My App "Made Money"!

Whoa, apparently back in September Apple deposited just over $20 in my bank account because of ad revenue from my App! I did have to pay $99 for a developer's license so it is quite a way from making a profit (even counting the $20 it has made since then), but at least there's some revenue offsetting the loss!

On one hand I'm impressed by the app development process because as a part time hobbyist I was able to create an app I'm rather happy with and that has been downloaded over a thousand times. On the other hand I just now found the section of iTunes Connect that told me that they paid me back in September. I'm sure if someone was doing this professionally they'd have taken the financial portion of the site more seriously and found that page immediately, but at the same time apple is normally all about making interfaces that anyone can easily understand. My bigger complaint is now that I have the app, every few months I want to make a minor change, but each time I end up spending so long getting the new SDK and figuring out the new setup it uses up all the time I intended to spend on it.

I mentioned the number of downloads, but I don't actually think that's a very interesting metric because someone can download an app and never use it. What I do find interesting is in the last week iAds has registered the following number of requests for ads per country (not sure if requests happen when someone goes to main menu or just on opening) for a total of 402:

Unknown 145
US 66
Korea 30
Japan 24
UK 23
Brazil 14
Netherlands 12
Taiwan 9
Turkey 8
Canada 7
Australia 6
Saudi Arabia 6
Thailand 6
China 5
Finland 5
France 5
Hong Kong 5
Czech Republic 4
Morocco 4
Singapore 3
Austria 2
Spain 2
Denmark 1
Kuwait 1
Mexico 1
New Zealand 1

I think iAds is a cool way to track if anyone is actually opening the app, although it is unfortunate that even though they track requests from countries outside the US, they only serve ads to the US.