my iAd-supported Gaia GPS Lite app was approved today | Hacker News Reader

my iAd-supported Gaia GPS Lite app was approved today

itunes.apple.com

We have always had this app as a demo/restricted version. It would restrict how long you could record tracks and how many map tiles you could download at a time.

With iAds, we thought maybe we could monetize better than just converting over to our paid app, since Lite users outnumber paid users 10 to 1, even with the restrictions.

It will interesting to see how it goes - we'll be monitoring conversion to the paid app and we'll have to make sure this doesn't muck up the works.

Can you talk more about the integration process, etc? Also, an update with some numbers later would be awesome.

The integration was simple... my co-founder timfbowen did all of it in a couple of days.

However, we did get rejected once because the ads wouldn't disappear when users are offline. In our app, we need to have some sort of restriction or ad offline (because it's mostly used offline), so we now show a house ad after we disappear the iAd when the user is offline.

As for numbers, we'll be excited to see and I will share. We have about 100k people who upgrade the app when we do releases now, and over 1,000 downloads per day, so we are hoping for a decent CPM and more revenue as the userbase grows.

The integration process was really easy. You just include the iAd framework and then add ADBannerView objects wherever you want them. The ADBannerViews work like pretty much any other view with the exception that they must be a certain size. There are callbacks for when the banner loads to fail and if these are called we display our house ad instead of the iAd.

I found this guide to be helpful: http://useyourloaf.com/blog/2010/7/13/adding-iads-to-an-appl...

Would you have done this with another ad system if you weren't limited to iAds?

We have always just advertised the paid version in the Lite version and had restrictions.

We probably would have tried a different ad platform at some point, but iAds are reportedly getting good CPMs, and they provided a good impetus to do it.

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