Adv noob

[Sunchaser]

Hello, I have the following questions on site advertising...

- What should be the minimum unique visitors/day or pageviews/days to add some banners ?
- When these ads companies pay how to they pay? is enough to give them a paypal account?
- Do any1 have any suggestion on adsense alternatives? maybe projectwonderful?

thanks

[bbgames]

Project Wonderful has been, in my experience, pretty terrible. I was making $0.05/day, usually less - I think I hit $10 after about a year. Adbrite's pretty good, though - they look just like Adsense, except that visitors can buy their own ads (for a price that you set). You can also specify a certain minimum amount that Adbrite needs to be making for you before it shows it's own ads, and copy in your Adsense code - in which case, if Adbrite can't hit that target, it will display your Adsense ads for you instead (allowing you to use both services at once).

[Chris]

Project Wonderful is much better than Adsense... if you have 100k+ impressions/day. It simply does not work with small volume since it has to be manually found by advertiser.
Adsense is generally equally good in all cases.

Anyway, forget about ads, nowadays you can not live on these. In the past, yes, not now. Go for donations or other payment options.

[JGadrow]

I have to disagree. You certainly can make income from ad slots on your website as long as you're getting a large volume of traffic and have a sales force out there selling ad slots on your site. These ad systems are not a very good way for you to make a decent amount of money.

However, they may be ok in the short-term while you're working on getting a direct-sales team together. Personally, I think an ad system is best written for a particular purpose if you're trying to make money off of it. But that's probably only because I used to work for a magazine publishing company that funded its web department by online ad sales. So, they were able to make enough to pay the salary of an entire department from ad revenue. But, they had the traffic and the marketing efforts to support it.

These concerns are probably out of reach for most in this forum who are still struggling to get a project off the ground or to get good "traction" from their community. But, companies are always looking for a decent investment if it will bring them additional income. You also have to be willing to think "out of the box" for the really good deals.

Have a MMORPG where people spend all day at their PC and have several thousand active players? You might have a case for charging $1k / month for run of site ads for Pizza Hut, Mt. Dew, etc.

Have a game devoted to brawling in skin-tight outfits? maybe WWF or WCW or whatever it's called will sponsor you when they have pay-per-view events. But, again, you will need to call them, not the other way around. And that's where the sales staff comes in.

So, yes, it's definitely not a "get rich quick" sort of consideration. However, it is entirely possible to monetize your game through advertising alone if you have the traffic.

[Chris]

I have to disagree. You certainly can make income from ad slots on your website as long as you're getting a large volume of traffic and have a sales force out there selling ad slots on your site. These ad systems are not a very good way for you to make a decent amount of money.

BBGs do not have large traffic. And if some do they spend huge amount on promotion (or are very old sites) and do not care about peanuts form advertising income.
You are talking from perspective of a person from business sector. Gaming sector is completely different. There are no big fishes looking to advertise their expensive lawyer services that pay even several $$ per click. The only real advertisers (in a long run from my perspective) are other gaming sites. This is industry made by poor for poor.

Have a MMORPG where people spend all day at their PC and have several thousand active players? You might have a case for charging $1k / month for run of site ads for Pizza Hut, Mt. Dew, etc.

If you have several thousands actives and you get $1k/month then you are instantly and immediately bankrupt. I mean there are tricks to cut costs, avoid taxes, skip on hardware and promotion budget but everything has limits. It is just not the kind of money that would let you stay online for that game size.

[Sunchaser]

Right now i have on my site from 100 to 200 page views/day, i did not spend anything in advertising and i am not pushing yet with email campaign etc. I have adsense on it.

My revenue in 3 months has been the wonderful sum 3 euro and the hosting vosts are 28 euro/year. I would like to know how it works,
this means that if pageviews will go from 200 /day to 20000/day the revenue will go from 1 euro/month to 100 euro/month?

Another  question: there is a topsite for bbg games around that asks 15$/month and is sending about 50 visits/day total to their games. Is it a good price? would yo buy it? because it seems to me a low rate of sent traffic.

Thanks

[JGadrow]

@Chris. You're taking my statements out of context. I stated that it is possible for you to earn a decent income with online advertising alone. However, it's not likely. And when I said you can charge $1k / month for a run of site ad, I mean per advertisement, per advertiser. And companies don't generally care what they're advertising on (be it game or business website) as long as they're getting the impressions. It's the same theory as television advertising. If a ton of people are viewing the advertisement, you're promoting product awareness, which leads to product sales.

So, if you bag 20 ad slot sales per month, you're banking $20k on ad sales alone. I dunno about you, but for $20k / month, I could run a large-scale game and afford the salary of a couple temp-service hired sales individuals to continue selling ads.

So, again, the point is: It's definitely possible to make money from ad sales. But, unless you become largely successful, it's not likely that you'll realize that income. This isn't to say that you shouldn't advertise on your site, but you'd probably be better off doing direct ad sales as opposed to going through an ad system.

Heck, if you guys are reporting ad gains of only $10 / month or less, just go around town to some local businesses. Offer to make them an ad banner and host it on your website as for only $1 / month. The benefit of this is:
A) the $1 / month is a flat, guaranteed fee for every ad that you manage to sell
B) the business managers / owners / whatever have incentive to visit your site, thus, earning you more traffic which will increase the value of your site
C) if you're really lucky, you'll find a small business willing to help you cross-promote

[Chris]

My revenue in 3 months has been the wonderful sum 3 euro and the hosting vosts are 28 euro/year. I would like to know how it works,
this means that if pageviews will go from 200 /day to 20000/day the revenue will go from 1 euro/month to 100 euro/month?

Hard to tell... It more depends on quality of your game. If it is good you won't get much money. But if it sux then players will click like mad to get out of the site and you will be getting money.
One of the advertising network owners told me plain that huge traffic + crappy site that everyone want to leave is the best combo...

Another  question: there is a topsite for bbg games around that asks 15$/month and is sending about 50 visits/day total to their games. Is it a good price? would yo buy it? because it seems to me a low rate of sent traffic.

It's 50*30=1500 clicks for $15 = $0.01 CPC. Yep, sounds like an unbelivably cheap deal. Drop the link
Of course most of the votesites "pad" their numbers so it needs testing.

Chris. You're taking my statements out of context. I stated that it is possible for you to earn a decent income with online advertising alone

I'm simple and narrow minded. I interpret every single post on this board in context of browser games

[Sunchaser]

It's 50*30=1500 clicks for $15 = $0.01 CPC. Yep, sounds like an unbelivably cheap deal. Drop the link
Of course most of the votesites "pad" their numbers so it needs testing.

I didn't explain myself well. I meant, I know a topsite that is sending 50 visits a day (not for one game but for all the games he has listed). This means that for examples he gets 400 votes a day, but only 50 people clicks a banner of the other games.

It doesn't make sense to me.  The OUTs should be more or less equal to the INs. If a visitors vote a game, i expect that "probably" clicks on another banner. So you are right, some topsites probably "touch" their statistics.

Anyway, this mean that i can develop a custom "advertising system" where i can host a banner that works on clicks? So it doesn't matter the impressions but the sent visits?

Hard to tell... It more depends on quality of your game. If it is good you won't get much money. But if it sux then players will click like mad to get out of the site and you will be getting money.
One of the advertising network owners told me plain that huge traffic + crappy site that everyone want to leave is the best combo...

LOL, nice this one...

[JGadrow]

If you're making your own ad system, forget clicks. Clicks are largely meaningless anyways as anyone will tell you. Just because some one gets to your site, doesn't mean they'll register, upgrade, etc.

Now, by all means, offer a linking mechanism so that clicking the banner takes the visitor to the advertiser's site. You are, after all, trying to facilitate connecting the advertiser to prospective clients. Do this in a separate window to keep them also on your site. This is generally acceptable behavior for any external site links on a web page whether it's a game or not.

If you're direct-selling your advertisements, you'll have much better luck promising the advertisement to run for a specified amount of time as opposed to either paying per click or a number of impressions. Put advertising in terms that marketing professionals can understand:

You give me $100 (or whatever the value of your ad slot is at the time) and I'll agree to run your ad in that slot for a month. Now, it's nice to sweeten the deal for them if you're running multiple ads in that slot. For instance, if you have 3 advertisers who all want a particular ad slot and you charge $100 for placing an ad in that slot for a month, you could also put a condition that it will also run for a MINIMUM number of impressions. This gives the marketers a sense of security that their advertisement will be displayed at least this number of times.

Now, you could create 'exclusive' ad rights for a slot at a premium price as well. Maybe someone wants their ad to run for a month and ALWAYS be visible. Well, that's great, but they're essentially cutting your profits if it's the same amount, so it's understandable that it's an up-sell.

If you average 5 advertisers for a given ad-slot for $500 and someone wants it exclusively, you should probably charge them $750 to place that ad. After all, if you wanted $500, you could have just kept up with your current advertisers so if they want the extra prestige, they'll pony up the extra cash.

Sorry to keep talking in abstracts, but so much of this depends upon how much the advertiser values your ad slot. Which all depends upon traffic. If you're getting 100 page views per month, nobody is going to pay you $100 for an advertisement. But, they might pay you $1 or $0.50. It's a small amount and most are willing to take a chance on increasing their business for such a small amount.

I mean, think of it this way: If someone offered to run a banner advertising YOUR website on theirs for a whole month for only $0.50. Would you consider that a worth-while investment? Probably.

But, now, if they said it's 0.01 per click... you might still hesitate. After all, what guarantee do you have that they're not inflating their click count? Same goes for impressions, how do you validate that it's been shown 1000 times? It's a much better analysis tool for the advertiser to gauge something over a period of fixed time. Plus, it allows them to set a budget for it. Always a win in the business world.

[Blacklava]

I see the discussion has now gone on another subject so sorry to come back on that but what's that projectwonderful?
Is that a big ad network and worth a try for browser based rpg advert?

[JGadrow]

Project Wonderful is an ad delivery network. So far, I haven't really seen anyone here who's found them to be a worthwhile investment. Obviously, someone feel free to correct me if they just love PW.

[Murzim]

Ads on small games = inadvisable