MACHAPP restores monetization, gains back 20% of its revenue

Can you tell us about your company and the apps you develop?

MACHAPP was founded in 2010 as a side project and by 2015 had grown into a full-time business. We mainly create weather and utility apps. Our main weather app has around 400,000 daily users and 2.5 million monthly users worldwide.

When we first released the weather app on Google Play, we didn’t aim for any specific audience group. But, it turned out that Russian-speaking users liked it a lot and gave us a lot of feedback. We used their ideas to make the app better. By 2015, our app was the No. 1 weather app in Russia, and 30% of our users came from there.

Today we have users from all over the world, but our top regions are Russia, USA, Ukraine, Western Europe and Asia.

When did you realize the Russian-speaking audience was important for your app?

It became clear after a year. We started with zero downloads and slowly grew — 100, 500, 1K, 10K. When we reached about 50K downloads, we realized that Russian-speaking users were a big part of our customer base. We got many reviews and emails from them. Even today, most of our feedback comes from that audience.

How do you monetize your apps?

Our monetization strategy has evolved over time. We began with in-app advertising, then created a paid, ad-free version and later introduced premium subscriptions that remove ads and offer additional premium features. 

We started ad monetization with AdMob as our primary ad network and later on integrated Yandex through AdMob mediation. This allowed us to optimize monetization and improve the user experience for our Russian users by leveraging Yandex's advertising network.

After 2022 our revenue from ads shown to our users in Russia began to show a sharp decline, eventually dropping to almost zero.