Your unbridled addition to Flappy Bird, the latest craze in smartphone gaming that has recently rocketed to the top of the App Store and Google Play charts, is earning its creator an incredible $50,000 per day in advertising revenue.

The title has been downloaded over 50 million times since its debut, and it has amassed almost 350,000 ratings across both platforms.

For those unfamiliar with Flappy Bird, it’s an incredibly simple yet immensely frustrating game in which you must fly a tiny bird between a series of Super Mario-style pipes. You tap the screen to flap the bird’s wings, and you get a point for every pipe you pass.

If your timing isn’t right, however, you end up crashing into a pipe and you have to start all over again. It sounds simple, but in actual fact it’s incredibly difficult, and it can take hours to rack up a score with double figures. My highest is just 35, and I don’t know anyone who’s beaten it yet.

So, how did a game so annoying become so popular? Well, Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen told The Verge, “it happens to be something different from mobile games today, and is a really good game to compete against each other.”

“People in the same classroom can play and compete easily because [Flappy Bird] is simple to learn, but you need skill to get a high score,” he added.

Chances are you may not have even noticed the ads embedded in the game, which only appear at the top of the screen when you’re at the main menu. But as long as they’re there, Nguyen gets paid — and with so many people playing the game, his revenue has increased at a rapid rate.

Nguyen actually released Flappy Bird on iOS in May of last year, but the game didn’t really take off until just recently. No one knows why it has suddenly gained so much attention, but Nguyen has vowed not to make any changes to its winning formula.

“Flappy Bird has reached a state where anything added to the game will ruin it somehow, so I’d like to leave it as is,” he said. “I will think about a sequel but I’m not sure about the timeline.”

Nguyen does have other mobile games available — Super Ball Juggling, another simple arcade game, is currently hanging around the App Store’s top ten chart — and he has ideas for other games he’d like to develop. His next will be “a fresh take on the popular ‘Jetpack’ genre of mobile games,” The Verge reports.

• SourceThe Verge