App Adds Own Ads...

Our free app, iHourglass Free previously used AdMob to show ads. Made a few $ per day--about enough to cover the company coffee addiction. And if they'd let us fill the 60% extra unsold ads with our own, we probably would have stayed with them. We thought the ability to show a bunch of ads for our own programs was too good an opportunity to miss.

So we made out own ad system. iHourglass Free has been in the top set of free Utilities for a really long time, so there's lots of people using. All ads we'll show for now will be for our other iPhone programs! If it works well, we will see how to open it up...


With a brand new ad system, it's easy to pick out the hits. Since until something is approved, if it's not me or my brother, it must be Apple reviewing :)

Sunday @ about 4:30pm. Hits from an iPhone that ran it a few times so saw a couple ads. Can't tell if they ran it on any without a network connection of course.

Monday @ about 3:30pm, got the notification it had been approved. Within 1/2 hour, started to see hits from people who were getting the new version! It will be very interesting to see, within a few days we should have a good idea what percent of people are using iPhones vs iPod touches; as well as what OS versions too.

(Update, the stats we got ended up in a nice article on ArsTechnica!)