwoMinute Television, Snack Mobile, etc).

He teaches Entrepreneurship and Mobile Marketing as an Adjunct Professor at IDC Herzliya, serves as Mentor in Residence for The Hive accelerator and writes a bi-weekly column about digital media and technology in the Jerusalem Post called "Unleavened Media ".

Mr. Shapiro is a graduate of Tulane (BA), Cornell (Asian Studies) and MIT (MBA)
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Published by Levi Shapiro

Levi Shapiro is the Managing Partner at the JIMMI Fund, a corporate venture investment fund, and concurrently Partner at TMT Strategic Advisors. He is also the organizer of Marketing & Ad:Tech Israel (www.adtechsummit.com), Israel's largest conference for digital advertising. During a 20 year career in media and technology, including 7 years in Asia, Levi launched new business units(IBM), new products (Toyota) and new startups (TwoMinute Television, Snack Mobile, etc). He teaches Entrepreneurship and Mobile Marketing as an Adjunct Professor at IDC Herzliya, serves as Mentor in Residence for The Hive accelerator and writes a bi-weekly column about digital media and technology in the Jerusalem Post called "Unleavened Media ". Mr. Shapiro is a graduate of Tulane (BA), Cornell (Asian Studies) and MIT (MBA)

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