How Valentine's Day and in-app purchases are making $266 daily for Snappy Touch

In January 2010, Noel Llopis of Snappy Touch wrote a detailed post about the commercial reality of his Flower Garden iPhone game.

Back then, things weren't looking too good, with the app generating an average of $78 daily.

Now however things have taken a strong upward tack, with the accumulated total up to $51,631 or $132 daily.

Actually, things are even better than that with a daily revenue rate of $266 between January and May, which is now stable at around $1,500 per week.

Several factors combined to change the situation. One was being featured as an Apple Staff Favourite, although this was only on iTunes not directly on-device.

More important however considering Flower Garden's grow and send flowers gameplay was Valentine's Day; something Llopis supported with an update, new in-app purchases, a price cut from $2.99 to 99c, and a mailout to 25,000 subscribers.

The result was a big spike in generated revenue.

"Two days in around Valentine's Day had higher profit than the initial release spike back in April of last year," Llopis points out.

But spikes aside, what's really changed the financial situation has been the introduction of solid in-app purchase system.

Players buy fertilizer to grow flowers faster, as well as new seeds and items, and for this reason, revenue isn't directly related to downloads but to active users.

"Even though the amount of downloads decreased significantly during this time [post-Feb], the user base had grown a large amount, and with it, the daily profit," Llopis explains.

This is backed up by a free cutdown version of the game, which because it's been downloaded more times, now accounts for the majority of Snappy Touch's revenue. The paid app generates more revenue per user though.

[source: Snappy Touch]