The other day I wrote a post about Joel Comm’s iFart application. Today he has disclosed his sales stats. Its the first time I have ever seen someone reveal statistics. Pretty cool:
Sales and App Store Rank for iFart Mobile (official site link)
12/12 – 75 units – #70 entertainment
12/13 – 296 units – #16 entertainment
12/14 – 841 units – #76 overall, #8 entertainment
12/15 – 1510 units – #39 overall, #5 entertainment
12/16 – 1797 units – #22 overall, #3 entertainment
12/17 – 2836 units – #15 overall, #3 entertainment
Pretty awesome how a application has a snowball effect.
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There is a lot of buzz about some independent developers and newbies who have made between $100,000 to $500,000 by simply creating their first iPhone application and putting it up for sale on the online Apple Store.
Steve Demeter made a simple puzzle game called Trism, and in 2 months he earned $250,000. Last December the app called iFart became the number one app on the App Store. It stayed on the top and raked in $9200 each day in profit after Apple’s cut. Then, Ethan Nicholas, developer of the now famous iShoot game, earns $21,000 per day selling his iPhone app. Ethan quit his day job to work full time on the iPhone and he did not even know how to write Objective-C code before he made iShoot.
These are just some of the stories that are causing a lot of buzz, and people have quit their day jobs to cash in on the opportunity.
However, developing for the iPhone is relatively a new field with a shortage of well structured tutorials and one-on-one mentorship and help. EDUmobile.ORG has been involved with online training in the wireless technology programming field and has launched its iPhone Online Course to meet the shortage of information resources and training.
The course is offered on a once a week basis via Online Video, PDF Documents, One-on-One sessions and Weekly Worksheets. There is also an option to access a remote Mac, for those who do not have access to one.
The iPhone course offered at EDUmobile.ORG is crafted to suite the industry need for beginner and intermediate level developers. After the course completion, developers will be able to create software for iPhone and can optionally distribute their content through EDUmobile.ORG on the online App Store, and immediately start earning. One can also bid to win the large number of growing projects being posted daily on project bidding sites like Elance and RentACoder.
The classes are taught as a combination of various online modules and you get the ability to work on live industry projects, along with an opportunity to be placed in top mobile gaming and mobile application development software companies. A certificate is also offered to all candidates once they complete the course.The Course duration for is between 4 to 12 weeks depending upon the developers past experience in programming.
For those who do not own a Mac, there is a facility offered to remotely login to access a Mac to carry out your programming from a normal PC connected to the Internet. Thus, one does not need to purchase or own a Mac.
The cost for the entire course is $200, and you can optionally avail of a facility to pay in 3 easy installments. Available slots are fast filling up.
WOW Shoe word of mouth is best type of Marketing in the earh.
I guess so I have to buy Iphone.
This would be a very funny prank to leave your phone by someone in a crowded place and call it, best place would be a glass elevator so you can see the reactions.
jeez
Damn, he’s making bank off this. Good for him.
iFart Mobile just hit #1 on the App Store!
We’re at #6 today. Pretty exciting to see it rising up the charts
That is a lot of sales in no time. If you are a programmer you need to be making things for the i-phone.
Shoe can help anyone he wants and can make his business sky rocket…
Wow, there is a lot to learn even only from this statistics. Great job and kudos to joel.
Nice figures.
Lol the number just keeps growing..
Yeah and it is just a little application. Lets make a bubble popping application and see how it sales.
They already have one.. BubbleWrap
Wow the application it self was funny, But to make money from it is insane
Anyone figure out the %cut that the programmer gets out of this?? I’d be curious to know!!
Nope Im wondering same so I can start developing too hahahaha
We make 70% of the price and Apple keeps 30%. We’re now #10!
Hopefully it is something like 50/50 or 70/30(apples get the 30).
Apple gets 30% and absorbs credit card fees and manages the backend.
Programmer gets 70% and manages design and maintenance of application.
i read that apple are set to begin approving more in the way of funny apps such as this one
its not apple who designed these apps. its the freelancers
Yes, the statistics look very good.
Yea it indeed good stats..
This just shows how much stupidity there is in this world.
Provides no real value but people still pay for it. And we wonder the world is in a financial crisis.
But I would not expect more of Joel Comm, if it makes money who cares about ethics. Right?
It is just for entertainment purposes. Almost ALL talk on ANY cell phone is not important and just for fun anyways. Almost all of us could go without cell phones.
May be true for some of us, but there are different forms of entertainment, some better then others, some with value others with no value, some ethical , some unethical ( or at least that’s how they are considered by most ).
Ex. a selling concert tickets may be considered ethical, selling drugs not although both may be entertaining for the buyers.
Did I do something unethical? I didn’t realize selling an app on itunes was a breach of a moral code.
I like it, people at work liked it! Also inspired me to download the kit have been coding out some of my ideas on it already!
Selling an app is not the same thing as selling a stupid valueless app
The way you put it is like “I was just selling vegetables and you say that’s unethical”
And everybody thinks that’s ok because the price is so low.
“0.99 is throwaway money” then throw it away at a charity instead of a stupid app.
This is more of less similar to selling land on the moon, selling ebooks that provide a close to 0 value, when the info in them is already available for free all over the net, getting people to subscribe to a newsletter just to bombard them with affiliate links after that, or even “better” having them pay for such a subscription, etc …
Mihai, so you’re saying there’s no value in making people laugh?
We are getting tremendous feedback from users about how much fun
they are having using iFart. Playing with their kids and pranking
friends. It’s the 3rd most popular app in the world right now for a
reason.. it makes people laugh.
And in regard to ebooks, to some people time is money. Sure they
can spend hours gathering the data for themselves for free, and hours
more disseminating good info from bad. But many would rather
pay a small fee to have someone do that for them.
I’ve always laughed at the argument that the info is available
for free online so why buy a book. The answer is simple, what’s
your time worth? Not much if you’re not willing to spend
$20 to save yourself a few hours of online research.
Dan, it just seems like a stupid way of making people laugh, but I guess you can’t argue with what some people like.
About ebooks:
No ebook is complete, and anyone can write an ebook for free and publish it for free, so how do you know which is good or bad. so
If someone can make some farting sounds sell well then someone can make anything sell well.
It doesn’t mean it provides value.
Don’t tell me anything that’s for sale provides value.
You end up buying dozens of such ebooks and spending the same hours gathering data and same hours disseminating good info from bad.
a pretty interesting tool…
wow joel comm did this, had no idea.
I think the iPhone app phenomenon is going to die. The problem is nobody wants to keep 3,349 different apps on their phone… it’s a major pain in the neck.
The real way to do this is have a web site that has web apps you can access from an easy to remember web site. Login and it loads the apps you want according to your preferences.
The era of Apple kookiness is drawing to a close… whoever makes a phone with flash support will be the winner…. which makes me think – maybe Adobe should come out with a phone?
many times I have a app play it for a week then delete it, you will find many people are like this. The beauty of the .99 price point is it is throw away money. Everyone thinks its only a dollar a gives it a try.
Very true… 99 cents is no biggie…. more expensive apps make you go hmmm
I hate the fact that I can’t use flash too
You’re on to something. Why don’t you make that site?
Yes, we are already profitable on this venture. But I would say that most people who make paid apps will not be profitable. We are now #12 in the app store and I am looking forward to tomorrow’s sales numbers. I’ll keep updating on my blog at http://www.joelcomm.com
Why do people make paid apps then?
Joel, awesome update http://www.joelcomm.com/updated_app_store_data_122008.html – also impressive insight as to why the double up overnight. Even if they were guesses, those are things I wouldn’t have guessed.
Ahhh, what’s our society coming to…..
Very impressive numbers, nonetheless.
Doing a quick spreadsheet, on the 17th he grossed $8479. That is an awesome daily amount by any standard. For the six days- $21,991 gross. The big question is- what is the Apple App Store cut? Even at 50% he makes $10,995 in six days and growing.
The best part, the work is done and it has its own momentum. It will spike and drop, then start getting a daily average. But even if it averages his first day rate of 75 downloads per day, that is over $81K a year gross. If there was ever a case to make your own product versus pitching someone else’s (affiliate marketing anyone?) product, this would be it.
In response to my post above, you make a solid point.
So Apple takes a cut, never knew that learned something interesting today, I wonder as well how much the cut is, but if your calculation is right wow he making a lot of money just think about the long run hmmmm
Their cut is 30%.
Thanks for the heads up!! I’ve been waiting on an answer to that question!!
The prospect is the only bright spot against a backdrop of crisis.
the cut is 70-30 and apple ll take the hit on the credit card processing fees too. thats good of them
Wow. Just wow. Thanks for breaking this down for me. Now I got the case of the “me toos” and wanting to build an iphone app.
BusinessX – I’m not sure where you’re getting your numbers. When the app first launched, it was $2.99, but only for 2-days. Then on Dec 4th, it dropped to $0.99. Apple takes 30% of the revenue, so here’s a more accurate financial breakdown:
12/12 – 75 units – $224.25 revenue, $156.98 profit, #70 entertainment
12/13 – 296 units – $885.04 revenue, $619.53 profit, #16 entertainment
12/14 – 841 units – $832.59 revenue, $582.81 profit, #76 overall, #8 entertainment
12/15 – 1510 units – $1,494.9 revenue, $1,046.43 profit, #39 overall, #5 entertainment
12/16 – 1797 units – $1,779.03 revenue, $1,245.32 profit, #22 overall, #3 entertainment
12/17 – 2836 units – $2,807.64 revenue, $1,965.35 profit. #15 overall, #3 entertainment
So Joel Comm has made $5,616.42 in 6-days of sales.
It’s very common for iPhone app devs to drop their price to $0.99. And this isn’t the first public disclosure of sales information for an iPhone app. The first was for the app Where To? on taptaptap.com/blog/. A bunch of others have since been published.
Pangea Software is pocketing $5 million, which is more than the total amount of revenue of all 20-years of Mac game development ever.
Ge Wang of the Ocarina app has pushed over 400,000 downloads and expects to post income of $1m this year.
The developer of Trism made $250,000 in the first 2-months of sales.
MintApp’s Mint Nutrition app earned $1,900 in the first 12-days of sale when it was first release. At this time it was ranked in the top 800 apps on the App Store.
So anyway, there are a number of devs releasing their numbers. And the fad lately is to drop the price of your app down to $0.99 so that it reaches the high rank popularity, which in turn increases your sales numbers considerably.
Devs are still trying to figure out how to sustain their top ranks. One way is to purchase advertising on iPhone sites, like m.macupdate.com/iphone.php to help increase the visibility and push your App Store rank higher.
-joel mueller
http://www.macupdate.com
The app only costs $0.99 (unless Joel Comm recently changed the price
Joel – awesome details man. Thanks for posting those. I already have some ideas brewing for apps. Is the dev kit common enough for users of scriptlance, guru, elance, etc to be familiar with it? Are there a lot of programming freelancers developing apps for others these days?
Thanx for the clarifications. Didn’t know two things- the 30% Apple cut and that the price dropped to $0.99 after two days. I got the $2.99 from John Chow as he highlighted the app on his PhoDotCom last week. I went with a 50%/50% cut as it seemed like a fair guess, but good to know the real numbers.
Thanks for letting us know what apple gets. Looks like I need to make
a program.
Very nice analysis buddy.
I guess 2-3 thousand downloads is still just a small app fish in a big apple sea.
Wow, thanks for an awesome breakdown explanation, Joel. Your site is getting a visit and a StumbleUpon thumbs up for this!
Less Investment, Long Term Continious Returns = Smart Idea!
Good Job Joel Comm!
Thats freaking sweet!! Hey Jeremy – congrats on getting 11th on the top 100 most influential blogs of 2008!! Saw the post on John Chows site, and figured I’d be the first to congratulate you!! (unless someone else already has lol)
This is excellent news! I join!
Nice, I want one.
you just need $.99 and of course a touch device from apple
It’s interesting, but if I’m reading it right then it tells me that the iPhone isn’t a platform I want to pursue.
That’s because there’s no way to cheaply test an idea like you can do with products that you sell via other channels. You can’t test with an affiliate product, and you can’t dry test. The only way to “test” is to develop the full product and launch it.
Compare that to a guess about his lifetime revenue for the product. (Or any product that is #15). He sold 2875 units today. How many will he sell, lifetime, before the product runs out of steam? Maybe 50,000 units? What is his share of the revenue after Apple takes their cut … $30K?
Plus there’s no possibility of upselling, and he has no list he can market additional products to.
How does this make sense from a business perspective? Aren’t their better opportunities with lower risk?
I don’t think the Ifart app cost 60,000 to make, I am sure he already made his money on it at current download rate.
Also many of the apps have ads on them that people click on so they also get recurring revenue from the sale, that apple does not get a cut of.
I’m sure he’s made money on this app. But saying that this success proves that it’s a smart investment is like pointing to somebody who wins the lottery and saying that proves lottery tickets are a smart investment.
Lottery tickets are pure luck.
Designing an app that goes viral is all skill.
Wow keeps moving up and up. Ive let several people know about the ifart, wonder if that had anything to do with the stats
Word of Mouth is best type of Marketing
lol
So till now 2836 people wants to make fart sounds out of his/her iPhone
Mega, the 2836 is just the stats for 12/17
Date – Units Sold – Overall Rank – Entertainment Category Rank
is it units sold per week or day or totally?
just 2500 units and he is a millionaire??
Units sold is a daily number, not cumulative
AHA! Thought so! Thanks for that. This means that I really want to see his stats over the next couple of weeks, as the exponential graph until saturation point is reached should be very interesting. The timeline should be quite explosive.
I am unable to understand the stats
2836 units – #15 overall, #3 entertainment
I think it’s
2836 – Number of times this app was sold
#15 overall – it is the 15th best selling app on that date
#3 Entertainment – it is the 3rd best selling app in the entertainment category
yeah I was conufsed too with what that meant but it some what makes sense now
Yea – it means hes making a TON of money – I wonder what the % cut between apple and programmer are
Very interesting statistics!
Thank you for sharing!
Impressed, though not surprised, that Joel was the mastermind. I wonder what Apple’s cut is per sale. They are doing alright by it too.
Yea I’m still waiting to hear back from someone if they have an answer as to what these figures are
What is the monetization margin on an app? Does anyone know? It’d be interesting to know his financials behind said units. I read a blog post the other day where someone sunk $65k into an app and got $60k back out. Something like that doesn’t really make sense from a business perspective.
I suppose your post had nothing to do with it…
fuck joel comm the greasy 2nd hand car sales man
Is there something I’m not aware about regarding this guy that you hate him so mucH?? lol
why do you hate him so much? you bought his book?
apps are the new gold mine
!!! in this hard time people need to laugh .. this is the best of both world lool
Definitely true – a few bucks can go a long way when it comes to continued enjoyment!!
Yeah.. come up with something fun with apple and you will be the next millionaire
You betcha! The trick is the right app at the right time, and getting it to go viral.
Wow i didnt know Joel Comm was behind this brilliant on his part .
Yep, I didn’t know it too, but I believe that he can do it, he is pretty brilliant!
wooho,,,
what does this mean “2836 units – #15 overall, #3 entertainment
is the sales 2836 or 15 ?
I think it is saying that downloads/sales = 2836, the app’s overall ranking ranking in 15 and its ranking in entertainment is 3.
That app is so awesome though – makes me wish I had an IPhone
i am surprised to see only 2500 downloads for a top app. The app store surely is flooded.
Are these total accumulative units sold, or units sold per day? Units per day will really impress me, as it clearly illustrates a serious ballooning effect. Am reaally interested to see his stats for the next couple of weeks / months.