I’ve been doing some research for another blog post that turned up to be a little too complex for me to finish today. More on that later. As part of that I’ve tried to calculate a lifetime value of a user (or download to be exact) for a developer of a free ad supported game. Luckily, thanks to Elbert Perez, we have some data to try and calculate that. Here’s one Elbert’s post with a total downloads he got, and here’s a per-app revenue breakdown post.

I apologize to Elbert, if he posted such number himself and I’ve totally missed it. It is also worth mentioning that apps in his revenue breakdown are named by their internal names (probably), so I skipped apps where there was even slightest doubt what the official name of that app is. The periods covered are probably not 1:1 match either. So, with what I was able to match I came up with a number that is equal to about 8 6 US cents per user.

Update: Elbert has tweeted his more accurate calculation – it’s more like 6 cents, not 8.

Now my other post was supposed to be about how it may seem logical, but totally wrong, to use this number as a top limit of your user acquisition strategy, but I got tangled in rudimentary math. So I’ll leave it for later 😉