New mobile app advertising service for iPhone combines pay-per-download with affiliate network

So you’re an app developer who has jumped through all the strange hoops that Apple asks you to. You’ve gone through the process and waited and now finally your app is ready for the Apple Store. And BAM! it’s gone – buried under the 10,000 other apps appearing today. Advertising and promoting and application has become as important as getting it up on the Store. Today we see the launch of an interesting new service from Germany. Apprupt is launching what it calls an “affiliate network” for promoting iPhone applications.

Affiliate network?

The keyword that apprupt is focusing on is “decentralized”. The big problem with the app store is that it’s a single store front for tens of thousands of products. The noise-to-signal ratio of the Apple store is astounding. As a developer, your application is very likely to get swamped by 20 different kinds of farting application.

So the idea behind apprupt is that the “discovery” part of application stores should be spread out between many different kinds of site. This network is maintained by apprupt, and they claim they’ve already got some of the biggest German mobile websites on board (including Financial Times Germany and Men’s Health Germany). When you place your app with apprupt, it will be targeted to the most relevant sites on the network.

Each publisher on the apprupt network has an “affiliate” app store embedded on their mobile or online site. This app store contains descriptions of the applications that are being advertised through apprupt. Clicking on the link will take a browser straight to the download page for that application on the Apple Store.

Now – this isn’t a pay-per-click deal. The developer is only charged by apprupt for each completed download. So you only pay when someone actually downloads your application – and you pay €0.35 per download (or 30% of the net revenue). However, in order to attract developers to the service, apprupt is offering 50 free downloads to anyone who signs on before the end of January.

What we think?

Making money from apps is a tricky proposition, and it seems to be that the more money you put into prioritising your app on various download sources, the better you’ll do. Apprupt has an interesting proposition – it essentially proposes putting tiny, selective app store outlets onto different websites, and targeting relevant apps to those store outlets.

In fact, it’s quite similar to the “warehouse” idea proposed by Symbian – whereby a massive central pool of applications is maintained, and anyone who wants to can open a “store” and sell whatever applications they want to from the warehouse. It just mixes that idea with a pay-per-download advertising scheme. Pretty sexy, if you ask me. I hope it does well, and I’ll be interested to see if apprupt plans to expand from Germany.