We’re excited for today’s release of iOS 4.0! As part of our focus on providing developers the best monetization platform, we have a beta iOS 4.0 SDK complete with iAd support available. One important note is that some of the ad network SDKs are yet to be compatible with iOS 4.0, but we’ll add in new ad network libraries as soon as they become available. If you’d like to participate in the iOS 4.0 SDK beta please email us at support@burstly.com. Expect our wide-release to be available in the next few days.

One of our team members, Alex Miyamura, who also happens to run his own app company called Simpaddico, had the fortune of finding his app catapult to the #1 slot on the iPhone App Store for 8 days (Monday 5/31 until Monday 6/7). The app has been out for over 6 months and zero marketing dollars have been spent to promote it. Needless to say, we were all pretty surprised when it rocketed to the top spot for no apparent reason (could be graduation parties, preparing for World Cup, etc). He hit what we are referring to as the “App Lotto” since he’s made at least $20,000 in 8 days.

With his permission, we are providing some metrics that are hopefully helpful to other developers.

Air Horn is the name of the free app and was developed in less than 3 hours. Alex knows the app is gimmicky and is not going to stand the test of time. This is a good example of a random app catapulting through the app rankings for no particular reason and actually making the developer some money. Here’s what we learned:

- It took 188,310 daily downloads to reach #1 on Monday, 5/31.
- As of Monday, 6/7, it was still #1 with 129,286 daily downloads.
- Daily ad impressions on Air Horn increased from 160,000/day to more than 2,000,000/day at peak.
- As of 6/7, Air Horn served a total of 4 million 3rd party ad network impressions since 5/31.
- Over that same time, 4 million cross promotion impressions were served to promote Annoying Sounds.
- Annoying Sounds shot all the way to the #5 overall app.
- Before the cross-promotion, Annoying Sounds wasn’t even a top 1000 app.
- Daily ad impressions on Annoying Sounds jumped from 35,000/day to more than 1,000,000/day at peak.

As impressions increased, so did the eCPM

The average initial eCPM on Air Horn was $2.06 and increased to an average of $2.62 over 8 days. As his impressions scaled, certain ad networks started performing better and Bursty was able to optimize accordingly by prioritizing the best performing ad networks to serve the majority of the ad impressions.

Takeaways

This was a unique situation and totally unexpected. That said, maybe you do have a substantive app that you expect good results out of vs. winning the App Lotto. Either way, making sure you are using tools to both maximize revenue and effectively cross-promote your other apps is the most important point.
Ad optimization works and the eCPM increased 27% over 8 days.
App Cross Promotion works and can help extend your revenue opportunity.

We are excited to announce that SoftBank Capital and Founder Collective have joined our Series A. The Burstly team has done a tremendous amount with limited resources and it’s great to have top notch firms join our vision. We are impressed with the teams at both firms and look forward to their involvement. SoftBank Capital and Founder Collective join our initial Series A investors, Rincon Venture Partners and GRP Partners.

Read the initial TechCrunch post here.

If you’re one of the lucky developers going to WWDC, we’d love to have a drink with you and talk about your iPhone and iPad dev experiences. Just send us a quick e-mail or hit us up on Twitter. We’ll be around all week and we’re looking forward to meeting you and seeing your great apps!