4 steps to turn your Flash Arcade site into a two million visitors/month portal
Old time readers could remember Michael Edlavitch‘s Hooda Math, because two years ago I blogged about its case history and how Michael built from scratch a 10,000 visitors/day Flash Arcade site.
A lot of time passed (actually two years in Flash related industry is really a big amount of time), and guess what happened to Hooda Math? It turned into a 2,000,000 visitors/month portal.
Michael shares with us the milestones of this long time ride:
Arcade growth can be determined by 4 stages: in-house games distribution, sponsorships, site-locks, and exclusively hosted.
Stage one, in-house game creation and distribution, the arcade owner cannot afford to sponsor games, so he develops his own games, brands them, spreads them and hopes for traffic. At the same time you are adding games to your site with another sites branding all over it. But hey at least your arcade has games and hopefully good ones. Feel free to use some of ours at http://hm.gs/free.
Stage two, sponsorship, the arcade owner has made a little money, now he can either pay someone to create games for his site or start sponsoring already developed games. Either way the arcade owner is going to fork over some of his petty cash. For the most bang for his buck it is probably easiest to go sponsor a game at FGL (a lot of times the developer will want to include mochi or cpmstar ads, and to keep the price down you will subcumb). At least he did not have to waste time making games; instead the arcade owner can waste time spamming, improving SEO or figuring out some other way to get people to come to his site, like writing guest posts on blogs with his anchor text, “Math Games“, and a link to his site within it. Look up anchor text, it is very important for SEO and, more importantly, he should be looking up and learning about SEO, which is always changing. Not to mention social marketing like http://facebook.com/hoodamath/.
Stage three, site-locks, when the arcade owner has received a decent amount of traffic to your site and he is making enough money that if he got fired, he could still survive on rent, an Internet connection, and peanut butter and crackers (and really cheap beer). Analysis comes into play and he should be asking himself, “So, why are you still wasting ad space on other peoples ads and out-links.” Every time a user clicks a “more games” link inside another arcade’s branded game, they could have been clicking on one of your google ads! (notice how I am speaking directly to stage 3 arcade owners now). Listen, now that you have a lot of traffic, do the math, if thousands of people are clicking to go play a game elsewhere, when they could have clicked on an ad to buy penny loafers, you just lost money. It is time to buy site-locks, because you still want the already developed games, but rather pay a chunk of money up front and not lose clicks or worse yet traffic. Stage 3 will last a while. Stage three is the money stage, where most arcade owners would love to be. A perfect example, Armor Games, notice how all of their games are branded or site-locked with swords. I personally believe Armor should be on Stage 4, but Stage 4 is more of a state of mind than an actual business strategy. Stage 4 is where Addicting Games lives and few others should be. Impulsively, in Hooda Math Games land we like to fool ourselves and hang-out in Stage 4.
Stage 4, exclusively hosted games. You may be asking, “Why would I not brand the hell out of great game and spread it to the top sites to get more traffic. Hopefully, after doing the math, your arcade believes that, like site-locks, the benefits of exclusively hosting out-weighs advertising by distribution. You may delude yourself into thinking, “Your arcade has received as much traffic as possible from other sites. I would like to remind you that the other arcades still host your old branded games and hopefully new users are still discovering your arcade. But now your arcade wants users to think that the only place they can play a game like “Grow School” (yes, there is a Grow School now). Play Grow School at http://hm.gs/growschool. (More about Short Links on my blog, mikeedla.com).
Caveat, not every arcade follows these 4 stages. Some arcade owners are tripping and jump straight to Stage 4, and others are stingy and refuse to leave Stage 2. Either way, this article is the current belief of an arcade owner that has earned 2 million Monthly Uniques in under 3 years times.
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This post has 24 comments
Heglaé
Amazing post. I just started my girls games site and I’m still in Stage 1, developing my own games and spreading it around, but as I have to do games for anothers flash games company to pay my bills, I almost don’t have time to do exclusive games for my won site. T_T
Dieta
Och. I realy like this story. It motivated me!:)
Istvan
And what about comment with anchor text “Cool Games Free”? Oh, wait these are nofollow links :S :) Anyway I’ll use my name!:) Well done Michael, there are tons of arcade sites out there, it is a really nice job what you achieved. It gives me motivation to continue and work on our arcade site.
Chris Moeller
Very nice article! I was feeling a little overwhelmed with how it would even be slightly possible to compete with the likes of Kongregate, but this gives a nice, iterative approach to it!
It would be nice to see some figures comparing different ways to make money with flash games- whether a portal is needed to actually make a living, or if you can subside on sticking to just making games, and if there is a direction to go outside of one portal (many different niche portals? One generalized portal, or many?
Very inspiring!
Prasanna kumar k k
A unique thing about hooda math is that it has been successful with educational games, which actually educates something more useful to the audience unlike the mindless shooter games. This makes it more than just a games site.
Vladimir
:p that is exactly what I want to know…”whether a portal is needed to actually make a living, or if you can subside on sticking to just making games”
Michael
I don’t think a portal is necessary. I believe you can make a living at making good games (which is probably a lot more fun). But for those of us that are better at business and internet marketing and just plain boring hard work we have to stick to arcade ownership.
Arcade Growth in 4 stages of game licensing | Michael Edlavitch
[...] site-locks, and exclusively hosted. Read my guest post on Emanuele Feranato’s Blog @ http://www.emanueleferonato.com/2011/08/10/4-steps-to-turn-your-flash-arcade-site-into-a-two-million... … other posts by [...]
Porter
Excellent article, very good points, and I’m glad I agree with all of it. I plan to eventually get into this market myself, but for now, I’m just perfecting my game making skills and programming skills. When the time comes, I’ll definitely follow a path much like the above.
Ben Reynolds
2 million views per month! Pretty amazing stuff! Great info and tips, it almost makes me want to start my own game portal… but I don’t have the time to dedicate myself to that. Thanks for sharing!
Radu
2 million views per month is good but not amazing. However, this article mentions 2 million visitors who usually generates more than 5 million page views.
We Game
Very nice article. I really like the four steps, and going to try them!
I think I can now only dream of 2million visitors a month (a)
Physics Games
Yeah, Hooda Math rocks. Great example of arcade site famous in it’s own niche…
Gaurav
Hi,
Great article there. I am in stage 1 with my site coffingames.com and have been self sponsoring since Feb, 2011. So, its been around 8 months and I hope to get to stage 2 soon :) I have sold a site lock of one of my great games to hoodamath (game was The Tricky Tumblers which I made in 3 days ;)). Good thing about him is he may let you keep your branding but yeah that compensates for lower cost of sitelock.
Gaurav
Hi Emanuele,
Can you change my name from Gaurav (my real name) to “Best Online Games” in this comment http://www.emanueleferonato.com/2011/08/10/4-steps-to-turn-your-flash-arcade-site-into-a-two-million-visitorsmonth-portal/#comment-941390 if you approve it.
After submitting comment, I realized that it linked my name to my website, which should rather be that keyword instead of my name. Thanks in advance.
jarofed
Michael, I’m also working at the developing of flash games site Jar of Games and would be very appreciate if you could tell more about another ways of promotion (not only traffic from games).
Natasha Oliver
Hooda Math is a great site! I, too, have an educational game site, but have chosen ONLY to host games that I create myself. But, I have tried to lock the site so that my games are ONLY found on my site. This approach leaves me out of some of your stages, but I am hoping to keep finding ways to make the site grow without change that. Http://www.fun4thebrain.com has grown immensely in the last four years, but I am still working out how to make it produce more money.
Thanks for this article as it gave me some ideas to help with that. Way to go Hooda Math! You are an inspiration!
Solitaire
This article is spot on, we’ve followed a similar process for my solitaire games site Solitaire Paradise. We are just pondering Stage 3, but we still make plenty of our own solitaire games – which we do enjoy doing. We are particularly proud of our most recent game Golf Solitaire Pro.
Juegos fritos
I began as a hobby a little games site for my son, 10 years old.
In internet seems that there be a blindness to the banners and cpm’s have fallen. Do you think that one part of visitors would pay a minimun price for play flash games without ads during a month for example ?
Kevin
Damn nice and simple method ! I’ll probably try to make some game or sponsor it !!! I have few arcade site but really low visitors…
http://play.x8smile.net – Zuma deluxe game online
Http://nzgame.net – Robot unicorn attack game !
Need more work on them !
ZoeZo Entertainment
Thank you for an excellent read, and great advice. Really loved the articall
CafeCafe
@Juegos Fritos: You should ask Kongregate about that. They just started a premium service without ads and more features with a fee per year.
Great article Michael!
My site (cafecafegames.com) is still pretty humble. We are focused on point and click escape the room games and we sponsor close to 10 games per month.
640K montly visits and going up slowly.
Best regards and congrats to Emanuele for your blog.
A flash portal? Oh God why? | Vladimirsan
[...] to create a flash portal (even with the monsters that are out there like kongregate) and that coupling your flash portal with flash games is a great strategy. And just like that…my flash arcade idea was born. BUT! am I doing this JUST because there are [...]
Vince W.
One of the best simplified articles of getting traffic to your arcade site. Honestly, it’s a TON of hard work, especially getting through that first stage. The feeling of being at stage-three and your work becoming a part-time job is amazing. I think that stage three is a very appealing milestone to all of us arcade owners.
The way Michael does it is actually pretty hard, and not the way that many of us arcade owners do it now. However, seeing that Michael has gotten extremely great results from this, I may have to incorporate these ideas into my own site.
Thanks again!