Weather Up · B2C · weather app with widgets
Pull Google AdSense ads and move to a hard paywall with a 7-day trial
Ads caused bad reviews and complaints; app lost money for ~a year without them
Mixedad-monetizationpaywall
What they did
Weather Up ran Google AdSense ads, which showed slot-machine-style, gun and other offensive ads despite filtering, leading to bad reviews and support requests. The ads were pulled ahead of the 3.0 revamp. Because every app open costs money and the main value (widgets and Apple Watch complications) cannot carry ads, 3.0 moves to a hard paywall with a 7-day free trial.
What happened
Ads drew bad reviews and support complaints; after pulling them the app has lost money for about a year (many free users, few subscribers). Hard paywall outcome not yet known.
- Effort
- Ads ran for years; about a year without ads before 3.0
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · App Store Ethics, Dark Patterns, and Rule-Breakers — Steve P. Young, App Masters“because I had Google AdSense in my app, and I kept getting bad reviews, I kept getting support requests of, "Why are you showing gambling in your app?"”
“the app is losing money right now, because we pulled the ads out in anticipation of this revamp and doing the hard paywall”
Related topics
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from Weather Up
All 12 Weather Up tactics- Pre-select the yearly plan on the paywall, not the monthly oneMonthly default got ~10% more subscribers but 60% lower revenue per user in month one
- Hold new features back for one big launch to get attentionDownloads fell to ~15 a day during the 4-year wait; guest calls it a big regret
- Ship a big update that gets featured by Apple and the press~$100K in the update year with almost no ads; halved the next year without updates
- Pitch journalists with a short demo video in a Twitter DMCovered by TechCrunch, 9to5Mac, MacRumors and BGR, even by writers who rarely cover apps
- Launch a weather app at $40 a year with no launch saleClose to 2,000 subscribers, but press readers balked at $40 next to a $30 competitor
- When someone leaves a hard paywall, send a push offering 7 free daysFew took it and few of those paid; being replaced
More from this episode
- Pay for searches-then-installs on one quiet keyword until the app ranks #1#1 for both keyword spellings and stuck there; ~$5K/month mostly organic
- App Masters: Buy App Store reviews that mention your target keywordsOne or two keyword reviews moved rankings; stopped because stores punish it
- App Masters: Have friends mark your best 5-star review as helpful so it shows first
- Show the paywall's close button only after 5 secondsIncreases revenue, per the agency founder; no numbers
- Launch a simple one-feature app with a paywall that has no close buttonGrew $1K to $10K/month; 35% trial-to-paid; fell to $5K when Apple forced a close button
- Test a hard paywall against giving away one free puzzleHard paywall raised revenue; follow-up test vs more locked content, result not given
- Ask for a rating during onboarding or right after the paywall, not after 10 usesSeen to work really well across apps; no numbers
- Rootd: Show the paywall during onboarding, with a close buttonRevenue doubled
- Launch Center Pro: Ship a big release that rides the home screen customization trend~$20K that month, then lost the lead by not iterating
- Ask web users to pay $1-$8.75 toward the trial's cost, then charge the saved cardHost was charged ~$70 by accident and did a chargeback
- Earning under $1K a month? Try a hard paywall to see if people want the appTrial-to-paid under 10% suggests no fit; 10-20% means people find value
- Change one icon on a freemium app's main screen to get more paywall views+57% paywall views
- App Masters: Pick app ideas from overlooked keywords in categories where people pay
- MyFitnessPal: Show a closable paywall each time a returning user opens the appHost resubscribed at times; no numbers