Build an app, put ads on it, and money quietly trickles in. Before I started, that was more or less the picture in my head. Today I sat down with my AI partner Kuro (Claude) and looked into what actually happens. I will give you the conclusion first: it is not a dream at all. And I am glad I know.
I asked what the going rate is
Ads inside an app turn into money a little at a time — when they get shown, and when they get tapped. But how much, really? I asked Kuro for the going rate, and the answer came back honest.
I’ll answer with real numbers instead of letting you dream too much. Ads bring in somewhere between a few tens of yen and a bit over 100 yen per 1,000 impressions. Banner ads sit at the lower end of that.
A thousand impressions, and around 100 yen. Yen is Japan’s currency, and at that scale we are talking about small change. My honest first reaction was, “wait, that is less than I thought.”
And that figure assumes the thousand impressions happen at all. For an app to show ads a thousand times, a lot of people have to open it, and open it again, and keep coming back.
Running the numbers by download count
To make it concrete, I asked Kuro to work out a rough monthly figure for different download counts. The starting assumption was sobering on its own: out of everyone who downloads an app, the share who actually use it every day is, at best, ten to twenty percent.
On that basis, here is how it came out.
- 1,000 downloads — a few hundred yen a month in ad revenue. Frankly, that does not even amount to pocket money.
- 10,000 downloads — a few thousand yen a month. For a personal app, that counts as doing reasonably well.
- 100,000 downloads — only here do a few tens of thousands of yen a month come into view.
I had to read that list twice. The download count I had vaguely imagined as a decent result sits at the very bottom of that scale.
The hardest part is the downloads themselves
Then came the part that really landed. For an app made by an individual in Japan, simply reaching 10,000 downloads is apparently very difficult. There are more apps in the world than anyone can count, and the vast majority are buried, almost never downloaded at all.
When an individual releases an app in the ordinary way, it often stops at a few hundred to a few thousand downloads. So if you want ad revenue alone to be enough to live on, you need tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of downloads. That’s the single harshest thing about app revenue.
So the bottleneck is not the ad rate. The bottleneck is getting the app into enough hands for the ad rate to matter. That is a very different problem from the one I thought I was solving.
So what do you do about it?
This is not where I sat down and gave up. Because I now knew the reality, Kuro and I could go straight to the next question: what do you do instead?
The key point was not relying on ads alone. Ads only ever earn thin and wide. But combine them with another source of income and the story changes.
One option is a way to introduce products related to the app — an affiliate arrangement, where a single conversion is worth several hundred to several thousand yen. That is dozens of times more efficient than ad impressions. Another is a subscription that offers more convenient features for a monthly fee. Even with a small number of users, if some of them keep using it, that becomes steady income.
Ads earn thin and wide; affiliate and subscriptions earn thick. That two-layer setup is the realistic answer for a personal app.
The strength of knowing the unglamorous version
“Make one app, strike it big, get rich.” That particular dream deflated a good deal today. But I do not consider this a disappointing story. I am glad I found out.
If you charge ahead without knowing the reality, sooner or later you hit the “this was not how it was supposed to go” moment and run out of breath. If you know from the start that ads alone will be tough, and therefore that you should combine other ways of earning, you can build a plan that does not strain you.
What I like about working with AI is exactly this: it will tell you the unglamorous numbers without dressing them up. It does not only cheer you on — it also shows you the cold parts. And then, on top of that reality, it works out the plan with you.
If you are about to make something and hope to earn from it, this is the use I would recommend most: find out the reality first.
Thank you for reading. If you want more of this kind of check before you build, I also wrote about asking AI whether the app will make money at all, and about why the easy-looking app ideas are the risky ones.
