App monetization is a trendy topic to discuss among app developers and some individuals who are trying to make money from their apps after building it.

Are you also one of them trying to come up with a profitable idea to monetize your app effectively, but concerned, what if it doesn’t pay you revenues against the intensive toiling? Worry not! Every app owner feels.

Irrespective of when your app was launched and whatever be the mobile OS, you can still monetize your apps in the market and earn millions of dollars effortlessly.

This article provides you with different options available to you if you are thinking of app monetization.

• Is App Monetization Worth it?
• Top 10 App Monetization Strategies to Supercharge Your Revenues
• Top 20 App Monetization Options to Supercharge your Revenues
• 10 Best AdSense Alternatives to Consider for Your Website in 2021

Is App Monetization Worth it?

Certainly, app monetization pertains to the act of earning revenues from your app. Monetizing apps has become one of the major strategies to leverage app data and make money from apps.

• Above all, the app market is growing tremendously, and the mobile app revenue will reach $935 billion by 2023. App monetization platforms and strategies all over the world are increasing by leaps and bounds and app developers are hastening their grab upon the global market to earn outstanding revenues from their apps.
• Specifically, mobile users are spending 87 per cent of their time in apps, versus just 13 per cent on the web. (source: mindsea). On average, users spend around 2-3 hours engaging themselves in mobile apps.

These statistics, of course, indicates that apps have great revenue potential stored in them for the app developers!

Read Also: How to Optimize your Ad Network Numbers

So, if you haven’t monetized your mobile app, you should start thinking of ways to convert those gazing eyes on mobile screens into revenue giving pockets through the best mobile app monetization platforms and strategies.

Top 10 App Monetization Strategies to Supercharge Your Revenues

1. Audience Monetization

Indeed, every company today possesses an app for its operations and business functioning. generally, users visit these apps looking for products and services that they intend to buy. Thus, companies get a lot of data from these users by collecting their email ids, phone numbers, geographical locations and a lot more.

In short, audience monetization pertains to the process of identifying and marketing your audience-data to generate revenues. Most importantly, aligning with user consent and privacy in order to make this a long term strategy.

By involving in audience monetization, companies can identify the useful data that is profitable to them and sell those datasets further to earn revenues. As a result, companies generate revenues.

2. In-App Advertising for App Monetization

Advertising is the easiest way for apps to make money. You collect data and display the third-party ads within your applications. This way, you get revenue from the views, clicks and conversions. You may use the following ad formats:

Rewarded Ads

Furthermore, you can monetize apps using rewarded ads. This ad form works best for mobile games where you watch a 30-second ad to unlock something special, like doubling your coins/points. These rewards provide extended health or any other exciting features.

Banners

Banners are the most practised strategy of mobile app monetization. You must have seen them as the rectangular ads at the top or bottom of the screen.

Although banners are popular, they need to have focus and precise designs to draw attention and recognition. Also, banners are sometimes disturbing to the users as they overlap the content they are viewing. So, take care to not to make them look disturbing while advertising.

Interstitial Ads

Interstitial ads are those that fill up the whole application window hiding the content that you viewed. These ads attract more audience than banner ads owing to their size and are more productive.

Users can either skip these ads by clicking “x” and return to the application they were in. Otherwise, they can click the “play”/“Install” option and direct themselves to the advertisements shown. Interstitial ads are more pronounced; hence, they attract more user attention and help to monetize apps.

Native Advertising

Native ads seem like a part of the application that does not look like ads at all. These are within the website in such a manner that you can’t say that it is an ad.

Generally, these ads are marked as “Featured”, “Sponsored by”, “Recommended for you.” For, e.g. to see what a native ad looks like, look at the sponsored content in the ad below.

3. In-App Purchases

In-app purchase is one of the most widely used mobile app monetization strategies. If you have kept your application free for download and you are seeking strategies to earn revenues, you could try implementing in-app purchases.

In this, the application is generally free but offers additional features to be purchased.  Candy Crush is a good example of this. It provides a screen right to its users when they run out of gold bars since that is the likeliest time they will want to buy gold bars.

4. Freemium Models for App Monetization

The freemium model is a popular way to monetize apps, particular to mobile games. In this model, you distribute your mobile app for free and generate revenue from those users who are willing to enhance their experience from the app-exclusive features with subscriptions.

The most essential characteristic of a freemium mobile app is that it is engaging and rewarding for all users, not just paying users. So any app monetization features must serve to enhance the experience rather than locking out free users.

For e.g., The writing app, ‘YourQuote’ now offers a freemium version. But the app has become so popular that recently they came up with a premium version of the app. The users can pay and book their unique hashtags and write on moving pictures (cinemagraphs).

5. Email and SMS Marketing for App Monetization

A study by Radicati Group indicates that the world sends about 196 billion emails daily, out of which 109 billion, is a business email. So, emails are a big part of the business world. Emails are direct, customizable, action-oriented, cost-effective and a popular way of business communication.

According to SMS Marketing Statistics data, 48.7 million people will receive business SMS messages in 2020. Nearly 30% of consumers are responding to your SMS messages — and almost 50% of responders will make a purchase. Also, SMS have a higher response rate, are very accessible and cost-effective.

It clearly shows that email marketing and SMS marketing is an opportunity that you shouldn’t be missing out on if you are monetizing your app for making good revenue.

Email and SMS Marketing is a popular way to monetize apps wherein you may send emails or SMS about other brands to your subscribers, and those brands shall pay you for doing so.

6. Sponsorship & Partnerships

Monetizing apps through sponsorship is another way out. Look for a potential partner with a similar customer base and offer to cross-promote each other’s apps.

It works exceptionally well with event apps. For e.g., A business partnering with or sponsoring an event can pay you to have their content included in your app.

You can use ‘sponsor content’ to monetize apps, wherein a sponsored post is shown as an advertisement by a particular company. This draws in a large amount of popularity to their app.

For e.g., Consider a case of Myntra displaying an article for their ‘End of season sale’ on ‘Womansera’ to widen user activity on their app. This is how apps make money through the sponsored content strategy.

7. Paid-Only Applications

If you offer a mobile app that is a paid one, that means that your app has a user value. User value shows that it is unique and exceptional enough to compete as a paid one as against thousands of free apps.

Often you may keep it a trial one and then demand prices for usage., for e.g. Tasker is an Android app made for getting things done quickly. You need to pay $2.99 to avail utilities like location, date, time and to pull off more than 200 different actions.

You need to pay $2.99 to avail utilities like location, date, time and to pull off more than 200 different actions.

8. Charge Users to Have an ‘Ad-Free App’

Having an ‘ad-free app’ is another answer to ‘how apps make money’. The users might already be using a free version of your app that shows ad contents.

You may ask the users to pay you a certain amount of money for an ‘ad-free version’ of the app in order to have a better user experience.

9. White Labeling

The white-label app is a service where an application is ordered from Company B (reseller) by their business client but developed by Company A (third-party service provider). In simple words, it is a specific application developed by a provider that is rebranded and resold by multiple resellers to earn revenue.

For example, BiznessApps offers a white-label mobile app service that is unique to each of your business clients.

10. Affiliates Marketing and Lead Generation

Affiliates marketing offers rewards for each visitor, subscriber and sales. Also, partners can derive revenue in the form of percentage from the earnings of other companies.

For eg., Amazon Associates is an affiliate where you can advertise any of Amazon ware just by placing its link if users follow the link and make the purchase, you receive earnings.

Lead generation is about finding potential customers using contacts and is mostly implemented for a strict target audience. It is found that the most popular places for lead generation are Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

Top 20 App Monetization Options to Supercharge your Revenues

Now we are going to enlighten you with our list of the top 28 Mobile Ad Networks (without any particular order), that would help you acquire new users as well as earn extra money out of your product.

1. Facebook Ads (+Instagram Ads)

Facebook and Instagram are so far the biggest and the most powerful channels to reach a wide audience of mobile users. Besides being social media channels, Facebook and Instagram (which is also owned by Facebook) let you run campaigns and target your public by location, gender, age, likes & interests, relationships status, education, and job.

The number of people you can reach out thanks to these two networks is huge. They have very friendly and catchy ad display formats that work on every device and with different connection speed.

You don’t even need to have a lot of money because you can run campaigns depending on your budget.

2. Twitter Ads

Twitter is also a very powerful social media channel that works as an ad network at the same time. Thanks to this channel you can set your goals and focus only on what’s important for you, showing your ad across the people of your interest.

You can shift the audience depending on their activity on Twitter, their interests and their location.
And another advantage is that you would only pay for the actions that you want people to carry out, as, for instance, downloading your app.

3. Snapchat Ads

If you are thinking that you don’t need that many social media advertising channels and you are underestimating Snapchat Ads, you are totally wrong. Snapchat is the only social platform that allows you to reach out to a younger audience (Gen Z). They also have very handy features that would guide you to select your target population and design your ads.

4. Apple Search Ads

Not long ago Apple launched its own advertising platform – Apple Search Ads, in which developers would only pay per install. Your app would appear on the top of the search results, driving a high volume of installs. Apple Search Ads platform allows you to decide what keywords and what audience you want to select, set up your budget and goals.

Unfortunately, Apple Search Ads is not yet available worldwide – so far it is active in Australia, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Switzerland, the UK, and the US.

5. Google AdMob

Google AdMob was acquired by Google a couple of years ago and ever since is the predominant leader of online advertising. We might claim that this is the best advertising platform for beginners. Its main advantage is a simple integration, and, in addition, you can easily deal with the selection of tools and features by yourself!

Despite the ease in use and integration, Google AdMob is often criticized because of the low-revenue benefits for users. Among its key characteristics, we would like to highlight the several ad formats, such as native, video and interstitial. Moreover, you can target your audience per country or region, carrier, OS version or device among others.

This is, probably, one of the most used Mobile Ad Networks to make money with apps/games.

6. Google AdWords

Google AdWords is an advertising channel that helps marketers or advertisers set their products on the top of Google search results. That way, users would be able to see your product anytime they are looking for something you are offering. You are only charged when someone clicks on your ad to visit your product page.

7. AdColony (or Opera Mediaworks)

AdColony is the choice for top mobile publishers in the world. Among its characteristics, we can find rich media & video, demographic targeting and integration with both Android and iOS. This is the first advertising platform that offers Instant-Play™ HD video ad technology that works on every device no matter their quality and internet speed. It allows to select the quality of ad content, bringing high engagement. They also have a premium service that helps publishers or advertisers to target their audience very precisely, ensuring user-response.

8. Unity Ads

Unity Ads was launched by Unity Technologies in 2014 and it is a popular platform for games that allows developers to improve their monetization. How? By offering IAP displayed in videos (that could be rewarded or not) to players.

As for the audience targeting, this ad network allows targeting the ads to players that are the most likely to be interested in playing a certain game. And in addition, there is no need to integrate an additional ad SDK. It works with both Android and iOS and supports several display formats.

9. Chartboost

Do you have a game app? Chartboost is another popular solution for mobile games that allows cross-promotion and is used by the majority of developers of the top games. Among its features we find interstitial and video ads, as well as easy integration, in which only one SDK is necessary. It is worth mentioning that you would have full control over your ad space, being able to decide who advertises in your app.

And on the top of that, the goal of Chartboost is to help developers make money while letting them keep the majority of the income!

10. Applovin

Are you interested in analyzing your users and acquiring high-quality ones? Then this is the ad network for you! With Applovin you can filter your users by country, analyze all ad campaigns and lead campaigns to users that are most likely to make actions inside your app. On top of that, you can mix advertising formats and chose the best combinations for you!

11. Appnext

Appnext owns a large database and has a global reach permitting businesses to get in touch with users at the right moment. They provide real-life experiences with apps and follow users’ actions to show them a content or a suggested action. They work with iOS, Android and Mobile Web and support interstitial ads and notifications. In addition, targeting can be done by country, device or channel.

12. Epom Apps

Epom Apps is an ad mediation platform with in-house experts who help developers generate revenue from their applications with the winning ad strategy. The main benefit of monetization with Epom Apps is that their team totally handles monetization process – from the selection of best-performing demand sources to include in your custom SDK to ad placements optimization.

Get trusted advertisers, benefit from AI-based optimization algorithm and receive competitive eCPMs globally with 98% or more fillrate.

 13. Mobusi

Mobusi is a leader company in both Spain and South America, however, they are known worldwide, reaching out to millions of users and generating high volume of daily conversions. They specialize in user acquisition and in providing marketing services, especially performance advertising. Mobusi supports various ad formats and both Android and iOS. In addition, they allow targeting by country, carrier, OS, device, browser, and connection.

14. YouAppi

This advertising platform focuses on user acquisition and retention. They study users behavior and show them recommended apps depending on their preferences. 

YouAppi also provides marketers with highly effective instruments, such as real-time tools to monitor users behavior, tools designed to schedule campaigns and tools for push notifications. Many big brands work with this advertising platform!

15. Liftoff

Liftoff specializes in user retention as they analyze their behavior and create profiles taking into account age, gender, mobile behavior, and other most-used apps. In that way, they help you build campaigns that will drive you high quality installs.

16. Taptica

Taptica focuses on user acquisition campaigns that would deliver the maximum ROI possible. Acquiring loyal user through different channels and providing full-service monetization are some of their key features. The ads could be displayed as texts, banners or native videos in different devices as smartphones and tablets.

17. Vungle

Vungle is one of the best companies in acquiring and engaging users through their highly creative and enjoyable videos! Their in-house designers and artists are responsible for the success of this network, and it is already proven that users that have watched a Vungle video and arrived to a company’s website, show higher loyalty than others. You can also enjoy the customized targeting and use Vungle video in both Android and iOS devices!

18. Smaato

This mobile ad network provides you with real-time data for each impression. Smaato allows marketers and developers to carry out ad-exchange actions, offering high quality traffic optimization features and full pricing control at the same time. You can target your audience by country, app, ad format, publisher, device, connection type, GPS data and device ID! Do you need anything else?

19. MoBrain

If you need to focus on CPI, this is your platform! MoBrain was founded by Headway in 2014 and it presents an innovative fraud protection system that helps marketers reach out and engage with their users. The ads can adopt various display formats (banner, content, interstitial, native, video) and can be used in both Android and iOS platforms. It allows you to target your audience by location, operating system, OS version or carrier.

20. Fyber

Fyber is a monetization platform that permits advertisers and publishers carry out CPM and CPA campaigns. Four tech companies combined different solutions and capabilities to provide users with a single mobile ad platform.

One of its best features is automatic optimization of ad revenue sources. Installs and engagement are ensured with Fyber as it can reach over half a billion of users. This platform works with both Android and iOS and developers can run different campaigns, such as engagement and installs, in different formats: videos, interstitial.

10 Best AdSense Alternatives to Consider for Your Website in 2021

Google AdSense is a popular tool for making money online through your website or blog through adverts, but it’s not the only choice out there. There are lots of Adsense alternatives you might want to check out.

Whether you’ve not yet set up an AdSense account, you’ve had trouble getting it approved, or you’d like to diversify your income, there are many different alternative advertising programs that offer great features and allow you to make additional income from your website.

Any type of website can use Google AdSense. But there are some types that are better suited to running Adsense ads on them

Let’s take a quick look at which types of websites are best for Adsense:

• Blogs – one of the most common ones. If you are a blogger and you are consistently publishing high-quality content to an audience, ads may be a great way to monetize your content.
• Forums – Instead of writing blog posts, forums are a great way for people to interact around a topic, whilst also generating some Adsense revenue.
• Free Online Tool – If you run a site that offers a free tool or service, one way to offset the costs is with ads.

The takeaway here is that any website that is getting regular traffic is well suited for Adsense. But what if you don’t want to use Adsense ads on your site? Here are some alternatives

1. Media.net

Media.net is a direct AdSense competitor run by Yahoo and Bing. It is one of the world’s largest contextual ad networks and is used by household names all over the world.

Its contextual ads allow you to monetize your content with exclusive access to searches from the Yahoo! Bing network. The marketplace gives you access to content-driven publishers, so you can maximize your ad revenue and take advantage of a huge search market.

Media.net was the first to develop a server-side header bidding platform, which can be fully managed, allowing you to make the most of programmatic display with minimal effort.

2. PropellerAds

PropellerAds is a large ad network that offers a range of adverts like banners, sponsored links, push notifications, and allows you to reach 1 billion users.

The self-serve platform is easy to use with a simplified ad creator that allows you to get your campaigns live with minimal hassle. With lots of targeting options and real-time performance measurement, you can work reactively to improve your campaigns.

It also features automated ad optimization, where your settings are fine-tuned by AI, giving you the best number of conversions for each ad without manual effort.

3. Amazon Native Shopping Ads

Bloggers and other site owners have been using Amazon’s affiliate program to generate additional revenue for a long time, but Amazon Native Shopping Ads offer another high-reward way to monetize your website.

Similar to AdSense ads, Amazon Native Shopping Ads are contextual, so they display relevant products based on the page content and keywords. If a user goes on to make a purchase after clicking on the ad, you get a commission from this sale, regardless of whether it was for the item that was clicked on.

Amazon is the top e-commerce site in the world, and their conversion rate is much higher than pretty much any other e-commerce competitor. You can leverage this unrivaled traffic and conversion rate for passive revenue with very little effort.

4. Adversal

Adversal is a self-serve advertising platform that allows you to get your ads set up in just a few minutes. Its smart interface allows you to start, stop, and pause campaigns, making it easy and intuitive to use. Once you’ve set everything up, you can just leave it to do the work.

It’s worth noting that to be eligible for Adversal, your site must have its own domain name, have at least 50,000 pageviews per month, and shouldn’t be restricted by a login.

5. Sovrn //Commerce (Formerly VigLink)

Sovrn //Commerce delivers revenue to publishers through content-driven-commerce with leverage, insight, and automation.

By converting regular product links into affiliate links, Sovrn //Commerce allows you to generate passive revenue from clicks and resulting sales.

The monetization tools create competition among advertisers for your traffic, allowing you to get the best price. In-depth insights show you which products and advertisers earn you the most money so you can optimize your performance. Automation of the process means that you can focus on creating great content instead of tracking affiliate revenue.

And there is also Meridian from Sovrn.com, which is a CPM ad network that pays publishers per impression. This means that you receive money whenever your ad is served, regardless of whether or not it is clicked.

6. Skimlinks

Skimlinks automates affiliation of your commerce content, allowing you to focus on running your website without worrying about setting up affiliate links.

By automatically updating your commerce content with affiliate links, this tool is able to enhance all of your commerce strategies, including website, mobile, social media and email.

Joining Skimlinks gives you direct access to a global network of 48,500 merchants and 50 demand partners. You can also find merchants that offer special commissions to Skimlinks’ publishers through the VIP and Preferred Partner Program.

7. Monumetric

Formerly The Blogger Network, Monumetric is a full-service ad revenue partner, allowing you to increase your site’s revenue while preserving the best user experience for your visitors.

They use CPM rather than CPC, so you get paid for every impression, and their pay rates are one of the best for CPM campaigns. Revenue is often reported to be much higher than AdSense, making this a great choice for increasing your passive income.

However, the minimum traffic requirement is 10k monthly views, and there’s a 99% setup fee for sites with between 10k and 80k views, so you’ll need to be confident that you can drive enough traffic to make the investment worthwhile.

8. InfoLinks

Infolinks is a global advertising platform that aims to deliver brand messages to engaged users.

The ads are fully customizable and offer a unique placement to improve click-through rate without disturbing the look and feel of the website. By using a smart algorithm to determine relevance and intent, allowing them to deliver relevant ads at optimized moments.

Infolinks supports a marketplace of over 100,000 websites operating in 128 countries and can be integrated into a website in just a few minutes.

9. ylliX

Some people look for alternatives to Google AdSense for better pay rates, and ylliX definitely fits the bill. It’s an advertising network offering various ad types for both desktop and mobile, including popunder ads, mobile redirects, sliders, layer ads, and full-page ads.

It offers instant account approval, fair rates, detailed reports, daily payments, and 100% fill rates, as well as precise campaign targeting and a self-serve platform that gives you complete control of your campaigns. Traffic comes from verified sources to ensure quality and increase conversions, and publishers don’t pay a thing for using ylliX.

Read Also: Choosing the Right Monetization Partner

They also offer a generous referral program, paying up to $100 for each new active publisher or advertiser you refer, plus 2% of their lifetime earnings or spend.

10. Evadav

Evadav is an advertising network focusing on push notifications, but they also provide many ad options, including banners, video sliders, and native ads for both desktop and mobile.

When a user subscribes to your push notification system, they remain connected to your account, earning you a constant daily income from their signup. Evadav also has a referral program that pays you 5% of the revenue made by referred publishers, bringing you even more passive income with very little work.

All websites are approved to ensure that adverts are brand-safe, so you benefit from high-quality traffic and trustworthy adverts.

AdSense may be one of the most well-known methods of monetizing your website. There are plenty of alternatives to Google AdSense, though, you’d want to try if you’re not getting the results you want or you’re looking to diversify your revenue streams.

Finally

By this point, you’re well aware of how awesome a mobile app can be for your bottom line. It can allow you to expand your brand and make connections with customers you might never have reached before. And as you’ve seen in this post, it can also be a considerable source of revenue.

So take advantage of these strategies for monetizing your mobile app, and watch your business begin to generate more app revenue than ever.