Classic Apps
TOOL: Corona SDK
ROLE: Programmer
INTRODUCTION:
Classic Apps is an Android app which stems from an experiment on novel mobile advertisement methods. It has gone through several iterations, and finally landed itself as an app that recommends other apps.
DESCRIPTION:
Free mobile apps make money mainly through in-app purchase or mobile ads. The conversion rate of traditional banner ads, however, is generally low due to the irrelevance between the pushed contents and the contents the apps itself provide. In order to encourage people to click the ad, we planned on providing content-driven ads.
First proposal: Quiz App
A quiz app is an app that asks people strange and interesting, sometimes informative, questions. Our plan was to show the ads in the answer section, where people might click to see why it was the answer. We foumulated new customized questions and dropped them into the question pool whenever a company wanted to advertise their product. The questions were later sold to Pubgame, a game company in Taiwan. This proposal did not make to the end because of the time-consuming process of creating the questions.
Second proposal: Shopaholic
Our second proposal still fell into the category of quiz apps. This time, however, the contents were dragged directly from app stores. The idea was to create a game that tested the player's knowledge of app icons. The collected icons could be viewed in a catalog page, and we peovided links back to the app store. Insterested app companies agreed to provide contents for our apps as well. This app resembled those popular logo quiz apps in some way.
Final product: Classic Apps
Our final produce was an app that recommended other apps. The main idea remained the same - to give higher visibility to apps whose companies wish to promote. It ultimately led us to be contacted by a game company in China to promote their app.
This project was fun and rewarding. It was my first time to have people on my team talking about business models and launching promotion campaigns. It was also the first time we actually contacted and met several companies that might be keen on advertising. Cooperating with people from different backgrounds was both challenging and stimulating for me. I very much enjoyed that atmosphere and am looking forward to such experience in the near future.
