$40,000 is too much of a budget for iPhone advertising. If you must, I suggest using 1/100 of that money on ads targeting Apple employees and keeping the rest for anything else. I'm preparing to release my 1st app soon and honestly I can't fathom spending even $1000 on advertising in Admob... from what I gathered it just isn't worth it.
If you really have that much of a budget to run, I'd do a takeover ad on wired.com or engadget. Heck, maybe even Yahoo.com
Nice idea, but advertising can't sell everything. Advertising is helpful when you have a good product. Investing $30.000 on advertising Rolando and investing $30.000 on a Khalid Shakid (or whatever his name was) application is not exactly the same thing. I remember ngmoco buying Touch Arcade (*cough*, I mean advertising on Touch Arcade) for Rolando. I believe they could easily cover the cost for that ad by selling many copies and increasing the hype around the game, but... would it be the same thing for the game we are talking about now? My answer is "NO". The sales of Fumbers didn't increase that much: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?threadid=42298
Depends how you look at it. The Fumbers sales increased infinitely compared to the week before I ran the advertisement.
In my situation，50 free downloads bring 1 paid sales. Yes,it looks bad. I am just thinking if I can use less money to get more people to download free version. Maybe I can earn money. I am just a developer, try to understand IPhone game market. Thanks to all the people here.
