jrtb

Laziz Biryani Corner: My 2nd favorite local restaurant! (on Hillsborough Street in Raleigh, NC). Seriously, this is the best Indian food anywhere!

April 9th, 2009 | Category: General | Comments (2)

$49 from the big three this month with about the usual $10 from the rest. Not bad, I’ll take it! Still haven’t gotten a chance (or the motivation) to upload new work since last year. Too busy with Whack ‘em All!

April 3rd, 2009 | Tags: photo | Category: General | Leave a comment

Quite a milestone! Hard to believe we got here after the slow start we had back in December! Thanks to everyone who’s downloaded and purchased the game! Hearing from so many of you and reading all your great reviews of Whack ‘em All are very inspiring! Stay tuned for an announcement in the next few weeks!

March 25th, 2009 | Tags: iphone | Category: General | Leave a comment

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

March 2nd, 2009 | Tags: iphone | Category: General | Leave a comment

Well, I haven’t had time to edit and submit photos from last year’s cruise I keep meaning to, but never find the time! Last month’s stock income was $54.18 from the big three and about $10 from the rest. Not bad at all considering how long it’s been since I contributed anything to this income stream.

Another positive thing about the break has been that I’m getting jazzed about photography again. The creative juices are starting to percolate

As far as income streams go, I think it will be clear why I haven’t been able to prioritize the time to put more into stock photography. Wait till our February numbers are up for Whack ‘em All (our iPhone and iPod touch game)

March 1st, 2009 | Tags: photo | Category: General | Comments (1)

Not a bad first month! We released the 99 cent version of Whack ‘em All on Christmas Eve, 2008 and the free version on January 21st, 2009.

At the end of January, the free version of Whack ‘em All was about the 5th most popular free family game and had just entered the top 100 free apps overall.

Total US sales for January were $530. As we didn’t earn more than the minimum payout of $250 in any of the other countries, that will be our total income from Apple for January. We also earned $182 with AdMob and $137 with the iTunes Affiliate Program. That brings our total to $849.

The numbers for AdMob are interesting. We served 1.96 million ads during January. AdMob could only deliver banner ads 81% of the time. 6,364 people clicked those ads for a total of 2 cents earned per click (.4% click through rate). For folks considering going the free app with advertising route, those should be eye-popping numbers!

February is going to be a fantastic month for us as we’ve already earned double or triple January’s amount (hard to tell as the affiliate program hasn’t publishing earnings in about 2 weeks).

February 10th, 2009 | Tags: iphone | Category: General | Leave a comment

I ran across Sales Report yesterday.

This is a fantastic app for iPhone that lets App Store developers track their earnings without having to log into the dreaded itunes connect page every morning. I know if other developers are like me, this is a daily chore. Not anymore! Check it out! You’ll love it!

February 9th, 2009 | Tags: iphone | Category: General | Leave a comment

This month picked up from the last couple! I made $57.48 from the big three, $8 from bigstockphoto, $8 from 123rf and a buck from fotolia Hopefully the market will continue to rebound and the renewed earnings will inspire me to edit, tag and upload some shots currently gathering dust

Big thanks to lookstat for the awesome new feature of reporting last month’s earnings!

Stay tuned for our January Whack ‘em All earnings report - that is where much of my attention has been over the last few months as we continue to look for nice streams of income!

February 2nd, 2009 | Tags: photo | Category: General | Leave a comment

“Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” - Winston Churchill

“The AppStore is the worst mobile software storefront, except all those other mobile software storefronts that have been tried from time to time.” - Chris Garrett, ZWorkbench

Assertion 1: The App Store for iPhone and iPod touch is the best publishing medium for independent developers that has ever existed. It is now truly possible to compete with the giants on today’s preeminent mobile gaming platform (with an estimated 40 million units shipped).

Assertion 2: The Crapp Store really has problems. Review system. Metadata searching. Try before you buy. Piracy. Quality of apps. Great apps never get seen (or downloaded).

What can we do?

Connie and I, co-founders of Fairlady Media and developers of Whack ‘em All for iPhone / iPod touch, would like to propose that like-minded developers form an iPhone Developer’s Guild. We’ll call ourselves the iDG. Here’s what we’ll do:

1) Organize ourselves into a unified voice and get responses from Apple on issues of concern. Engage Apple in a meaningful dialogue to address these issues.

2) Agree to give accurate reviews to each member’s apps on the app store.

3) Collaborate with each other about issues like development, QA, marketing, pricing strategy, revenue and maybe even share some code.

We’re willing to help coordinate and will kick things off by giving an honest, thoughtful and high quality review to any developer’s app that is willing to do the same for ours. Leave comments below. Email me (jrbosser@gmail.com). Follow me on twitter (http://twitter.com/jrtb).

Who’s in?

January 29th, 2009 | Tags: iphone | Category: General | Comments (3)