Apple's iAd Mobile Advertising Platform Providing Worthy Returns For Developers So Far

iPhone app developer Jason Ting was one of the nearly three dozen to get his flashlight app with iPhone 4 LED support approved and into the App Store yesterday. It seems his free, iAd supported version of LED Light for iPhone 4 turned out to be a great choice to offer. The advertisements pulled in a fantastic $1,372.20 of revenue in a single day's time frame from 11.8% of users who actually clicked on the ad. In fact, Jason noticed our coverage and decided to give our readers, via the comments section of our announcement article, the heads up on his offerings. He offered links to both versions, a link to his blog post, and a brief comment on his decision to offer two versions.

I’ve released both a 0.99 version and a free iAd supported version. I really wanted to check out iAd and see if the returns it offers developers is really worth it.

The free app received 26,651 requests, or total views, and 9,300 impressions, or unique users, giving a 34.9% repeat use. The 9,300 impressions with a revenue of $1,372, brings the estimated cost per 1,000 impressions to be about $147.55. Well Jason, it looks like you got your answer.

"I was quite surprised at the first day numbers from yesterday," Ting tells [Business Insider] via email. "I hope it keeps up!"

While this does look promising, it isn't extremely likely this trend will stick. While a great app, it's newly released and available in a subcategory that has few free choices yet. As iPhone 4 LED flashlight apps begin to appear more and more, and with more free versions, this higher return is likely to settle to previous typical levels. Maybe these results will influence some developers to offer free iAd versions of their apps with at least some success?  Or maybe iAd is just intriguing enough to consumers right now and the hype will fade? [via Business Insider]

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