May was a moderately busy month for Neil Rajah. I spent a lot of time fixing bugs and releasing updates. I started work on new levels, but didn’t get to spend much time on that. And now with the new baby, that’s probably going to be on the back burner for some time. I got Neil Rajah and Bus Jumper onto the Barnes and Noble store for the NOOK tablets. Also, it appears that Neil Rajah might finally be approved for the Kindle Fire, since I’m actually seeing a handful of downloads now. But since that’s been rejected about 4 time already, I’m not going to trust this until I get some confirmation – either an email from Amazon, or an answer to a support ticket.
Ad Revenue
I’m continuing with the format from last month’s post, where I combined sCatter and Drippy into a single column.
sCatter & Drippy | Bus Jumper | Neil Rajah | Total per Month |
||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total per Game | $143.14 | $946.39 | $99.88 | $1188.82 | |||||||
| Impressions | Clicks | Revenue | Impressions | Clicks | Revenue | Impressions | Clicks | Revenue | |||
| April (2011) | 935 | 16 | $0.18 | - | - | - | $0.18 | ||||
| May | 7,915 | 148 | $3.15 | 277,166 | 2,351 | $59.53 | $62.68 | ||||
| June | 17,871 | 366 | $4.55 | 212,897 | 4,081 | $63.02 | $67.57 | ||||
| July | 35,527 | 670 | $14.90 | 309,395 | 3,113 | $108.60 | $123.50 | ||||
| August | 28,031 | 379 | $4.28 | 259,481 | 2,428 | $44.70 | $48.98 | ||||
| September | 15,142 | 296 | $3.94 | 155,001 | 1,573 | $39.98 | $43.92 | ||||
| October | 28,894 | 378 | $6.50 | 243,578 | 1,735 | $58.16 | $64.66 | ||||
| November | 36,550 | 740 | $13.97 | 264,278 | 3,429 | $72.95 | $86.92 | ||||
| December | 64,640 | 1,693 | $37.38 | 432,863 | 7,447 | $169.21 | $206.59 | ||||
| January (2012) | 71,690 | 1,341 | $21.79 | 461,196 | 8,670 | $128.16 | $149.95 | ||||
| February | 65,653 | 728 | $13.59 | 332,540 | 5,459 | $82.04 | $95.63 | ||||
| March | 33,648 | 836 | $10.18 | 182,024 | 4,586 | $57.48 | 1,957 | 7 | $0.18 | $67.84 | |
| April | 22,517 | 640 | $1.33 | 62,138 | 2,931 | $12.68 | 292,676 | 5,563 | $35.27 | $49.28 | |
| May | 32,654 | 965 | $7.40 | 146,115 | 4,201 | $49.53 | 418,440 | 8,540 | $64.43 | $121.36 | |
Some things to point out:
- This will show a big jump over April, because for most of April, I was running ads for Neil Rajah instead of the normal paid ads. Still, comparing Bus Jumper against last May, it looks like the payment per click is way down. It will be interesting to see if monthly trends are similar – rising income through June and July, followed by a big drop in August and September
- Neil Rajah showed some growth, which is good. If I include today’s income, I’ve crossed the $100 threshold for Neil Rajah. I think I spent about $5-600 on art and music, so at this rate, I should break even in about a year or so
Paid Games
Google - Not much to report here. 2 Bus Jumper sales for $2.18.
Amazon - I was getting decent sales of Bus Jumper until I got my first review, which was a 1-star. That was in February. I’m guessing that affected search rankings significantly, or just peoples’ willingness to try the game, because sales plummeted. I sold 2 copies in all of May. What’s interesting is that I got my 2nd review on May 30th, which was 3 stars. And both sales were on the 30th. So maybe I should do something to try and seed some good reviews here. I’m pretty sure my ‘ask engaged users for feedback‘ code is in this build, but I suspect the link goes to the free version of the game, which is why I’m not seeing any reviews. I might try to fix that, but getting OpenFeint to build against my current code base will be a painful project (I’ve tried and given up more than once in the last month).
Barnes and Noble - This is where things get interesting.
Neil Rajah sold 10 copies, for a total of $13.90 (it’s priced at $1.99). Towards the end of the month, I released an update that includes a free trial version. I’m not sure if that’s gone live yet, since I don’t have a NOOK tablet to test with. I’m hoping that the ability to try out the game will convince a few more people to buy it. No reviews yet, a good review or two should help as well. If I don’t see any change in June, I’ll probably drop the price to the magical 99c level.
I also listed Bus Jumper on the Barnes and Noble store. This earned $19.32. However, it’s not clear how many I sold. Up through May 29th, I sold 22 copies. Then on May 30th, I got my first review, 3-stars. Flurry for that day showed about 300 new users for the B&N version number. The B&N store report shows 353 sales for that day, but only $0.69 income (which is the equivalent of 1 sale). Dito for May 31st – 190 sales, $3.90 revenue (which is 5 sales). So I’m not sure what happened. Best case – I did sell 353 copies, which means I earned $243.57 in Bus Jumper sales on that day. Much more likely case – the game was accidentally made free, so I got a bunch of downloads but no sales. I’ve filed a support ticket asking for more details, we’ll see what they say.
Not counting this anomaly, I have a total of $33.22 from sales on the B&N store. This is less than I was seeing from the Amazon store, but it’s also not the ‘Kindle Fire Christmas’ right now, so direct comparisons are meaningless. It’s certainly better than my paid game sales on the Google store.
I do not have NOOK tablet too but I guess that they have some sort of free day promotion like Amazon when they put your app for free, on that day you get a bunch of downloads but zero income.
Except that with Amazon, you the developer have to explicitly opt in to this promotion. It doesn’t make sense that the store would discount your item to $0 and not pay you at least a minimum amount per sale. But maybe that’s their policy. I certainly didn’t read all the fine print when I accepted their terms of service
Wait am I see this right 0.7 dollar cents (not even a cent) per click?
Unfortunately, yes. I’ve asked Mobclix about this. It is because most of the ad impressions for Neil Rajah are coming from India, where the payouts are much lower than in the US and Europe. The CPC values improved a bit towards the end of the month, so I’m curious to see what June is like.
Hey there,
yeah 0,007 $ per click this is really low. Maybe AdMob can offer better ads for India, have you ever tried? It should be worth it, because 0,007 is fraud.
I tried AdMob a long time ago. I’m hesitant to spread the ads out across multiple providers, because that means each one gets fewer impressions / clicks. This means it takes longer to cross minimum payout thresholds, and it also makes the game look worse to the ad agencies, so you end up losing out on the better ad campaigns.
might not be a bad idea to rate your own game on nook market. i saw a noticeable jump in sales after just one 5 star rating after sitting for a couple weeks at 0 ratings . you have to purchase it, but think of it as an “investment” and you get most of the money back anyway.
I’ve done that on Amazon in the past
Since I don’t own a NOOK tablet, I wasn’t sure I could do it here. Can I just create an account, buy the game, and then rate it?
Yeah I already had a B&N account, but I don’t think it took much to set one up. Then I clicked on purchase (put in credit card info and stuff) and it said it was “available for download”, then I was able to leave a review. I don’t own a NOOK either :/
Thanks, that’s good to know. I might just make an investment here