MobiAdage - App Store Optimization, Mobile Advertising & Making Money on Android

If you had asked me when was the best time to publish an app or game about a year ago, I would say to publish it in a related season or event. But now, things have changed. Quite drastically in fact. Seasons and events are a good source to get some eyeballs to your apps, but it also means competition is high. Terribly high in certain cases. Look at this "mistake" I made recently. I published a football game in conjunction with the World Cup 2014 in Brazil ( go Germany! ). A day later, I decided to check out where my app is starting off in the top new sports game category. And I got the biggest shock of my android life so far! The top new sports category had basically been transformed into the top new football games category! It was over flowing with football games!!! AARRRGH! I really should have checked this category out before publishing. Well, lesson learnt the hard way. It will be very tough to go up the ranks in this category, even if you did, with so many option

Time to revive this blog! Have you noticed the current top games and apps? The same games have been at the top of the charts since like forever! ( A year or so is forever in the mobile world). Fiksu recently came out with a finding that the average advertising cost for app developers have gone up. It is more competitive and more expensive to get your apps discovered and downloaded. The gap has widened quite a bit between the kings or rovios or supercells against the smaller devs. In order to kill off competition, the top devs have been rather aggressive in dishing out money for ads, drowning other developers with smaller budget out. Well, you can do that when you have a billion dollars in your account. So, here is the tough reality, advertising has grown expensive. If you're a small time dev, I'd suggest to hold off on spending that $200 on ads, it isn't gonna get you back much in terms of ROI. (Unless you get lucky of course). Is it all doom and gloom for us then? W