I recently released a free app Everything F1 which I included iAds as a way to pay for the development costs. I noticed a couple of things during the develop of the app.

Here’s a little bit of background for anyone new to this, iAd’s is provided by Apple and as part of there review process that all apps go through they have some rules. Pictures can’t show test ads and your app should not show a blank ad it should disappear if the ads aren’t displayed. To help you with this they put a couple of methods in the delegate the main one is

-(void)bannerView:(ADBannerView *)banner didFailToReceiveAdWithError:(NSError *)error

 

This method is called when ever an ad is not present show you know to hide the banner. What I discovered was that sometimes this method gets called even when an ad is present, so on my app i added an if statement to say if the error was null ignore the method. This seems to have stopped several of the banner has an ad but is hidden warning messages which is always good, if its hidden you don’t get money for it.

Now the less techie bit, iAds seems like a good idea you get money for just having ads in your app so this means you can release the app for free and pay for you time and effort through ads. Its not quite like that you have to get a large volume of ads to get any real money. So far i’ve had nearly 200 copies of my app downloaded and i’ve made 3p for ads shown and 18p because someone clicked on an ad. Not going to retire on that hopefully with the F1 season restarting it will pick up a bit but I’m not expecting to make huge sums.