At this stage, developers of smartphone applications have basically two ways to generate revenue with its Apps: They either bind within their apps display or text advertisements and hope to generate advertising revenues or make the user pay for the application.

Due to the rapid increase of available apps, which in many cases have the same functions, may in the future force developers to create apps that have more or better features to stand out from the competition. Otherwise most users will simply use content that is free.

Apps are also struggling in the display area suffering from declining clickthrough rates.Thus Apps only with a particularly high range will be able to make use of this refinancing model.

With this situation in mind, it is worthwhile to turn our gaze to Mobile affiliate marketing. The crucial question here is: Can Mobile Affiliate Marketing be a relevant way to increase the income generated by app’s?

In the “classical” Internet, affiliate marketing has now established itself as an integral part of online marketing and has developed into a successful and growing sales channel. The compensation for display advertising is usually based on pay-per-click (PPC, a click on the link in a display) or CPM (cost per thousand contact price, also known as CPM), whereas the affiliate marketing Payment system is normally by CPO (cost-per-order) or CPA (cost-per-Action). In this specific case, the advertiser pays a fee to the App developer, if he by advertising creates a new customer (eg through product sales) or potential customer (for example, by ordering a catalog).

Due to advertisers only paying for successful sales, commisions can differ in quantity depening on the product sold, some possibly reaching rather large amounts (eg 100 € for a mediated service plan). Also if a developers app can be linked to a specific target audience and display advertisements for this group, it can also generate a much higher revenue.

Currently the number of advertisers that cover their affiliate program to include the mobile sector is still very manageable. However, we can already see that the number of programs is increasing and this trend will intensify in the future definitely.

Is everything just advertising?

Mobile Affiliate Marketing creates opportunities for developers which can be used to fund their apps, causing them not to exaust themselves through continously placing image or text ads within an app. Also through Store APIs advertisers can use the app developors access to product information to increase the attractiveness of the app.

For example, available products are included that fit the theme of the app (for example, an app with food ingredients recipes). Also vouchers from the advertiser can be used in this way through positioning even for offline businesses. By combining data from different stores that form in the App complete price comparisons (at any time through can be controlled in the smartphone built-in bar code scanning) may or coupon portals – there are online and offline almost no limits.

Overall, we can already say that App developers should seriously deal with the possibilities offered by the Mobile affiliate marketing them.