App monetization is one of those hot topics of the present hour. A variety of apps that leverage the mobile ecosystem to provide best services that make life easy. However, in the mobile ecosystem, advertising is not as feasible as it is for desktop machines. At present, there are numerous attempts to use apps as prenium inventory but ultimately, an app with a banner popping up in the middle of your tasks is a straight no-no! Moreover, with smarter and impatient users and the availability of a variety of apps, keeping a user hooked to an app with ads on it is a difficult task. We ourselves are the best analysts, just ask yourself a simple question – Would I keep an app on my phone that irritates me with ads all through the time I am using the app? most of us would answer “no” as we have a variety of apps and would try a different one.
So, these apps have to help each other survive. This can be achieved through a mutual collaboration. Every app can have a section “Apps we recommend”. This section will feature third party apps which belong to a different domain. When someone signs up for the recommended app through the installed app as a refferer, the revenue for that sign up can be shared by both the apps. Similarly, a barter system can also be used for the same.
Here the concept that I want to high light is “SOPHISTICATED ADVERTISING”. We do not throw a banner in front of a user to irritate him and hate us. in fact, we provide a system, where the user is made to feel special by showing him a list of apps we think are apt for him. They would definitely love our polite approach and wouldn’t even realize we were advertising other apps the whole while. This in turn helps us all to get in there and monetize the in app inventory effectively.
Here is a quick example of how this would work :
App “A” has a deal with apps “B”, “C”, “D” that when a person installs app “A” on his device, they would show a menu option as “Apps recommended for you” and will display apps “B”, “C”, “D” on it.
If someone signs up for app B through A, app B pays a particular amount to app A. They can also have barter deals. This way, the apps will help each other grow.
Moving forward, we can also have customized targeting or demographic targeting to choose a list of appropriate apps for the end users to be displayed in this list. Ofcourse this cannot replace the primitive forms of advertising, but will definitely prove to be a way of monetizing mobile apps in a more sophisticated manner.
Please feel free to drop your views and opinions on this.
VAIBHAV PANDIRKAR 