Okay, this week I have some good news to all of y’all. Flippa has re-enabled the public comments section on the auctions for apps.
And what do y9ou know, I have nothing to report which would be an absolute scam for Android apps.
As a matter of fact, this week seems to have some viable high-ticket items, like
This set of online games has a monthly income of $1500,- however the minimum starting price is set at $35k,- and you can buy the lot for a staggering $100k,-
While I will not go into analysing the viability to earn your money back with these numbers, there is a definite potential to grow the monthly revenue. My rough guideline though is to never spend more than 15 – 20 times monthly income on an app or a set of apps.
The main reason is that if everything remains static wrt the income, there are so many things which may change over a two year period to recoup the investment, that you run the risk of losing a large chunk of your income simply through policy changes of Google, Facebook, or Apple to none of your fault.
Also the competition is high within these types of income producing apps such that you will have to fend them off through either ad-spending or some other social media marketing scheme, which will quickly eat into your profit margin.
Finally, $35k is a lot of money for most people and losing this much on a would certainly make for a dim looking few months.
This weeks scam of the week is for a game. Granted I am not as familiar in the gaming section as in other categories but I see a stinking bad deal when I see one.
One of the really frustrating things is that I can’t comment on the listing to earn people to not lose their shirt on this garbage. That’s why I use this blog.
What’s more is that flippa again increases the visibility by giving this listing and “Editors Choice” stamp of approval. Really … Well let’s see
Friends
Miss unlike the name, this seller is certainly no one’s friends. Let’s direct the offer shall we.
1000 downloads with $100,- spent on AdWords to get downloads. The income from this game is supposedly $788,- per month if you believe it.
Since there is no proof of income we have to take the seller at his wired and believe these are actually real numbers. It would be great if it would be that easy to earn money. But then why in the world would the seller sell this income producing app with a reserve of $1,- ?
The answer is quite simple
The game is crap. Why else would you only put 3 screenshots up and repeat the same screenshots multiple times
To gain 1000+ installs cost $101,– to acquire. That also points to the fact that there is no traction … Because #1
The revenue is fake, unless it is provided in monopoly dollars in which case it may be closer to reality.
Unfortunately the game is currently standing at $355,- with 47 bids and there are 5 days left. That means that there are a few people actually falling for this scam.
To be worth $355,- the game would have to generate around $15,- per month which it will never get unless you spend 100s of dollars in advertising each week.
Again flippa is a great site to find passive income generating apps. However you have to be careful to not dual for the obvious scam and have to spend your investments wisely.
Update June 26 2019 : Someone actually paid $1500,- for it as a Buy It Now – option.
An amazing 500+ installs on the Android Play store with a monthly net profit of $448,-. Again lets dive into these numbers.
Assuming he now has 999 installs ( just below the 1000 installation mark ), minus the 199 uninstalls from the screengrab above, that leaves a total install of 800. For these users he has received a total of around $1748,- in 3 months with ads spent of $400,- which brings the ‘proven‘ income to $1348,-
The following video was uploaded April 24’th where he shows the $874 income through AdMob. Somehow the rest of April the income must have been less than 99 cents otherwise he would have set the income for end of April accordingly.
Looking at the listing in the google play store itself it has 3 screenshots, and only the following text
It is an interesting game. The style gives people a feeling of being small and fresh. The gameplay is also very tone. Control the ball as much as possible. The spiral maze makes you unable to stop, the ball When there is no power or when it touch the lines, it will be judged as a game failure. Try it now!
A lonely single rating from “Sharad Lamba” which is also the name on the listing on Flippa. I.e. there are no ratings for this game at all.
Dissect the lie
Okay where to start. Lets look at the marketing. Spending $400,- and getting 800 installs with “Organic downloads and Forum Posting and small marketing investment on Google Adwords.” assumes a acquisition cost of $0.5,- per installation with a LTV per user of $174.80-.
So how does the app generate revenue ? As always AdMob. So lets try to figure out what those number would look like. Of course these are rough estimates but if I compare this to my numbers that would mean around 3Million page views for the month of May and approx 15000 clicks. So assuming each user is playing this game every single day that would come out to around 125 page views a day or about 1 page view every minute for 2 hours straight. Also each users has to click on an advertising about every other day.
Of course these numbers again assume each user opens the app every day, which is unlikely.
Where are we more likely with this app
I think if the game would be addictive and people would play it with around 800 users the app could possibly earn around $10,- per month ( best case IMHO ). Now if “Sharad Lamba” told the truth about the advertising cost for the game to get the user base then this game is currently losing between $90,- and $140,- per month. In other words you will need to invest between $4000,- and $6000,- in marketing to get the game to a break-even point.
By that time you will get your invested money back in about 40 months, assuming that people actually like it enough to stick around and the 80% retention rate is real ( trust me, it is not ).
At the best this is a high risk/low return investment, at worst it’s a scam where you will lose almost all of your money.
According to the listing it generated around $650 profit per month with AdMob alone. Now why is this an obvious scam ? It’s because the app has a total installation count of 1000-5000.
To earn that much money with a single app you will need aground 3 million impressions and around 15000 clicks.
Let’s look at the math here. Let’s say they have an installation count of 3000, and an uninstall count of about 2000, that leaves them with around 1000 active users ( although this number is likely too high )
With this amount of users you would have to serve around 3000 ads to each users device per month. This pans out to about 100 ads a day per user if the user would open the app every day.
The current price is around $715,- and the buy-it-now price is $1500,-. So why would you sell an app for the amount of money you can create within a short 3 months if you hold on to it ?
Even at is current price of $715,- the app is well overpriced for a 2 month old app with 1000+ downloads and no proof of income aside from the manually entered text. I would not pay more than $50,- and would likely need two full years to get a return on my investment.
Yes, I think this app may be earning around $2,- per month with AdMob. But then it may be less.
Now if I could, I would ask in the comments for some proof, and ask how many ads per month and user he serves, however flippa had gone fully to the dark side in order to increases sales.
Please be careful when you go and deal on flippa. While there are a few good opportunities per month to be found, the overwhelming majority of Android apps on flippa are either low grade or outright scams.
