I think that is a good question because they actually are a good way to monetize a mobie app or game. But they have many drawbacks.

What are "Notification Ads" or "Push Ads"

These types of ads does show up in the notification bar of your mobile phone from time to time.

People use them because they are very profitable - surely, because normaly, when people are getting something in their notification bar, they click it for 2 reasons:

1. They except any more or less important information from it, and if they see something new, they just click it.

2. They want to get rid of it - and it's some kind of normal to click on it, simply to get rid of it.

But to be honest: IT IS SPAM!
If you are not a pro on your mobile you will hardly investigate which app are causing it.
You get spam in your notification bar and have troubles to shut it off.
You need to watch advertisements when you even do not use the app which is causing it.

From my sight - it's pointless to use them, as long as you have a good piece of software which people find useful, funny or just entertaining (like a game).

Why should I - as a developer - use Push Ads. They are simpy annoying.

The developer should ask himself, does he want to make fast dirty cash or does he want to deliver a good product.

I know that it is not that easy to get a good stand nowadays with your product - it can also be irrelevant if this product is good or not, you can just have bad luck and noone gets notice of it. So some of them decide, yes, I only got 10 new users a day so I want to get the most money out of it and it doesn't matter if 8 of this 10 new users will instantly deinstall my app again :-)

Well, every developer has his own mind and is merely allowed to do what. With Push Ads it is another thing.

Let's think about the case a PushAd-App-Developer decides to show his pushads not directly after install but a little time later and very rare.

So the user get this "stealthy" app, uses it and put it down. After some while the user installs some other app and suddenly the Push Ad come up .. The user will immidiatly think that the new app has something to do with it, but it hasn't. So the PushAd Developer is hurting other developers and that's not a good thing.

The user should always(!) know which app is causing an add and should always have a direct correlation between the ad and the app - which is not the case with Push Ads.

So are Push Ads and Notification Ads always evil? No, they are not. There are cases where the developer has really little options in the way he can monetize his work and he deserves it (mostly of the time :-) )

Like developing a Live Background or a service which is running mainly in the background. From a logical sight of view, the app is running while the push ads are coming in (and hopefully only then).

Personally I would use Push Ads if I have a crappy app. On a good app where I invested quite an amount of time in developing and looking forward to have the best user experience possible I would never ever use push ads to annoy my userbase.

While Robo Miner is doing very very well all my other apps are currently hardly noticed and I would still not think about using Push Ads.

That's just my opinion about Notification Ads .. maybe I will write more articles about different monetizing methods in the future, let's see.

I have to state, that I never used Push Ads or Notification Ads in any Software because I hate them as a user - maybe that's the reason because I am not rich yet haha