How Much Do Apps Make From Ads?

An app with 10,000 daily active users makes somewhere between $1,800 and $15,700 a month from ads, depending almost entirely on where those users live. In our benchmark estimates, a casual game with a mostly US and UK audience earns about $0.05 per user per day. The same game with a mostly Tier 3 audience earns closer to $0.006.

That gap, nearly nine to one, is the real answer to "how much do apps make from ads". There is no single figure. There is a formula, a handful of inputs that swing it, and a spread that gets wider the more you look at it.

This guide walks through the formula, then runs the numbers at 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000 daily users, then shows what changes when the country, platform or category changes. Every dollar figure comes from our modelled benchmark tables, so treat them as estimates and put your own dashboard figures in place of ours as soon as you have them.

The formula behind every estimate

Ad income from an app comes down to one chain:

monthly revenue = daily active users x impressions per user per day x eCPM / 1,000 x 30

Strip out the last two terms and you have the figure most developers actually track, ARPDAU, which is average revenue per daily active user. Multiply ARPDAU by daily users and by the days in the month and you have the monthly number. Our ARPDAU and LTV guide covers the metric in more depth, and the same arithmetic works for any app once you know your own impressions.

Notice what is missing: downloads. Installs only matter once they turn into people opening the app. A million downloads with 2% still active each day is 20,000 daily users, and 20,000 is the number that earns money.

Firebase uses the same idea in its reports. Its ads-only ARPU is estimated earnings divided by active users, and Google notes that it is called ARPDAU when aggregated by date. It also warns that the figure only counts earnings that are integrated with Google Analytics, so it can differ from your AdMob total. The details are in the Firebase and AdMob documentation.

Where eCPM comes from in our tables

eCPM is what you earn per 1,000 impressions, and it differs a lot by format. These are our Android baselines for AdMob, with a typical app and the audience split into three tiers.

Tier 1 is the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Tier 2 is Western Europe and developed Asia-Pacific such as Japan and South Korea. Tier 3 is the rest of Asia, Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe. The live table below shows every network, and the mobile eCPM benchmarks guide explains how we arrived at the ranges.

If eCPM itself is new to you, eCPM in plain English is the quick primer. Google's own definition of the metric sits in the AdMob reports glossary.

The worked example: a casual game at three sizes

Everything below is an example with stated assumptions, not a measurement of a real app. Take a casual game on Android, monetized with AdMob banners, interstitials and rewarded video. Each daily user sees, on average:

• 2 rewarded videos
• 3 interstitials
• 8 banner impressions

Using the Tier 1 eCPMs above, one user's day is worth (2 x 12.00 + 3 x 8.00 + 8 x 0.90) / 1,000, which is $0.0552. Our casual category multiplier is 0.95, so ARPDAU comes to about $0.0524.

Run the same mix through Tier 2 and Tier 3 eCPMs and you get $0.0217 and $0.0060. A blended audience of 30% Tier 1, 30% Tier 2 and 40% Tier 3 lands at about $0.0246.

Now scale it. Monthly figures are daily revenue times 30, rounded.

Read across a row and the audience matters more than anything. Read down a column and revenue simply scales with users. That second part is the comfortable bit: once you know your ARPDAU, forecasting is multiplication. The first part is the uncomfortable one, because you rarely choose your audience. You can check your own setup against the AdMob revenue calculator, or open the pre-run page for 10,000 daily users.

Where do the 2, 3 and 8 come from? They are assumptions, and they are the softest part of the model. Impressions per user depend on session length, how many levels or screens a session has, how often you cap interstitials and how many players choose a rewarded video. Two apps with identical eCPMs can differ by a factor of three here. Your AdMob report gives impressions by ad unit, and Firebase gives active users, so dividing one by the other for each format replaces our guesses with your numbers. Do that before you trust any forecast, ours included.

Our tables put a band of roughly 0.7x to 1.35x around every central figure. For the blended 10,000-user row, that is about $5,200 to $10,000 a month, which is a more honest way to read the $7,390.

From downloads to daily users

Most people start from downloads, so here is the bridge. In steady state, daily active users roughly equal daily installs multiplied by the number of days an average install stays active. That second number comes from your retention curve, and it is the one thing you cannot borrow from a benchmark table.

Take a hypothetical: 500 new installs a day, and each install is active for 6 days over its whole life. After the app has been running long enough, daily users settle near 3,000. At the blended ARPDAU of $0.0246 that is about $2,200 a month.

Per download, the same assumption gives 6 days x $0.0246, roughly $0.15 of ad revenue per install over its life. A Tier 1 audience would be about $0.31, and a Tier 3 audience about $0.04. Those are hypothetical lifetimes, and a game with strong retention can run well past 6 days. Still, the shape is useful: per-download ad income for a free app is measured in cents, not dollars. The revenue per download answer and the 10,000 downloads page show the same calculation with our standard inputs.

It also works backwards. To reach $1,000 a month you need about $33 a day. That takes roughly 640 daily users at the Tier 1 ARPDAU above, about 1,350 at the blended figure, and about 5,600 on a Tier 3 audience.

What moves the number most

Five inputs account for most of the spread between apps.

Country mix

Already visible in the table. The country page for the United States shows the multipliers we apply. If you are not sure where your users are, open the audience report in your analytics before you touch anything else, because the answer decides which of the other levers are worth your time.

Platform

We model iOS at 1.3 times Android. In the blended 10,000-user example that lifts $7,390 to about $9,600. The multiplier is an average and your real gap depends on how many players allow tracking, which App Tracking Transparency and iOS earnings explains. Apple documents the framework itself on its App Tracking Transparency page.

App category

Advertisers pay different amounts to reach different audiences. Our multipliers are hypercasual 0.8, education 0.85, utility 0.9, casual 0.95, puzzle and social 1.0, mid-core and strategy 1.35, and finance 1.6. With the same ad mix, a Tier 1 hypercasual app would earn about $0.044 per user per day, a mid-core one $0.075 and a finance app $0.088. The multiplier is only one factor: a hypercasual app and a finance app will also differ in how many ads each user sees, and that part comes from your own design. The category pages, such as casual games on AdMob, show what we model for each.

Ad load and format mix

Two interstitials a session and ten interstitials a session are different businesses. Rewarded video is the biggest single lever per impression, but it only shows when players choose it, so what matters is how much of your economy sits behind it. Rewarded or interstitial covers the trade-off. One rule is fixed: AdMob requires users to opt in before a standard rewarded ad appears and to see what the reward is, as set out in the AdMob rewarded ads policy.

Network and mediation

Differences between networks are smaller than differences between countries. In our Tier 1 rewarded data AppLovin MAX sits at $14.50 against AdMob at $12.00. The AdMob vs AppLovin comparison shows the gap across formats. Running several networks at once raises both fill and price, which is the usual argument for mediation.

Seasonal swing

Our monthly index runs from 0.78 in January to 1.36 in December, around an annual average of 1.0. Take the blended 10,000-user app, which averages $7,390 in a normal month. In December the index suggests about $10,050. In January it suggests about $5,760.

That is a 43% drop in a single month with no change in users or code. It catches a lot of developers out. Why ad revenue falls every January explains the mechanics. If you are planning cash flow, build the dip into the budget before it arrives. The live table below shows every month.

Why your real number will differ from ours

Our tables are modelled estimates, so a few things will push real results away from them.

Fill matters. Our examples count shown impressions, but fill rates run from roughly 78% to 90% across networks in our tables, and unfilled requests earn nothing.

New apps often earn less in their first weeks while buyers learn about them. Missing seller files, consent setup, floors and invalid traffic filtering all pull eCPM down, and why is my eCPM low goes through them in diagnostic order. And AdMob's own help says estimated earnings are not final until the end of the month and may differ from what you are paid, which is worth remembering whenever you compare dashboards.

Then there is the question of whether ads are the right model at all. Many apps do better with a mixed approach, and in-app purchases versus ads works through when each earns more. How to monetize an app compares every model, including subscriptions and paid downloads.

Common questions

Can a small app make a living from ads alone?

Only at a scale most apps never reach. Using the blended example above, $3,000 a month needs roughly 4,000 daily users, and that is before any tax or costs. Ads alone can cover hosting or a modest side income for a small app, but they replace a salary only for apps with a large and well-placed audience.

Do banner ads make any money?

A little. At $0.90 in Tier 1 and $0.10 in Tier 3, a banner earns a fraction of what a rewarded video does, though it appears constantly. In the casual example above, 8 banner views add about 13% of a Tier 1 user's daily revenue. They are easy to add and cheap to keep, but they will not carry the app.

Is a game more profitable than a utility app?

Not automatically. Our tables give utilities a multiplier of 0.9 and casual games 0.95, which is close. The real difference is how many ads each user sees per day and how many days they keep opening the app, and both depend on the design more than on the label.

How many downloads do I need to earn $1,000 a month?

It depends on retention and country. With a blended audience, about 1,350 daily users reaches $1,000, and with 6 active days per install that needs roughly 225 new installs every day. Cut the retention to 3 days and you need about 450.

What to do next

Start with your own ARPDAU. Take last month's estimated earnings from the AdMob report, divide by days, then divide by average daily active users from Firebase or your analytics tool. Compare that figure to the closest row in the tables above. If you are far below, check country mix first, then format mix, then fill.

If you do not have data yet, enter your expected audience in the AdMob revenue calculator and pick a category. Then open the casual games estimates page or whichever category fits, and see what a plausible range looks like before you plan around it.