A guide to using MochiAds Self-Serve ads

I always talk about making money with MochiAds, but remember that if Mochi splits its revenue with us developers and someone buys advertising space at the double price we are earning, maybe a trip on the other side of a MochiAds would be interesting.

That’s why I asked Ryan from Freelance Flash Games the permission to publish his experience as a Mochi advertiser.

« Want to drive more traffic to your game or developer site? MochiAds offers developers self-serve ads for those who want to drive targeted gaming traffic to their site. In this guide, I’m going to show you how to use their service and purchase your first self-serve ads.

The first thing you’ll want to do is sign up for an account with MochiAds if you don’t have one already. It’s a fairly easy thing to do. Just visit Mochiads, and click on the sign up now option right underneath the for Developers panel. Just follow their direction, and soon enough you’ll be a full fledged member of mochiAds.

Now that you’re a member, go into your dashboard and click Try Mochiads Self Serve Advertising. It’s on the right side, underneath the traffic share and referrals options.

You should now be directed to the self-serve section of the site. Once you reach the self serve advertising section, you’ll be met with a screen looking like the one below.

This screen is fairly easy to use. Just enter the name for your advertisement in the first form. In the second, you’ll be asked to upload the image that you will be using for your ad. The image must be 300×250 in size and must be a JPG, GIF, or PNG. Lastly, enter the site page you want the ad to go to. Then, click next.

You’ll be taken to a page looking like this.

It’s a bit more complicated, so try to stay with me.

The first part determines where your ad will appear. If you choose to show your ad anywhere in the world, it means your ad can be viewed in any country. If, however you choose to show your ad only in certain countries, maybe ones that speak your language, you can choose the countries you want it to appear in. Just select them from a drop down list, and add whichever ones you like.

Next is the categories option. You can choose to either show your ad in all categories or pre-select categories of games for your ad to appear in. If you opt to choose your categories just pick and choose categories you feel fit your site’s theme.

Lastly, you have to pick a start date and end date for your campaign. You can either go for the stretch of small consistent traffic, or a quick burst of traffic. It’s your choice.

Now click Next Step.

You will be taken to a screen that looks like this:

The first box is where you put in a name for your ad. Name it something that has to do with what it is like for easy tracking of it.

Next is where you schedule your campaign Budget. This sis where you will allocate funds for your campaign. The funds will determine how many impression or clicks you will be able to receive. The current minimum for the budget is set at $100.00. So you’ll need to be able to afford that amount if you want to be using their self -serve ad service.

Next is your bid for the in game ads. You have two options here. You can either choose cost per click (CPC) or cost per mille (CPM).

CPC is when you are paying for each click that takes a player to your site. Clicks will range anywhere from 1 cent to however high you want to go. The chart shows that if you want traffic in Europe, it will probably be 3 cents a click. If you want traffic in America or the UK it will be upwards of 15 cents per click.

CPM is when you pay for or a thousand impressions of your ad. The cost is dependent on the number of impressions show, not on how many clicks you receive. If your ad gets a high clickthrough rate, then this is a good way to go. As the chart shows, depending on the type of traffic you wish to receive, you will have to pay anywhere from $0.15 to $2.00 for a thousand impressions.

When you have decided, click Next Step.

You’ll reach a screen that looks like this.

This is where you need to go through and make sure you entered all the data correctly. It will show how much money you have already set aside for ads (none yet in my case) as well as how much you owe. It also shows your ad, your targeting details, the types of games your chose, your placement name, and more.

There are two ways to pay for your new ads. You can either choose to use a credit card, or PayPal. PayPal is my preferred method, but use whichever on suits you. That’s it for the self-serve ads guide. Good luck with those ads! »

I will personally test Self-Serve ads in a couple of days, and I will share my results with you.

The different dialects of casual game monetization

I had the permission from Ada Chen to publish this post on my blog.

It’s very interesting to read what Ada thinks about casual game monetization because she is the Product Marketing Manager for Mochi Media.

Ada also runs her own blog at adachen.com.

« Games are hot lately and GDC 2009 is just around the corner.
When talking about games, most people tend to think about the business of making games in the loose terms of console, casual and mobile.

However, the casual games industry is definitely a lot more segmented than that. The conversations become radically different depending on what group you’re speaking with.

The basis for why this is stems from the underlying economics of each industry. This can be summed up in one question: How are you monetizing your users?

Put a grab bag of casual games people in the online games industry together in a room, and the conversations will be incredibly diverse – ranging from CPMs, RPMs, ARPUs, sponsorship deals, publisher relationships, and viral co-efficients.

In the end, they are all trying to answer the same question (how much money can I make?) but speaking with with different dialects. Here’s how those dialects, in a rough way, break out.

Web games, defined as distributed browser-based games that are not dependent on a destination site, primarily monetize users via advertising.

Gamers playing these web games are predominantly monetized via advertising today. Developers monetize games via in-game ads such as Mochi Media (where I work) and game portals hosting the content monetize the games via around-game ads. Developers license their content, do custom development deals, and sell game sponsorships to portals, who do these deals as a vehicle for traffic acquisition.

Direct user monetization via micro-transactions and purchases are still emerging. In a primarily ad-based market – developers and game portals are primarily focused on advertising-centric metrics: number of sites where the game is distributed, number of game plays, RPMs, CPMs, average click-through rate of advertisements, page views, time on site, efficient traffic acquisition, and basic retention stats to get people to come back.

Casual downloadable games, which are typically downloaded games that users can trial and then purchase.

These are typically monetized via direct one-time user sales from the game publisher. Developers typically work with an oligopoly of game portals who publish their games and sell them to a user base which they maintain, paying back a rev-share to the game creator.

With these limited distribution channels, the success of a game is largely dependent on getting onto the Top 10 list for a long enough period of time to make a profit. With the glut of games coming into the market, margins are getting slimmer, however, and several suggestions to improve this model are emerging.

Due to this model, however, most conversations in the downloadable space focus on publisher partnership development, developer community, channel management strategies, franchisable IPs and the stats are transaction focused – conversion rates, sales, break-even sales, etc.

Virtual worlds, or destination-based virtual worlds where users inhabit the world and interact with one another with virtual representations of themselves.

These are typically monetized via a mixed bag of advertising, subscription streams and virtual goods. The creator of the website is focused on engagement, retention and content to directly monetize users through purchases.

These virtual worlds therefore, are keeping an eye on the advertising numbers but are most concerned about retention and payment stats – PVs/visit, payment fraud, cohort analysis, engagement funnels, ARPUs and balancing their virtual economy so that the available money isn’t too much or too little. In addition, they are very focused on community management and support issues.

Social games, which blur quite a bit with virtual worlds, are games which are deeply integrated with the social graph and APIs available on social networks.

Social game developers make money from the users playing these games, with a combination of incentivized CPA offer networks and direct payments. These developers are focused on honing their viral loops to acquire new users into the system, creating engagement funnels to engage those users and convert them, and measure ARPUs for the users.

Unlike virtual worlds though, there’s less of an emphasis on community management since everyone playing the game with you is theoretically managed by the social graph, but instead more emphasis on viral spread. »

7 reasons NOT to get your game sponsored

While most developers are trying to get their games sponsored in as much ways as they know, Ryan from Freelance Flash Games (great blog! a must read) is going to explais us why you shouldn’t get your game sponsored.

Sponsorship is one of the biggest revenue streams for flash developers. Flash Game License reported over 1 million dollars in sales since it has begun.

So why would you ever decide to forget the sponsorship route? Here are 7 reasons why you shouldn’t get your game sponsored.

1. You can promote yourself. By not having a sponsor intro to your game, you will be placing more emphasis on your own logo and game intro. This will get you more recognition as a developer and can be useful in future sponsorship deals.

2. You can increase your site’s traffic. The key reason a sponsor will give your game a sponsorship is to send traffic back to his site. By putting your own logos into the game the traffic will be coming to your site.

3. You can use your new traffic to generate revenue. If your site is well optimized for advertising, the players that come back to it will click on your ads. Depending on how well your game spreads, this can generate a good amount of income.

4. You can increase your site’s branding. Even if players don’t click on the link to your site, they are still going to see your site’s logo. By showing them your logo enough times, you will build brand recognition for your site. So when they think of how great your game is, they will also think of the site that made it.

5. You can earn in-game advertising revenue. Some sponsors won’t allow you in-game advertising, which can cause you to lose out on revenue if your game becomes viral and spreads to thousands of sites. By not having it sponsored you are free to choose whether you want in-game ads or not.

6. Most Sponsorships are a one time deal only. Sponsorships will only give you a flat fee for your game. By hosting your game on your own site, you will still be receiving revenue from it months or even years from when you released it. There is no limit to how much you can make off of it.

7. You can still make money from non-exclusive deals. Just because you don’t have a primary sponsor doesn’t mean you can’t make money off many of the sites your game spreads to. Sell them a non-exclusive sponsorship and you will be making more money from your game, as well as getting more traffic sent back to your site.

Sponsorships may be the right choice for some developers, but if you want long term monetization opportunities you will have to turn away from sponsors and start driving traffic to your site.

Do you think you can make more money with or without sponsorship?

How to live forever

While you are reading this post, I’ll probably be in a long airplane trip to Cuba (guess how I am going to spend the hours onboard…).

Now let’s imagine I am inside this plane, and it crashes… I will probably die, and if not, I surely won’t be able to blog for a while.

Anyway, unless you listen to some TV news saying I died in a plane accident, you won’t notice it because next monday a new post will go live. Same thing for tuesday and so on.

That’s because I scheduled some posts for the next week.

Schedule posts for the years to come and you will live forever… just make sure someone pays for your domain renewal…

Quite ironic… reminds me something like “the show must go on”… if you want to contribute to the blog while I am away, read the guidelines at Blogging when you’re on holiday.

MagOrMin – an old php based game

This is an ooooooold (let’s call it) game I explained for a web programming class in 2003 or 2004.

It was made to explain some basics about Php, sessions, MySql and styles. All in one.

That’s how students learn… all in one and with a real world example.

It’s just a “guess if next number will be higher or slower than the current one” concept, the same that I applied to GuessNext last year.

It’s called MagOrMin and the name comes from the italian translation of “higher” (maggiore) and “lower” (minore).

Simply click to say if next number will be higher or lower, gain extra lives and compete for the high scores.

I plan to port the game in Ajax, adding a so-called “Web 2.0″ style and convert it into a Facebook application with all features… you know… I must monetize everything…

Meanwhile here it is the source code: Read more

How to use Google Maps API with Flash AS3 – part 2

This time I am going to show you how to add to your Flash Google Map the controls you are used to see in all maps, such as map type, zoom and overview.

You will find, looking at this example and next ones, Google Maps can be customized in a wide range of ways.

Read How to use Google Maps API with Flash AS3 if you are new to Google Maps API for Flash.

This time the code is six lines longer

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27

package {
	import flash.display.Sprite;
	import flash.events.Event;
	import flash.geom.Point;
	import com.google.maps.LatLng;
	import com.google.maps.Map;
	import com.google.maps.MapEvent;
	import com.google.maps.MapType;
	import com.google.maps.controls.MapTypeControl;
	import com.google.maps.controls.ZoomControl;
	import com.google.maps.controls.OverviewMapControl;
	public class googlemap extends Sprite {
		var map:Map = new Map();
		public function googlemap() {
			map.key="ABQIAAAAF5GHwa7hgxz5etSP-jJVwhSK_rP-_Usta8fEpiVtC50gLzF69hQ6_VK0zgpArekpmdsRCJK2Vnp60A";
			map.setSize(new Point(stage.stageWidth, stage.stageHeight));
			map.addEventListener(MapEvent.MAP_READY, onMapReady);
			this.addChild(map);
			function onMapReady(event:Event):void {
				map.setCenter(new LatLng(45.436319770227,12.33638048172), 13, MapType.SATELLITE_MAP_TYPE);
				map.addControl(new ZoomControl());
				map.addControl(new OverviewMapControl());
				map.addControl(new MapTypeControl());
			}
		}
	}
}

Line 9: MapTypeControl provides a control for selecting and switching between supported map types via buttons. The classic Map, Satellite, Hybrid, Terrain menu.

Line 10: ZoomControl contains buttons for zooming the map in and out and a zoom slider.

Line 11: OverviewMapControl shows a small map in the corner of the containing map and displays a rectangle representing the containing map viewport. The rectangle can be dragged, or the overview map can be dragged to update the viewport.

Line 21: Adding the zoom control

Line 22: Adding the overview control

Line 23: Adding the map type control

And the map now looks like this one:

Next time we’ll see how to change the look of buttons and other visual tricks

Download the source code.

Buy and sell arts for Flash Games with FlashGameArt.com

How many times did you draw a “not so good-looking” character in your game just because you aren’t that good at drawing and you did not now where to find the graphic you needed?

And how many times did you draw something interesting for your game, just to discover you changed something in the gameplay and now you don’t need your drawing anymore, realizing you wasted your time?

Here it comes FlashGameArt, from the same guys behind FlashGameLicense and FlashGameDistribution

In this blog you can find more information about FlashGameDistribution and FlashGameLicense, but the aim of this post is telling you what Chis Hughes says about his last work:

« As it says on the homepage of FGA: “FGA is a haven for Flash artists and the people who need their services.

Create and maintain your portfolio, accept jobs, manage projects, and get tips and advice from professional Flash artists!”

The site is still in beta and so currently you can only sign up as an artist and show off your portfolios, but we plan to add a ton of new features that will help artists get more exposure, and ultimately team up with developers to create games.

The site strives to continue our mission to assist indie developers (including artists) in making better games and monetizing those games more effectively.

We think by adding this site to the arsenal we already provide (including FlashGameLicense, FlashGameDistribution, and FlashGameBlogs) we can further help developers focus on the main goal of spending all your time and energy on making great games. »

Some images in portfolios are really interesting, like this one:

… now you know what to do when you need an alien spaceship or the zombie queen.

I’ll make a full review (and will use it) as soon as developers account will be available

Optimize your blog on mobile handsets with MobilePress

In the last times we saw an interesting diffusion of mobile handsets in the market, just think about the iPhone alone sold 4 million units in 200 days.

That’s why a lot of big sites such as Google and Facebook feature a mobile version.

What about a your blog?

MobilePress is a WordPress plugin that will render your WordPress blog on mobile handsets, with the ability to use customized themes.

The plugin also allows specific themes for specific devices / mobile browsers, such as iPhone, Opera Mini, Windows CE Mobile and other generic handset browsers.

The plugin also allows WordPress theme developers to create custom mobile themes for WordPress blogs using the MobilePress plugin.

Therefore, theme designers can create specific iPhone themes or generic themes.

Think of MobilePress as an enabler for WordPress on mobile.

I tried and I have to say I am very happy with it.

Look how the blog looks like on an iPhone (in this case, emulated on Safari for Windows)

and here it is a real world photo

I would like also you to notice the “View Full Version” link at the bottom of the page, as in most important iPhone enabled sites.

A must have… check the official page for more information

Blogging when you’re on holiday

A PROgrammer’s life is like being on holiday all the time, because there’s nothing better than doing the job you like the most – and making a living out of it.

Anyway, sometimes I have a real holiday trip.

One of the most interesting things about blogging is you can do it from everywhere, as long as you have a computer and an internet connection.

During these years, I blogged from home, from my office, from Milan, Barcelona, Menorca, Ibiza and Sardinia.

But it’s also true sometimes you just can’t blog. Just think about a really hard working day, a long airplane trip, a bad flu, “just another” try to beat a level in your favorite game, a date, and so on.

That’s why a good blogger should always have at least 5 blog posts saved for an emergency use.

You can use them when you are in troubles or, if you know next week you will be very busy, you can schedule them to be self-published at the desided time.

Look, you’re not cheating… all newspapers and new sites do the same: they have a library of articles ready to be used in case they need them. In most cases they talk about famous people lives and they are ready to be published just in case one of such people should suddenly die.

Next saturday I will travel to Cuba for two weeks… connecting to internet from the major cities is not a problem but in some smaller towns you just can’t do it.

So I am preparing some posts to be scheduled during my trip, just in case…

If you want to contribute to the blog with a post, it’s the right time to do it… if you have a blog and want one of your posts to be published here, or have something interesting to say, mail me a triqui[at]libero.it and I will schedule it. Obviously you and your site will get fully credited.

At the moment I am looking for posts about Flash, blogging, game design, monetizing and PROgramming.

Win $9,000 + $15,000 with Batman: The Brave and the Bold Game Casting Call!

Big news for Flash game developers.

MochiAds and Warner Bros have teamed up to bring you a fresh new promotion.

It’s an open casting call for all top Flash developers out there to submit your awesome game ideas for a chance to create an officially licensed game starring none other than Batman himself!

Out of all the submissions, Mochi will select their favorites. Those selected developers will then go on to create these games with, for the first time, official Batman assets provided by Warner Bros. and a chance to win one of many cash prizes!

DEADLINE

Game idea submissions for this promotion are to be submitted by 3/27/2009 11:59PM PST

PRIZE BREAKDOWN

Grand Prize – $9,000 + Contract to create another game for $15,000
WB Choice Award – Four winners receiving $5,000 each
WB Appreciation Award – Five winners receiving $4,000 each

RULES

Phase 1 (3/11/2009 – 3/27/2009)
Submit a game idea that describes your idea for the perfect Batman: The Brave and the Bold game! The submission form asks for items like “game description” and links to “game mockups”. The more comprehensive and detailed these pieces are, the better idea we will have on the game you plan on creating and can then judge accordingly.

Phase 2 (4/10/2009 – 7/2/2009)
Finalists from the casting call are announced and invited to start development on their game! Official Batman assets passed out to finalists participating in the game creation!

Phase 3 (7/3/2009)
Winners announced!

MY CONSIDERATIONS

Obviously, if just had to draw a game idea for a Batman game, it’s quite easy to talk about a GTA game where you roam around Gotham City hunting and chasing criminals.

Unfortunately you must be able to complete your game in about two months, so I think your project will be also evalued according to its chances to be completed in two months.

Moreover, you must provide mockups using the assets you can find at the official page, so I think this will be a very interesting contest.

Read more at MochiLand blog

Next Page →