[dirGames-L] Revenu with advertisment realistic?

[Hipolito Troy]

Thanks guys.

This is the information I have been searching for.

I can now gage the potential profit with real numbers (with in a ball park).

I think I will start experminting with a few of my sites and see the trends.

-T


Chris Evans <chris.evans1 at cox.net> wrote: 

>
> I'm more exited about micropayments. They work well in Asia and are well 
> within the limits of web-based games.

Definitely! I'm surprised that with the high cell-phone usage here in 
America, there still isn't really a viable phone micro-payment solution, 
like SMS in Europe. But I'm hoping in a few years, some form of micropayment 
solution will show up here in the US.

Anyway, regarding Troy's question, Gene pretty much covered all the 
advertising angles. Just keep in mind that with Adsense, not only does eCPM 
fluctuate wildly from month to month but it depends what keywords/Ads your 
games target. A lot of things are just out of your control. For me, banner 
Ad networks give me an equal sometimes better return than Adsense. You can 
optimize your Adsense ads by fiddling with their page placement and colors, 
but if your game targets a weak keyword or gets "smart-priced" (that's whole 
another discussion) then there's not much you can do.

Personally, I recommend doing a combo of Ads and in-game premium features. 
This is what I'll be doing in the future. Basically, you still run ads but 
you also have some special/premium features that users pay for. This way 
you're not completely dependent on the peaks and valleys of ad revenue. I'm 
also not comfortable being at the total mercy of Google for my business. Who 
knows what Google will do in a couple of years. As it is, their rates have 
steadily gone down the past several years, not up.

On the topic of in-game advertisements, I'm pretty much against it. As 
someone else pointed out, most of the ads would stick out like a sore thumb 
and wouldn't mesh well with the game style. It would basically be product 
placements gone horribly wrong. However I don't mind 15 second video clip 
before a game starts or even during a game intermission (assuming the game 
is free). I think some companies are already doing this. They're called 
"Interstials" or something.

But again, I think the best way for developers to monazite their own web 
games is to use ads to monazite the freebie traffic (which will be the vast 
majority) and have some premium features to leverage the loyal hardcore 
players. The catch being though is that the premium features need to be 
interesting and appealing. Not exactly trivial.

Then of course there's always the subscription model if you have regularly 
updated content. There's a lot of things to try. As Gene pointed out, it can 
be a lot more profitable than "Work for Hire" once you find something that 
works.

- Chris 

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