Whilst a number of teams may have underperformed at this year’s World Cup, few could have expected how dominant the Vuvuzela horn would have become. In stadiums across South Africa, the horn’s distinctive sound rings out – a symbol of the tournament – echoing fans’ frustration, pride anger and glory. And app developers have been quick to capitalise on the notoriety of the horn, described by fans and media around the world as ‘sounding like a giant swarm of bees’. Dutch app developer moblio.nl captured the imagination of millions of iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users across the world with its free application – Vuvuzela 2010 bringing the distinctive sound to phones near you.

Key to the success of any app is where it features in the App store ranking. If an app has a high position in the store, users can easily discover it via search or by simply by stumbling across it. And if the app is free, people will be even keener to download it. Being number one also opens up a great opportunity to monetise. We’d like to share a fantastic story on how Vuvuzela 2010 became the number one free application all over the world – across Europe, including the UK, Germany, France and as far afield as South Africa, Argentina, Japan and Australia as well as top 3 in the USA. It has also earned its developers moblio.nl tens of thousands of dollars a week through advertising revenue.

moblio.nl formed in 2009 in Amsterdam by its directors Jeroen Retrae and Lyan van Furth specialise in creating and realizing iPhone applications and mobile websites for national and international companies. They needed a quick and easy way to monetise the Vuvuzela 2010 app globally and capitalise on the opportunity the tournament in South Africa presented, so they decided to join AdMob’s publisher network on a self-serve basis. Following a simple integration, AdMob adverts appeared within the application: clicks and the revenue grew and grew across the world. Real time reporting by country allowed them to see their success story unfold in front of their eyes.

The team developed the Vuvuzela 2010 app as an independent project and the company is now earning several tens of thousands dollars per week via its share of advertising revenue. We’ve helped monetise their inventory in over 100 countries worldwide. As of today, the Vuvuzela 2010 app has been downloaded over 3.5 million times and has experienced explosive growth across the world. With the whistle set to blow on the World Cup Final on July 11th, we’re still far from sure who will be lifting the trophy but there’s no doubt that Vuvuzela 2010 has won the affection of football fans across the world.

THIS BLOG FIRST APPEARED IN THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ADMOB http://blog.admob.com

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 4th, 2010 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Mobile Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.