Flippa scam of the week #2
Todays scam of the week features The Levitation: Spiral Maze
An amazing 500+ installs on the Android Play store with a monthly net profit of $448,-. Again lets dive into these numbers.
Assuming he now has 999 installs ( just below the 1000 installation mark ), minus the 199 uninstalls from the screengrab above, that leaves a total install of 800. For these users he has received a total of around $1748,- in 3 months with ads spent of $400,- which brings the 'proven' income to $1348,-
The following video was uploaded April 24'th where he shows the $874 income through AdMob. Somehow the rest of April the income must have been less than 99 cents otherwise he would have set the income for end of April accordingly.
Looking at the listing in the google play store itself it has 3 screenshots, and only the following text
It is an interesting game. The style gives people a feeling of being small and fresh. The gameplay is also very tone. Control the ball as much as possible. The spiral maze makes you unable to stop, the ball When there is no power or when it touch the lines, it will be judged as a game failure. Try it now!A lonely single rating from "Sharad Lamba" which is also the name on the listing on Flippa. I.e. there are no ratings for this game at all.
Dissect the lie
Okay where to start. Lets look at the marketing. Spending $400,- and getting 800 installs with "Organic downloads and Forum Posting and small marketing investment on Google Adwords." assumes a acquisition cost of $0.5,- per installation with a LTV per user of $174.80-.
So how does the app generate revenue ? As always AdMob. So lets try to figure out what those number would look like. Of course these are rough estimates but if I compare this to my numbers that would mean around 3Million page views for the month of May and approx 15000 clicks. So assuming each user is playing this game every single day that would come out to around 125 page views a day or about 1 page view every minute for 2 hours straight. Also each users has to click on an advertising about every other day.
Of course these numbers again assume each user opens the app every day, which is unlikely.
Where are we more likely with this app
I think if the game would be addictive and people would play it with around 800 users the app could possibly earn around $10,- per month ( best case IMHO ). Now if "Sharad Lamba" told the truth about the advertising cost for the game to get the user base then this game is currently losing between $90,- and $140,- per month. In other words you will need to invest between $4000,- and $6000,- in marketing to get the game to a break-even point.
By that time you will get your invested money back in about 40 months, assuming that people actually like it enough to stick around and the 80% retention rate is real ( trust me, it is not ).
At the best this is a high risk/low return investment, at worst it's a scam where you will lose almost all of your money.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://www.softwaresamurai.org/2019/06/16/flippa-scam-of-the-week-2/