Monetizing your Flash game. Serving your own ads?
Posted by Will | Filed under Adobe Flash, Advertising, Flash Games
Lately I’ve been thinking about ways to go about monetizing my latest flash game to maximize the amount of income possible. As it currently stands in the Flash game community there are 3 ways developers are currently monetizing their work. Id like to briefly cover them and go over each of their pros and cons and then explain an idea I have.
Sponsorship
This is where the developer agrees to put a websites logo at the very beginning of their game, usually just after the preloader. The idea being that your game will be copied to various other websites (usually not by you), giving greater exposure to the sponsor and thus driving more traffic to their site. Read more at flashgamesponsorship.com.
Pros:
Can generate some big dollars for the developer. Sponsors may increase their offer to secure their sponsorship if they want your game badly enough. Usually they will allow you to include your own served ads.
Cons:
More often than not, a one time buy. Meaning that once you’re received your money that’s it. Your game must always carry your sponsors logo regardless of where it is. (There are obviously exceptions to this that can be negotiated with your sponsor).
Adsense
The developer hosts the game on their own website, usually site-locked and encrypted, and surrounds the game with several Google Adsense units.
Pros:
Adsense is well known, reliable and fairly easy on the eye. You are able to “cash out” every $100 earned.
Cons:
Adsense is limited to the page you’re hosting the game on. Since your game will only be hosted on your own site you’ll need to create your own buzz to draw traffic to the site.
In-game ads
Ad services such as Mochiads and GameJacket feed ads directly to your Flash during your preloader and/or during levels in your game regardless of where the game is hosted. This works on a revenue share system earning the developer money when an ad is viewed and when a user clicks on the ad.
Pros:
Can provide a constant income for your games. They can be turned on and off remotely depending on where they are hosted.
Cons:
Users can find these ads obtrusive as they can be quite ‘in your face’. Being a revenue sharing system would assume the more developers using it, the less everyone gets.
My idea
My idea is the same as the In-game ads with the difference that you generate your own ad content. Rather than feed ads through one of the readily available services at which you may or may not get $0.00x per view/click why not find your own advertiser and negotiate your own terms with 100% of the fee going to you, the developer.
How?
XML baby. Basically when your game instantiates it will go out and grab a XML filed hosted on your website. From this Flash can grab any information it needs to display the ad during your games loading process eg. the path to the ad, the link the ad goes to if someone clicks etc.
The XML file can be written manually using a regular text editor or created dynamically using a server side language like PHP. Having a dynamic XML is not necessary, but does provide some benefits. For example, your server side script could check the current date against an ad’s expiry date and only return the ad path if the ad is still valid.
Now you might be saying ‘this is all good and well, If you have an advertiser’. Yes this is true. But if you don’t have one, advertise for an advertiser. Why not display a “Your ad here. Click here to find out.” message during your preloader. You could even pull stats about how many times the game has been played over the last week and on how many domains.
When you do find an interested advertiser you can negotiate a time frame for the ad. You could set your own fees such as $x for 3 months. Once those 3 months are up, they either pay you again or you pull the ad and find a new advertiser.
The benefits of this idea is that it puts the money in the developers hands where it belongs. It allows the developer to control all aspects of the games advertising.
But ultimately, lets not forget that for any form of in-game advertising to work your game must be playable and fun.
July 17th, 2008 at 5:13 am
Nice idea, I will consider this for my next game.
One question – why PHP? Flash can directly load and parse the XML file. Obviously if you want stats etc you’ll need middleware, but the way you’ve phrased it, you make it sound like you need PHP just for the XML loading.
Great article though – I’ve added you to my RSS feed.
July 18th, 2008 at 4:54 am
Thanks for the feedback. You’re correct about not ‘needing’ PHP. I’ve revised the article slightly to better explain the benefits of a dynamic XML file while noting that it is not a necessity.
July 18th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Nice one Will – your article is clearer now.
Let us know how you get with this advertising method. I’m seriously considering it and will post my results here if I attempt it.
July 19th, 2008 at 8:04 am
Cheers Paul,
I’m implementing this into my latest game. I will probably release the class file and xml template at a later stage.
September 13th, 2008 at 8:27 am
We have a few Flash games and advertisers. The problem with Flash is that is can’t use our javascript ad code. We use OpenX serve our ads but the invocation code is JS.
Any thoughts about this?
September 13th, 2008 at 8:42 am
Gamboozle,
Not quite sure what you’re asking.
November 21st, 2008 at 1:14 am
congratulations! you have invented the wheel, or at least the wa it starts.
mochiads, for example used exactly this strategy to start up the business. however they are not hosting the game. they have a pretty good deal with kongregate so their adds already have a nesting site. anyway if you start up with this your focus is to generate as much traffic as you can to yr site, witch is hard if it features only your games. and that is if you have not created 2000+ games. of course you can nest others, but the problem is that the in game ads are going to the developer and the ad network is uses mainly.
but you could create about 100 like 200,000 pays/month games, and create your website with it, till then leave them on other sites to generate income, after that you mod all those popular games and put a special version sitelocked to your site and mod all the other versions with a link to you.
this way you have about 10% (if the bonuses on your site are minor ones) of the total traffic your games have channeled to your homesite
and so on…
April 7th, 2009 at 10:39 am
Well said, finally a good report on this stuff