Suppose you have invested 2.500 dollars into creation of your app, let’s say, it is a game. 2.500 dollars may be only for at total reskin of the app, or you might have billed yourself to that amount if you are a developer, or you might have had any kind of various costs while developing the app — games designer, graphics designer etc.
How To Know Whether Your App Will Recoup The Investment?
Did you do your math correctly? You have 2500 dollars for reskin and that is 2500 x 100 cents = 250000 cents. If you got 5 cents from a clicked upon ad, you would need 250000 / 5 = 50000 clicked ads. Suppose one user in 100 impressions clicks upon an ad, you would need 50000 x 100 = 5.000.000 impressions for the ads to pay out the reskin (not taking into account other costs you had).
Now suppose you app has exactly 100 screens to show ads. 5000000 / 100 = 50.000 impressions per screen. To achieve that you may have 50000 downloads (presuming each player visits all 100 screens in a row), another way to achieve that would be to have less installs but more stubborn players who dedicate themselves to the game, and so on.
You should best use a spreadsheet for this exercise.
Finally, all this math will not do you any good if you do not have downloads and players who want to play the game over and over again. But that is another topic altogether.