Monetization
Earn from your app without guessing what the category does
Most monetisation advice is written in the abstract. This page starts from the catalogue: what the listings around you actually charge, how many of them run ads, and how many sell something inside the app.
- Free to install
- 81.9%
- Free listings running ads
- 38.6%
- Listings with purchases
- 94
- Paid listings
- 28
What free listings actually do
Four groups that do not overlap, so they add up to every free listing in the index.
| Advertising only | 24 |
|---|---|
| In-app purchases only | 69 |
| Both ads and purchases | 25 |
| Neither | 9 |
Reading that chart
The largest group is usually "neither" — listings that are free, carry no advertising and sell nothing inside the app. Those are rarely charities: they are funded somewhere else, by a subscription bought on the web, by a paid desktop product, or by a business that treats the app as a channel rather than a product.
If your category is mostly advertising, a paid listing has to clear a much higher bar: people compare it against a free alternative on the same screen. If it is mostly purchases, you are competing on what the first session feels like before anyone has paid anything.
Check your own category rather than the index as a whole. A utility category and a casual-games category look nothing alike, and the average across both describes neither.
The models, and what each one costs you
Every one of these trades something away. The useful question is which trade your product can afford.
Advertising
Pays from the first session and needs no payment flow. It costs you screen space and some goodwill, and revenue scales with time spent rather than value delivered — which makes a fast, efficient app earn less than a slow one.
In-app purchases
Earns most from a small share of users, so the median install is worth nothing and the model only works at volume. It also pushes design toward whatever drives the purchase, which is not always whatever makes the app good.
Subscription
The steadiest revenue of the three, and the hardest to start: it commits you to shipping something worth renewing every month, indefinitely. Churn, not conversion, is the number that decides whether it works.
Paid up front
Simple, honest and increasingly rare — paid listings are a small fraction of the index. It works best where the buyer already knows what they want and a free competitor would feel like a compromise.
Free, funded elsewhere
The app is a channel for a business that earns somewhere else. Nothing to optimise inside the app, and no revenue to lose by making it faster — but the app has to survive a budget review it does not pay for.
More than one at once
Ads plus a purchase that removes them is the most common pair in the index. It works, but it means designing an experience you are also selling the removal of.
Start from what your category already does
Open the category you compete in, look at the pricing and monetisation mix, then compare your listing against the three above you.
Shares and counts on this page are from the Appcompass index and describe the listings we track, not the Play store as a whole.