Guest post: AppRever plugin offers cross-promotion and real-world testing

18 July 2013

Guest post: AppRever plugin offers cross-promotion and real-world testing

Earl Mincer is the Co-Founder of AppRever and has been involved in software engineering for over twenty five years. Prior to founding AppRever, Earl held a role at the International Space Station Program. As the holder of three patents, Earl was on the committee that formed the MPEG standard, and helped pioneer the foundations of all Internet streaming video in use today. Over the last several years Earl has focused on the app market, bringing his experience in development, marketing, and start-up strategy to AppRever.

AppRever is the latest addition to the Corona Plugin family, and is available for Corona SDK Pro developers. For more information on integrating AppRever’s services into your Corona apps, please see AppRever’s plugin documentation.

AppRever started out as indie developers looking for something better. We didn’t feel that the existing ad networks worked for our needs and along the way, learned that before we could expect to monetize our apps through ad revenue or in-app purchases, it was critical to expand our user base. We knew that cross-promotion worked and that industry leaders agreed. From those conversations, AppRever was born – an ad network for Corona developer, written by Corona developers, that is focused on getting developers more app downloads.

We were careful to build in the features that Corona developers need, including cached ads for immediate ad availability and no real-time bidding system causing fill rate problems. We were also committed to creating a service that is easy to use, easy to sign up for, and that works well in the Corona simulator.

At AppRever, our network is growing, serving up to 1,000,000 ads per day. As our network grows with the Corona community, we will all grow our apps together. We currently serve all ads equally but we will soon roll out tiers so that apps with similar traffic are grouped together to keep it fair. Other than that, it’s pretty simple. We serve banner ads and interstitials. You serve ads for others and they serve yours.

Integration is simple, just require apprever in your main.lua, call initAppRever, and finally call either requestInterstitial or requestBannerAds. For a complete list of instructions, check out AppRever’s documentation.

AppRever is also here to help you grow. As you expand your user base, we want to help you monetize. We are currently beta testing some new monetization techniques that earn up to $80 ECPM in early tests. We are also developing relationships with promotion companies that have resulted in over 120,000 new downloads for some of our test apps in a single day.

And there’s more! We are most excited about an affordable new program to get developers real-world feedback on their apps. The Android marketplace is particularly demanding. Device fragmentation is a real issue, with bug fixes often required for specific devices. These issues don’t show up until your app gets widespread usage and a massive variety of devices. We offer very affordable packages of real-world testing, with unbiased real users all over the world that will tell you if your app works on their device, if they like the app, and if it’s useful (or fun!). In today’s marketplace, it is not enough to have family and a few friends test your app – getting your app tested by a large base of people will give you valuable insight into everything from device compatibility to gameplay.

All of our cross-promotion services are free. We will soon be offering real-time analytics such as geolocation, usage alerts, the path users take through your app and more. We have learned through our own experience, as well as research and interviews with top developers, that the little things you polish can make the difference between a somewhat successful app and a major hit. Our app testing service is already in place, so if you’re serious about improving your app and polishing it to perfection, contact us today. You’ll be surprised how affordable the service is and how large of an impact it can have on the success of your apps.

To experience AppRever, just follow the instructions in AppRever plugin documentation, sign up on AppRever.com, upload your ad, and use our plugin. There’s no obligation to use our other services, but either way, let’s get your app revving! Come join the ad network created for Corona developers by Corona developers.