Andrew Garrison

I’ve used MochiAds before, as a developer, to monetize a few simple Flash games I made, but this week I stepped over to the other side of the fence and I uploaded an ad for my new iPhone application, Touch Island. Creating an ad was super easy, requiring only a single 300×250 image. This is the ad I uploaded:

I put a bid of $0.10 for cost-per-click and a max budget of $100. One day later, the budget has (nearly) run out and the statistics are in

105,925 impressions, and 994 clicks. While creating the ad, I hooked it up to use an affiliate link from LinkShare to link to the app so that I can track any conversions from this ad (and also a 5% commission from the sale!). So, how many sales did I get from the MochiAd? Four. Four sales. Absolutely dismal. After Apple takes their cut, and after adding back in a 5% commission from LinkShare, this is a -97% return-on-investment. I’m beginning to learn that advertising on a small scale like this does not work. It seems that you must either go all out, or not at all. Has anyone else out there had any luck with advertising an iPhone app?

Touch Island has been released and is now available for purchase on the iTunes App Store. The introductory price is $0.99, but the price will be increased to $2.99 on November 1st.

Touch Island was submitted to the iTunes App Store last night. The initial price will be $0.99. I’m hoping for a speedy approval with no rejections! That might be a lofty expectation, but I’ve only had one rejection thus far from Apple, and that was BridgeBasher Lite.

I built this island in about 3 minutes using an arsenal of finger swipes.

Here’s a summary of Touch Island:

Description
Unleash your creativity with Touch Island as you build an island with your fingertips. An exquisitely easy to use interface lets you sculpt a beautiful island in seconds. When you are done, you can photograph it and share it with your friends so they can rate and comment on it.

Features

• Sculpt mountains, valleys, and lakes with your fingertips.
• Paint your island with a wide range of colors.
• Auto color your island. Want a beach that is smoothly blended into grass, then mountains with snowy white caps? No problem, Auto Color can do that with one tap.
• Take a picture of your island with a high quality ray tracer that renders your island surrounded by realistic water with reflections. Control the direction of sunlight and how it hits your island to get the optimal lighting on your island as you photograph it.
• Upload your island so other people can view it, rate it, and comment on it. You can check on your uploaded islands at any time and see how they are doing and how many visitors have marveled at your work.