We get a lot of phone calls from digital marketers, at least once a week or so, asking us whether we want to add advertising to our free applications. Our answer is usually “No”. We often get an incredulous response, questioning “Why? Don’t you want to make money from your apps”?

Of course, we do want to make money – after all, we are an app development studio. But there are few reasons why we choose not to carry ads. Over to Mohan, one of BuUuk’s co-founders, to explain more.

1. We want to focus on giving our users the very best visual experience. Our goal is to showcase our capabilities and the features of the app. Unfortunately, some advertising systems, especially those which take over an entire page, can disjoint the user’s experience quite badly.When done well, advertising can bring value to users, but we find that most ad systems are not very discriminating. Ideally, the app needs to make sure that it gives the right user profile to the ad system and, in return, the most appropriate ad is shown. However, this is often not the case, as ad systems have to fulfil daily quotas, and therefore don’t discriminate between users as much as they should.
2. Ads can affect the speed of an app. Apps are optimised to work correctly in low bandwidth situations, but ads are pulled in real time from a different network. This can increase the waiting time for the user, particularly so if the ad is full page. Ideally, ad systems need to be hyper-local and hyper sensitive to load times.In-app cacheing of ads, plus offline viewing and management of ads, are very important to developers who are interested in making sure that their apps give the best user experience possible. Ad networks should also use content delivery networks (CDNs) to distribute their ads. This would help decrease long load times and improve overall performance.
3. Not every app needs ads. Most of the time, our apps are free to use, and no advertising is run because we see them as a way of letting people try out our work for no charge. We see it as great marketing, but we’re also happy that everyone benefits from it too.