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How One Company Paid The Bills With Their Affiliate Commissions


The next installment of our MAKE APP Magazine special is a case study featuring Andrea of Flubber Media.

Prior to using GeoRiot, Andrea’s team faced a common dilemma for app developers with limited resources: allocate valuable dev time to creating internationally affiliated links, or leave earnings on the table and focus instead on engineering his product. 

Read about Andrea’s experience using GeoRiot to find out why his doubled commissions quickly become enough to cover his company’s utilities and office space rent. 

As always, we urge you to please support GeoRiot and the folks at MAKE APP who worked hard to put this together. Head to the iTunes store to download the issue in its entirety and as a thank you, you’ll be given a free, three month, non-auto renewing subscription, courtesy of MAKE APP. To claim, simply download the issue, click Subscribe > Current Subscribers and enter the bonus code “georiot”.

Andrea founded Flubber Media largely as app marketing experiment. Fresh off the heels of what he says could have been a more successful first endeavor, iTorch Flashlight, he launched Flubber. The concept behind its conception was simple: Andrea believed that in an increasingly competitive app marketplace, developers are more likely to find success by pushing several apps simultaneously, and then analyzing their performance against one another and making improvements based on user feedback, rather than spending months toiling over a single app until it’s perfect.

He began releasing apps under the Flubber brand, with a system of cross-promotional and lite-to-paid banners that linked to his content in the App Store. Andrea had heard about affiliate marketing but did not know how it was used or who would benefit from embracing it as an additional revenue source.  After reading a book on affiliate linking, he learned that developers such as he are among the best suited for leveraging existing links to the App Store by implementing the affiliate program.

He jumped in full-force, signing up for the multiple country-specific affiliate programs and enlisting the help of GeoRiot at the same time. He began by first replacing Flubber’s existing cross-promotional links with affiliate links. Then, after taking a closer look at the click metrics of users who had upgraded within his apps from lite to paid versions, he decided to incorporate affiliate linking there too and replaced those banners with affiliate links.

It was here that Andrea first began to see a return on his affiliate marketing efforts. As he says, “it was not enough to make a living, but enough to cover the bills and the cost of the office rent”. Not bad considering this additional paycheck was earned from an action he’d already been doing: linking to his content in the App Store.

While the majority of Andrea’s 12 million downloads came from his native Italy, Flubber had significant customer bases elsewhere in Europe, the UK, and Australia, with additional regions that fluctuated on a month-to-month basis. He understood the need for focusing on app placement in individual countries, but without the help of GeoRiot, it had been more cost-effective for a company of his size to leave the international commissions on the table.

“In theory, the iTunes Affiliate Program doesn’t cost money, but because there is no central service that works for all of the countries you’re selling in, you have to put a lot of dev time and resources into making it work properly. It then becomes a time vs. money issue,” says Andrea. His initial success with GeoRiot gave him the means to promote his apps to users in countries outside of his largest demographic, therefore increasing his sales and letting him earn additional commissions from those purchases.

Increase his sales he did.

By the time Andrea incorporated each of his affiliate network accounts into GeoRiot, he effectively doubled his commission earnings. “What GeoRiot does is understand the logic of where the user is coming from and converts the link to the correct one for his or her store. It makes it possible for developers to promote their content from a number of places (social media outlets, apps, websites) to any number of countries which they’re signed up to earn affiliate commissions.”

The ease of implementation that accompanies GeoRiot’s single-link platform simplifies and eliminates much of the behind-the-scenes engineering required to earn commissions from global sales. Because of this, developers like Andrea are able to embrace a larger, more diverse customer base, making it not only worthwhile but lucrative to promote content internationally.