In the companion piece, I lined up five monetization channels for indie mobile apps and argued that ad revenue — specifically AdMob — has the highest ceiling for the kinds of apps Rork is good for. This article is the lived-experience version: the eight concrete steps I actually took to reach over ¥1.5M/month on AdMob, including the failure that nearly killed one of my flagship apps and the four-month recovery from it.
Up Front: This Wasn't a Lottery Win
I want to be honest about the shape of this story. ¥1.5M/month wasn't a sudden hit. I started shipping apps in 2014, and for the first three years my monthly revenue was somewhere between a few thousand and tens of thousands of yen. I came close to quitting more than once.
The number you see at the top of this article is what eventually emerged from running multiple wallpaper, calming, and utility apps in parallel — not a single home run. That distinction matters. For an indie developer, a portfolio of stable mid-revenue apps is a far more reproducible outcome than betting on a single breakout, and it's the structure I'd recommend to anyone serious about long-term mobile monetization.
The eight steps below are how I'd describe the path retroactively. I still follow this order whenever I start a new app today.
Step 1: Pick a Genre Where "Free" Is Natural
This is the single most important call. To realistically aim for ¥1.5M/month on AdMob, you need a genre where users genuinely don't expect to pay.
The genres that worked for me:
- Wallpaper apps (aesthetic, seasonal, character-themed)
- Daily affirmation / quote apps
- Light fortune-telling apps (simple tarot, birthday-based readings)
- Calculators and utility apps
- Light life-loggers (simple expense trackers, diet trackers)
The shared trait is "not worth paying for, but touched daily for a few minutes." When MAU grows, ads simply work. The structure is uncomplicated.
The genres I'd specifically avoid: deep games, social apps, chat apps. Ad interruption hurts retention in those categories, and over time DAU drops as users leave for cleaner alternatives.
Step 2: Ship Your First App With "Pass Review" as the Goal
When I started, I tried to make my first app perfect. I spent over six months on it and never shipped. This is the classic indie failure pattern.
What you actually need from your first app isn't quality — it's "passing review and entering a measurable state." Even with 100 MAU, the moment numbers start appearing in your AdMob dashboard, the world changes. eCPM, session length, drop-off points become visible, and improvement direction becomes concrete.
If you're using Rork, design your first app to ship in one to two weeks. Don't pursue perfection. An MVP with the core mechanic is enough.
Step 3: Start AdMob With Rewarded Ads, Not Banners
This is where most indie developers go in the wrong direction. "Slap a banner at the bottom" was reasonable advice in 2018; in 2026 it's almost meaningless.
In my experience, around 80% of AdMob revenue comes from rewarded video. Banners contribute under 10%; interstitials sit at 10–20%. That ratio held across every successful app I ran for years.
Using rewarded ads requires designing a reason for users to voluntarily watch the video into the app's screen flow:
- Wallpaper app → "Watch a video to download this premium wallpaper once"
- Fortune app → "Watch a video to see tomorrow's reading in advance"
- Life logger → "Watch a video to generate a 30-day stats report"
The goal isn't "users hate seeing ads" — it's "users feel they got something good in exchange." When that lands, video completion rates settle at 20–40% and eCPM stabilizes at ¥10–¥30 per impression.
Step 4: Cap Ad Frequency — This Is the Most Important Rule
Time for the failure story.
On one of my wallpaper apps, I tried to maximize revenue by triggering an interstitial on every screen transition. The first month, revenue genuinely jumped. By month two, the rating had collapsed to 1.8 stars, store search ranking dropped, and three months later MAU was half of what it had been.
The lesson — and the rule I haven't broken since — is always cap ad frequency. Specifically:
- Interstitials: max twice per session, minimum 60 seconds between
- Rewarded ads: only on user button press (never auto-triggered)
- Banners: visible on at most one screen, never the main interaction screen
- No ads at all in the first three screen transitions after app launch
These rules cost a small amount of short-run eCPM but stabilize long-run MAU and ratings. The ¥1.5M/month line came after I locked these rules in.
The recovery from my disaster went like this. First, I changed interstitial frequency from "per transition" to "max once per session." Within two weeks, the new-review average climbed back above 3.5 stars. Then I spent a month writing thoughtful, individual replies to the historical 1- and 2-star reviews. On Google Play, developer replies appear directly under the original review, so new visitors see "this developer responds carefully to feedback." It took about four months for total rating to recover above 4.0, but once it did, MAU rebounded — and within six months, the app passed its pre-incident revenue line.
What I took away: short-run AdMob revenue maximization and long-run app health are different metrics that often pull in opposite directions. Accepting a 30% revenue cut to maintain a 4.0+ rating consistently wins on six- and twelve-month cumulative revenue.
Step 4.5: Understand the Ad Network Behind the Scenes
To build stable AdMob revenue, it pays to know the basics of how the auction works.
Simplified: when your app sends an ad request, AdMob runs an auction among multiple advertiser bids and serves the highest one. Your eCPM is the average outcome of those auctions over time.
That makes the practical levers for raising eCPM exactly two:
- Increase auction participants (mediation / open bidding) — In the AdMob console, open Mediation and add Meta Audience Network, Unity Ads, AppLovin. Many apps see overall eCPM rise 10–20% from this alone
- Improve inventory quality (signal richness) — The more advertisers know about who uses your app, the higher they bid. Configure age range and interest categories properly in the AdMob console
In one of my apps, just adding mediation lifted eCPM from ¥20 to ¥24. The work takes half a day. At minimum, add Meta Audience Network.
That said, don't pile on every SDK in existence. Each adds binary size and slows cold start. I cap at three networks total.
Step 5: Invest Real Time in App Store Optimization
Ad revenue is ultimately ceilinged by MAU, and MAU is largely determined by store visibility. ASO investment has, in my experience, the highest ROI of any single activity.
The basics I worked on for years:
- Embed "genre keyword + differentiator" in the app name (e.g., "Beautiful Wallpapers - Seasonal Landscape Photo Collection")
- Pack search keywords naturally into the first three lines of the description
- Make the first screenshot show the core experience as a usage scene, not a feature list
- Reply in-app to negative reviews to keep aggregate rating above 3.8 stars
- Ship at least one update per month, every month
That last one matters more than people think. Store algorithms favor "actively maintained" apps. Three months without an update and ranking starts to decay.
With Rork, a small improvement release is half a day's work. Maintaining a monthly update cadence as a solo developer is fully practical. I've done it for over five years on some apps without missing a month.
Step 6: Build a Portfolio in the Same Genre
This was the biggest single lever for reaching ¥1.5M/month.
A single app hitting ¥1.5M/month is rare and not a goal you should plan around. Building five to ten apps in the same genre, each earning ¥100,000–¥300,000/month, is more realistic and reproducible.
Wallpaper variants, for example:
- Nature-photography-focused
- Minimalist-design-focused
- Seasonal-themed (spring/summer/autumn/winter)
- Anime / character-licensed
- Lock-screen-specialized
Each captures a different long-tail keyword cluster, and combined reach goes far beyond what any one app can achieve. Codebase sharing means apps two through ten each take a fraction of the build time of app one.
For me, the ¥1.5M/month line came from six wallpaper apps, three affirmation apps, and two calculator apps running together.
A practical note on codebase sharing: I kept one base Xcode project and one base Android Studio project, then forked each new app from there. The shared layer was AdMob initialization, IAP flow, push notification handling, in-app review prompting, and error reporting. The per-app surface was content, colors, icon, and app name. That structure made each new app a one-to-two-week build.
The trap to watch for in portfolio strategy: support volume. Running ten apps means tens of monthly user inquiries to handle thoughtfully. I built a Notion-based reply template library — when a familiar question came in, I'd copy-paste and adjust tone. Without that system, support drowns the development time you came for.
Step 7: Capture Seasonality and Holiday Traffic
Watch AdMob revenue long enough and you'll see two or three predictable annual spikes. In the Japanese market:
- December (Christmas / New Year): 1.3–1.5× normal months
- April (new academic / fiscal year): 1.1–1.2×
- Obon week (mid-August): roughly 1.2×
Time seasonal content releases to these windows. They stack two effects: search-keyword growth and seasonal demand.
My yearly rhythm: prepare Christmas content updates by mid-November, submit to App Store review around November 20, ship on December 1 across all wallpaper apps. December MAU climbs 20–30% with that timing alone. Avoid late-November submissions — Apple's review queue gets congested before holidays.
For April's "new life" season, the psychological trigger is "new room, new wallpapers" or "new goals, new affirmations." Mid-March releases hit best.
The other side: June–July rainy season and post-September-holidays are the lowest-revenue windows of the year. Don't time new launches there. Use those months for improvements and prep for the next peak.
Step 8: Build the Habit of Looking at Numbers Daily
The last step isn't technical. It's psychological.
The AdMob console, the two store consoles, and your push notification dashboard. Looking at those four screens for five minutes every morning is, in my view, the single biggest determinant of long-run monetization success.
When you watch numbers daily, you notice changes early. "DAU on app X dropped 10% yesterday." "Search traffic for keyword Y suddenly spiked." "Installs from country Z just broke their pattern." Each of those is a hint at the next move.
When I crossed the ¥1.5M/month line, there wasn't a triggering event. It was the accumulated outcome of a year of small daily moves. The market rewards people who keep showing up.
Beyond ¥1.5M/Month — Diversification via AI Tech Blogs
Having said all of the above, here's the honest postscript.
Depending on AdMob alone is getting riskier each year. Apple and Google policy changes, eCPM volatility, currency moves — too many factors are outside your control. My own AdMob revenue has, at times, been less than half its peak.
That's why, starting around 2024, I began running four AI tech blogs: Claude Lab, Gemini Lab, Antigravity Lab, and Rork Lab. This very site is one of them. The revenue structure (single-article purchases, monthly memberships) is fundamentally different from app ad revenue, which means failures correlate less. When one channel softens, the other doesn't necessarily soften with it.
For sustainable indie life, I'd recommend treating "¥1M/month from apps" as a foundation, not a destination — and building a separate income stream alongside it. The ¥1.5M/month milestone is real and worth pursuing, but relying on it forever is dangerous in a way that's only obvious after a major platform policy change or eCPM crash.
What You Can Do Tomorrow
After eight steps' worth of looking back, the one thing an aspiring AdMob-focused indie developer can do tomorrow is simple:
Ship one app, built around rewarded video, through store review.
That's it. Don't aim for completeness, aim for shipping. Even at MAU 100, the moment numbers appear in your AdMob console, you have the raw material to start running this article's eight steps in earnest.
From there, the path is the same one I walked for over fifteen years. Monthly updates, ASO refinement, portfolio growth, seasonal alignment, the daily numbers habit. Done patiently, those alone get you into the hundreds-of-thousands-yen range. ¥1.5M/month is what lies further along.
The most truthful thing I can say is this: the talent it took wasn't unusual. The persistence was. Which means: anyone willing to keep going long enough has a real shot at the same path.