I was interested in finding out how widespread is advertising model adoption in free apps on Windows Phone. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any answers to this question so I decided to conduct a small experiment on my own.

The Method

This is very non-scientific experiment or maybe just not a very scientific one. I’ve just downloaded 100 of the newest free Windows Phone apps and launched them to see any signs of ads. The only “filtering” I did is skipping multiple apps by the same author. I just took one of each. And I didn’t count ads on web pages if app rendered some or all of it’s content in WebBrowser control.

The Results

As you can see 31 out of 100 had ads in them. The rest were ads-free.

It’s interesting to note that if I only took games the results were slightly different.

Which kind of supports a widely adopted belief that ads work best for the long running apps such as games.

Few More Notes

Obviously a hundred apps isn’t probably a good enough statistical set, but it’s better than nothing at all and going for a thousand was outside of my reach, given the time I wanted to dedicate to this research.

Another thing is that a handful of apps were made using either appmakr or followmyfeed. Unfortunately I noticed this trend when I was already too far into the experiment and didn’t adjust to this (not sure if I had too). Apps of both of these types didn’t include ads.

I was really pleased that quite a few of the tested apps used AdDuplex. Thanks!