<story><title>Ask HN: My free app has gone slighty viral – looking for ideas to monetize it</title><text>A bit of background, I built the app because I was running an old Nexus One and the Facebook app was too large to install alongside my other &amp;quot;essential&amp;quot; apps (15mb at the time, its now 38mb!). So I spend about an hour or so and cobbled together the app.&lt;p&gt;For almost a year and a half it had less than 1000 installs and then in Feb this year it started to rapidly gain installs. It is currently sitting at 241,000 installs (with 55,000 active users).&lt;p&gt;I figure I should take advantage of this and figure out some way to monetize the app.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately the app is all about size and trust (as it sandboxes the FB web app) so most of the ideas I&amp;#x27;ve come up with don&amp;#x27;t seem to be in the spirit of the app.&lt;p&gt;Some of the ideas I&amp;#x27;ve had:&lt;p&gt;* Put in ads and add an in-app purchase to turn them off 
* Put in a &amp;quot;donation&amp;quot; in-app purchase
* Add support for other social networks but only enable them after an in-app purchase&lt;p&gt;The app also has some pretty interesting demographics. Most users are from non-English speaking countries: Turkey 18.14%, Philippines 8.38%, Mexico 7.46%, Morocco 6.52%, India 5.27%, Indonesia 4.10%, Brazil 4.04%, Thailand 2.72%, United States 2.59%, Colombia 2.44%, Others 38.33%&lt;p&gt;The app is called &amp;quot;Social Lite&amp;quot; see here for more info https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;play.google.com&amp;#x2F;store&amp;#x2F;apps&amp;#x2F;details?id=com.rabidgremlin.sociallite&lt;p&gt;My current go-forward plan is put a survey in place and poll the users on what they want and what they would pay for</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>aaronbrethorst</author><text>Unlikely to succeed. Your users won&amp;#x27;t want to be monetized and they&amp;#x27;re from countries that are relatively unmonetizable. You don&amp;#x27;t say what you do for a living, but—personally—I&amp;#x27;d slap this on my resume as a &amp;#x27;look at the awesome user base my apps have had&amp;#x27; sort of event, and move on. Great way to gain better leverage for the next job move or raise request, but not likely to be more than that at present.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>egwor</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think anyone would object if you added a &amp;#x27;Please donate&amp;#x27; plash screen or had a page that advertised your other apps (get them to click anywhere on the screen but the donate button to continue to app. Delaying loading the app for x seconds is annoying). Users can ignore it easily if they can&amp;#x27;t&amp;#x2F;won&amp;#x27;t without impacting your user base.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: My free app has gone slighty viral – looking for ideas to monetize it</title><text>A bit of background, I built the app because I was running an old Nexus One and the Facebook app was too large to install alongside my other &amp;quot;essential&amp;quot; apps (15mb at the time, its now 38mb!). So I spend about an hour or so and cobbled together the app.&lt;p&gt;For almost a year and a half it had less than 1000 installs and then in Feb this year it started to rapidly gain installs. It is currently sitting at 241,000 installs (with 55,000 active users).&lt;p&gt;I figure I should take advantage of this and figure out some way to monetize the app.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately the app is all about size and trust (as it sandboxes the FB web app) so most of the ideas I&amp;#x27;ve come up with don&amp;#x27;t seem to be in the spirit of the app.&lt;p&gt;Some of the ideas I&amp;#x27;ve had:&lt;p&gt;* Put in ads and add an in-app purchase to turn them off 
* Put in a &amp;quot;donation&amp;quot; in-app purchase
* Add support for other social networks but only enable them after an in-app purchase&lt;p&gt;The app also has some pretty interesting demographics. Most users are from non-English speaking countries: Turkey 18.14%, Philippines 8.38%, Mexico 7.46%, Morocco 6.52%, India 5.27%, Indonesia 4.10%, Brazil 4.04%, Thailand 2.72%, United States 2.59%, Colombia 2.44%, Others 38.33%&lt;p&gt;The app is called &amp;quot;Social Lite&amp;quot; see here for more info https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;play.google.com&amp;#x2F;store&amp;#x2F;apps&amp;#x2F;details?id=com.rabidgremlin.sociallite&lt;p&gt;My current go-forward plan is put a survey in place and poll the users on what they want and what they would pay for</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>aaronbrethorst</author><text>Unlikely to succeed. Your users won&amp;#x27;t want to be monetized and they&amp;#x27;re from countries that are relatively unmonetizable. You don&amp;#x27;t say what you do for a living, but—personally—I&amp;#x27;d slap this on my resume as a &amp;#x27;look at the awesome user base my apps have had&amp;#x27; sort of event, and move on. Great way to gain better leverage for the next job move or raise request, but not likely to be more than that at present.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>downandout</author><text>I strongly disagree. Since he has access to the DOM of the FB mobile website (he can definitely load custom JavaScript into any page, which is all he needs), there is a ton of stuff he can do to monetize. For one, he can inject ads into FB timelines, which wouldn&amp;#x27;t piss off his users..Facebook itself does this and people are fine with it. He could pre-roll video ads on any videos that are played. These are just two of several possibilities.  He can have monetization on every single page viewed through his app, integrated directly into the FB interface.&lt;p&gt;The trick would be getting access to offers targeted at these countries, but a major mobile ad network like MobPartner could easily give him some.</text></comment>