How much do apps make from ads?

Far less than most people expect. Ad revenue is priced in eCPM — dollars per 1,000 impressions — with widely cited US benchmarks around $0.10–$1 for banners, $2–$10 for interstitials, and $8–$25 for rewarded video (benchmark ranges, not our data; other regions often pay 5–10× less). In practice an app with 1,000 daily active users typically grosses roughly $150–$900/month depending on format mix. Scale is everything: ads are a volume business, and most apps never reach the volume.

Fractions of a cent to a few cents per impression. Dividing typical US eCPM benchmarks by 1,000: a banner impression pays roughly $0.0001–$0.001, an interstitial $0.002–$0.01, and a completed rewarded video $0.008–$0.025 — about one to two and a half cents at the top end. These are benchmark ranges, not our measurements. Per-click and per-install payouts run higher but occur far less often, which is why per-impression math is the honest way to project ad revenue.

AdMob doesn't publish a fixed pay rate — earnings depend on your users' geography, the ad format, fill rate, and advertiser demand, and are quoted to you as eCPM. Widely cited US benchmark ranges are roughly $0.10–$1 per 1,000 banner impressions, $2–$10 for interstitials, and $8–$25 for rewarded video, with non-US traffic often 5–10× lower. AdMob pays out monthly once earnings pass the $100 threshold. Treat every number as a benchmark, not a promise: two apps with identical installs can earn very different amounts.

Games are where in-app ads work best — rewarded video, the highest-paying format at a benchmark $8–$25 US eCPM, is native to game loops. Ad-funded hypercasual games can gross meaningful revenue at huge install volumes, but per-user earnings stay small: even three rewarded views per user per day is roughly $0.02–$0.05 of daily revenue per US user (illustrative arithmetic on benchmark rates). For store-side context: in our 746,534-app dataset, Games has the best revenue odds of any category — 15.7% of games clear an estimated $1,000/month and the median earning game makes an estimated $2,250/month — though our estimates see App Store transactions, not ad-network payouts.

Some do, but the odds are harsh. In our July 7, 2026 snapshot of 744,874 iOS apps, free apps without in-app purchases — the group that includes most purely ad-funded apps — are 81.6% of the store, yet only 6.07% of them show any estimated store-side revenue and just 1.81% clear an estimated $1,000/month, the worst rate of any model. Important caveat: ad revenue is paid by ad networks outside Apple's payment rails, so it is invisible to store-intelligence signals — ours included. Those figures are the store-side floor, not the whole picture; the ceiling for a pure ad play is still governed by the eCPM math above.

On every store-side measure we can model, in-app purchases win. Freemium apps (free + IAP) clear an estimated $1,000/month at a 13.76% rate versus 1.81% for free apps without IAP, and the median earning freemium app makes an estimated $2,571/month versus $321 (744,874 iOS apps, July 7, 2026). The math explains it: one $5 subscription equals roughly a thousand interstitial impressions at benchmark rates. The common playbook is hybrid — IAP as the primary engine, rewarded ads monetizing the users who will never pay.

Illustrative arithmetic at benchmark US rates: $1,000/month is about $33/day. At 3 interstitials per user per day ($5 eCPM → $0.015 per user), that's roughly 2,200 daily active users. On banners alone (10 impressions at $0.50 eCPM → $0.005 per user), roughly 6,700 DAU. With 2 rewarded videos per user ($15 eCPM → $0.03 per user), roughly 1,100 DAU. Halve the eCPMs for mostly non-US audiences and the DAU requirement doubles. For scale: only 7.4% of the 744,874 iOS apps we track show enough public signal to carry any download estimate at all.