Euchre for Windows Phone

UPDATE: EuchreWP post relocated to a new blog dedicated to only content related to EuchreWP.

Monetizing your mobile application using banner ads

If you are planning on monetizing your mobile application by including banner ads there are a couple of things to keep in mind:

1) Stating the obvious here, but you need a *lot* of ad impressions (i.e. views/eyeballs) in order to generate any income whatsoever, meaning, of course that you need a lot of downloads, and your users need to use your app pretty regularly. If you have a game that goes viral, maybe that will work out for you, but if you have a fairly niche application that is based on a 100+ year-old card game, published only on one platform like mine (EuchreWP), there is a natural limit to how many new and dedicated users you reasonably may expect to get.

2) There is a fundamental problem with how the content itself is delivered, at least in the toolkit I am using. The ads take a non-zero amount of time, sometimes a second or two, to download from the ad servers. During that time the application becomes unresponsive (for the programmers: the ad control blocks the UI thread). This can lead to behavior that is difficult to reproduce, especially during development, because real ads are not served up if you are running the app in a development environment (testing on a handset is only part of the equation; if you tweak the ad campaign parameters after publishing, like I did, different behaviors can emerge).

I've come to the conclusion that the almost-nonexistent revenue stream is not worth the hassle caused by the blocking and lag introduced by the advertising component. Already I have seen some oddball behavior that I think is related to that blocking, and the last thing I want is for a bad user experience to tarnish someone's impression of the app.