How annoying your users can be profitable
Whack ‘em All! If you don’t know - you should!
Since the release of the free version of Whack ‘em All on January 21st, our earnings from AdMob have been underwhelming. To the tune of $83 and 750k impressions a day with a click through rate averaging around .4%
Taking advice from AdMob into consideration, we released an update to Whack ‘em All with all kinds of great new features. Some of them however, in our opinion, had to be annoying to our users. AdMob recommended that we make the ads more prominent, display them longer and not let the user click past them. Okay, what the heck, we decided to give it a try. Adoption of the new version is somewhere around 20% of our overall userbase at this point and our earnings yesterday were at $193 on just 666k impressions. Our click through rate has climbed to 1.65% and is still going up! Also, up-sell on our paid version of Whack ‘em All has climbed in the last couple days as well. We had an all time high of 223 sales yesterday! I think we can attribute that to annoyed users who love Whack ‘em All and don’t want to look at the ads anymore!
Seems counter-intuitive to us and we’re sort of at a loss to explain this. It may also shape the direction of our next game (which we plan on announcing soon!).
Let me know if anyone has questions, I’d be happy to go into more depth 
