In-game banners, after 1,000,000 plays

October 22, 2009 • Flash, Game design, Monetize by Emanuele Feronato • 13 Comments

Some time ago I released SamePhysics, my first Box2D game, a self-sponsored game with a rotating banner placed in the lower play area.

I decided to rotate five different banners, four of them link to my sites/games and one was sold to Rotten Tomato Games.

I published some considerations after 75,000 views

Let’s see what happened after 1,000,476 views

1: Banner to Paypal asking for a donation: 16081 clicks

2: Banner to Red Flowers: 18004 clicks

3: Banner to this blog: 15991 clicks

4: Banner to triqui.com: 15677 clicks

5: Banner to Rotten Tomato Games: did not track the clicks, but we suppose they can be about 16K as there isn’t a great click-through difference among banners.

So the total amount of clicks is 81753, that’s 8.17%.

It’s not easy to give a value to 80K clicks, I can only say 0.81% of Paypal clicks made an average donation of $0.93, and I don’t think any player got fidelized to triqui.

Probably some of them played a bit to Red Flowers and some of them still read this blog.

Anyway, let’s suppose the worst scenario, with all people visiting such sites only once.

At a $1.51 eCPM, triqui scored $27.18, the blog ($3.22 eCPM including sponsors) $51.49 and Red Flowers ($0.17 eCPM) $3.06 while donations raised $135.62 (once converted some euros to dollars)

So the minimum banner earning is $217.35 (about $0.22 eCPM), but we know in some ways (like this blog) every loyal reader is priceless.

I would like to know your considerations about in-game banners.

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This post has 13 comments

  1. Michael Long

    on October 22, 2009 at 11:17 pm

    Wow this really changes my views on in game banners, I always thought that it would clutter the game screen too much using in game banners. But with earnings like that how can i refuse.

    A Great Read as usual Emanuele!
    Thankyou

  2. Josh

    on October 22, 2009 at 11:25 pm

    I absolutely hate MochiAds, because the video ads are insanely annoying, and the pregame ad system can render a game unplayable sometimes, especially if you opt for the encryption and automatic updating features.

    I have yet to find a good low-end advertising solution for Flash games. I make more money from page ads, though, so I don’t have a lot of motivation to search for Flash-friendly ad networks.

  3. Kaan Soral

    on October 22, 2009 at 11:52 pm

    %8.17 click rate is extremely high

  4. Israel Lazo

    on October 22, 2009 at 11:53 pm

    Actually people donate for games, that’s interesting. If my calculator is working fine, you could be making about $600 from this game with only the banner for donations. Interesting. Is my math ok?

  5. Emanuele Feronato

    on October 23, 2009 at 12:38 am

    israel, I guess you’re wrong, the banner switches at every level, so 80K clicks does not mean 80K people :)

  6. Guest

    on October 23, 2009 at 12:44 am

    It’s true. the eCpm for me is VERY LOW in game banners, but the ECPM in page banners is good. I think that’s why people sponsor games… they want content to their portals because web banners are by far more effective… the in-game banner income is nice when your game got viral and the money comes from different sources, but nothing to get crazy about

  7. Chris

    on October 23, 2009 at 8:52 am

    It seems like your banner should be a lot more valuable than it was. With 80,000 clicks at $0.05 CPC, you’d get $4,000. If this were through a company like MochiAds (who shares 50% of ad revenue), the developer would get $2,000. At 1,000,000 hits this would come out to $2.00 eCPM, very respectable.

    Of course the $0.05 CPC is an estimated guess. And real ads tend to have much lower click rates than ads for flash portals (like Triqui).

    Still, banner ads are a cool idea.

  8. zproxy

    on October 23, 2009 at 9:46 am

    Hi Emanuel, It would be cool if you would do a research on ingame monetization like mochicoins and alike too disclosing the analysis of earnings. :)

  9. Yarden Refaeli

    on October 23, 2009 at 10:45 am

    Thanks, interesting…

  10. Jay

    on October 23, 2009 at 11:31 am

    Let me make sure I understand this sentence correctly:

    “0.81% of Paypal clicks made an average donation of $0.93″

    So 0.81% of the 16k people who clicked on the paypal (13k people), each donated $0.93 on average?

    I think when putting a banner like that, it’s pretty much the same as taking a piece of the publishers webspace and placing your own ad on it, since the area isn’t used for your game.

    Some publishers might not like this for obvious reasons.

  11. Jay

    on October 23, 2009 at 11:34 am

    “0.81% of Paypal clicks made an average donation of $0.93?

    That means a total of 12113 dollars. That can’t be what you mean?!

  12. Emanuele Feronato

    on October 23, 2009 at 12:33 pm

    Unfortunately 13K is 81% of 16K, not 0.81%… sigh…

  13. Prankard

    on October 25, 2009 at 12:05 pm

    Good stats :)
    If your interested about stats and figures I’ve gotten a game released with CPM star with interesting results. Been out for about 9-10 months.
    I recall some t&c saying I can’t publish specifics but if you email me then I can email it to you so long as it doesn’t get published.
    Interesting stats as the game uses interlevel ads and I tracked the game plays vs the ad views.

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