I didn't even want to pay 4.99 for GTA: CTW, so what makes you think I'll shell out 5 bucks to remove ads? Just kidding. I agree with Yemi, when I think of iPhone and iPad gaming, I think of great quality and Really cheap prices. Take for example, GTA: CTW, it costs $40 on the DS and $30 on the PSP while it costs 9.99 on the iPad and iPhone.
I'm almost always willing to pay away ads, if the game is good. However, if your feeling is that "anything you develop is worth $5", you should just forego the ads and charge that. The reason I say this is that when users do that, they are not paying $5 for your app (which it may, indeed be worth), because they already have the fullt functioning app, they are paying to rid themselves of the ad. $5 to do that feels like a colossal rip off to me. I would gladly pay $5 or more for a great app, though. I also don't think anyone would assume that you are making $5 in ad revenue, so anything above what they think you may be making, feels like a cheat. My guess is that most people would assume that your ad revenue is less than a dollar per app and, since the minimum app store price is $1, then they'll pay it. It's all about perception.
Reading this makes me feel like I would be paying more than it's worth, just so other people can play it for free. If you are serious about your apps being good enough to warrant a $5 price point, the last thing you want to do is include ads in any form. Again, the perception of gamers is likely to be that an app with ads is not as good as one without. The thought is that "if it's a great game, why would the dev need to put ads in it?" Seriously, this can only end badly for you, if you go this route.
thanks for all the words on this, guys - your responses have definitely helped me get a better idea for what action to take ad how people feel about things. I am leaning heavily towards maybe just a buck for ad-removal now, in the mind-set that it is far less than what I would deem my work to be worth, but enough to give an option to the (potentially few) amount of people who are annoyed enough by ads to see them gone properly. I wouldn't look at this as potentially a good way to make money off the IAP, but it seems like it pisses the least amount of people off in the long run, without having to resort to just going "totally free." I am not going to execute this with my currently available apps, but might do so in the future (or a similar scheme). On a side note - are there many people on here who will only grab free apps if they are completely ad-free?
Well most people will just turn off thier wifi or put thier phone on airplane mode to avoid ADs. Not just ADs but openfaint (or openslow) and gamecenter are reason why people turn off thier internet as well.
keep in mind that the average TA poster is a super-small part of the population (otherwise we'd have.. hundreds of thousands of posters in here!) A good lot of "more casual" people who play games on their phone will whip it out when they are standing in line or something, and just "fire up a quick game" without going through a bunch of rigamaroll (killing wifi, etc) Ads don't really work worth a damn in a lot of cases (the amount of return one gets is tiny.. like, a nickel per thousand impressions or something, maybe even less than that?) but if your game does reach that huge penetration, then the numbers you can get are pretty mammoth. It's a pretty short list of games who've made that threshold, though..
I can't speak for all the iPhone owners, but being an iPod Touch owner, I am rarely connected to wifi when playing a game, unless the game actually requires wifi (Words with Friends, We Rule etc.) So, in my opinion, if you want to use ads as a source of revenue, I recommend making an online-only game. Though there will be additional server costs and all that good stuff..
Most gamers are ipod users and most ipod users dont have wifi on because it eats up thier batteries. People dont turn wifi on unless thier going to download something.
