Android Market

This is an interesting article, suggesting that Android app revenues are puny. But does it miss an extremely important point?

The iPhone market is built off of the fact that people will pay $0.99 for anything. All the revenue is up front payout.

The Android Market is much more based on free apps with ad revenue. I’ve often considered this an unnoticed tax on the cost of an iPhone (my wife has easily spent $100 more on her phone than I have on mine because she has to pay for apps that are free on Android).

Consider Angry Birds.

It is free on Android. There are ads. They are unobtrusive. Angry Birds makes $1MM/month on these ads (that’s after being released for just 4 months on Android – those numbers will likely rise). Those numbers do not show up in the above linked article. That one app would ad 10% to those revenue numbers.

Maybe not so puny?

And the Angry Birds folks prefer the Android model because the revenues continue over the life of the app.

You can argue over which model is better for users. Some folks would prefer to pay the 99 cents to avoid ads. But don’t spout revenue numbers for the app market unless you factor in ad revenue as well.