About a month after launch, Alan decided to experiment with monetization by placing a simple Google AdMob banner at the bottom of the free version of his app.
“In the first week it was like 10 cents, 20 cents... then I got to $10 and I was like, 'Oh wow, I made $10,'” Alan laughs.
But that revenue quickly grew, eventually establishing a significant and reliable stream of income that sustained his new side business.
In those early days, Alan experimented heavily with his monetization. He tried offering paid versions of his app upfront, charging anywhere from $1 to $10, but quickly realized that users strongly disliked paying for utility apps before trying them. The ad-supported version consistently brought in double the revenue of the paid version.
He also attempted to use mediation with competitor ad networks like Facebook and Unity, but the results were incredibly disappointing. The competitor platforms paid significantly less and cluttered his app with frustrating dependencies that he constantly had to update. He immediately switched back.
“AdMob is fantastic,” he notes.
After years of overthinking his ad placements—even losing sleep over whether moving a banner ad five pixels up or down would impact his revenue—Alan adopted a simple philosophy for his ad strategy: set it and forget it.
“My philosophy after doing this for 13 years is … AdMob, just don't touch it,” he jokes.
This hands-off approach has allowed him to benefit from programmatic advertising trends without lifting a finger. Over the past year, he has seen his revenue consistently increase, and today, ad revenue makes up roughly two-thirds of his app income.
While he recently added a monthly subscription option for users who want to remove ads and directly support the app's maintenance, he says the free, ad-supported version is absolutely irreplaceable to his business model.
And that reliable stream of AdMob revenue has completely changed the trajectory of Alan's life. He still remembers the day his ad revenue first hit $1,000 in a single month. He calculated that this equated to $12,000 a year—effectively a minimum-wage salary generated entirely passively from a side project.
But the true life-changing moment came years later when his family began to grow. Alan and his wife were living in Florida in a modest starter home they had renovated themselves. As their children approached school age, Alan looked into their local public school district and was horrified to discover it was rated a "one out of ten.”
He knew they needed to move, but even with his engineering salary, he couldn't afford a nice house in a top-tier school district. “I was like, ‘how am I going to make this work? There's no way with this salary,’” Alan recalls. “But my wife said, ‘you're also making income from apps, remember?’”
So Alan contacted a realtor and a mortgage financier, who confirmed that his consistent AdMob revenue fully qualified as a secondary source of income. By combining his civil engineering salary with his app revenue, Alan was able to purchase a beautiful house in a highly-rated school district for his growing family.
