After a bit more research on the subject I think it's fairly safe to call bullshit on that $200/hour figure. It's either a concerted PR stunt or the app developer is trying to push his market value.
While I didn't find much information about iphone app sales or revenue figures I did indeed find some sobering bits about regular web ad gigs.
This game has undoubtly spawned one of the biggest viral hypes of the recent years. Nonetheless and despite fairly reasonable advertising efforts under massive traffic it "only" managed to pull in 100k over 12 months, or roughly $11 per hour.
So yes, those hawaiian golf resorts must be paying one hell of a CPC/CPM rate. Wonder what they'd pay me for wearing a t-shirt with their URL. I think I'd do that for a measly $1/hour...
Yeah, I feel you. I think I know what happened. Some "journalist" took poetic licence interpreting what the developer probably said:
Dev: It took me 5 hours to build and I made $1000.
Reporter: Developer makes $200/hr building iPhone apps.
We've all done this kind of math before (revenue / work time), but I think somewhere the context was lost on this one. Unless somewhere we can find the developer actually saying "I make $200/hr even when I am sleeping."
While I didn't find much information about iphone app sales or revenue figures I did indeed find some sobering bits about regular web ad gigs.
A good example with published stats is one that we all know: Desktop Tower Defense. http://novelconcepts.wordpress.com/2008/03/11/happy-birthday...
This game has undoubtly spawned one of the biggest viral hypes of the recent years. Nonetheless and despite fairly reasonable advertising efforts under massive traffic it "only" managed to pull in 100k over 12 months, or roughly $11 per hour.
So yes, those hawaiian golf resorts must be paying one hell of a CPC/CPM rate. Wonder what they'd pay me for wearing a t-shirt with their URL. I think I'd do that for a measly $1/hour...