I’m currently designing an Android application, which will be published in Play for free. I’m considering including ads, but I’m not sure of whether I should. Is it really worth it to do it? Is the revenue really that high? I don’t intend to live off of this, since I already have a full-time job, so I’d like to know how much, approximately, could I expect to earn through ads, in order to decide if I should use them or not.
BTW, I know some people actually HAVE made a lot of money through ads. I’m not interested in special cases, or in apps with thousands upon thousands of downloads, just how much could one expect to earn with a normal app. If someone could post an answer like “Using this library, you can expect a revenue of $X per hour of use of your app”, it would be perfect.
In my experience a normal application doesn’t make much with ads, only high profile applications or high volume applications will make money with them. I would recommend the Freemium pattern, it brings in the most money.