Leveraging social sites like stumbleupon/reddit?

[Callan S.]

Related to http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=28830.0 , but moving away from the word 'ransom' even more so.

Taking the idea of adsense for some return and leveraging it with stumbleupon, reddit and similar, has anyone considered a colusion group? Pretty much an arragement where anyone in the group can point out a page to the rest of the group and they all stumble it/reddit etc. Pretty much everyone does it for everyone else. Perhaps at most a page per every two days per group member or something, so it's not too nuts.

After all, it's not utterly colusion - we all have some understanding of each others works here, even if we don't agree on everything (clicking 'I like this' can mean 'I'd like this to recieve critique from more people!' )

Though I'll say upfront this is an experiment in whether adsense is really worth it - so far it seems like I'll crawl toward the cancel minimum amount and give up on it there. The normal payout amounts would take literally years to accumulate. Better to grow more crops in the backyard...

[guildofblades]

>>Though I'll say upfront this is an experiment in whether adsense is really worth it - so far it seems like I'll crawl toward the cancel minimum amount and give up on it there. The normal payout amounts would take literally years to accumulate. Better to grow more crops in the backyard...<<

I think andsense only makes sense if you have a substantial volume of site traffic coming from a broader set of invidiuals. We experimented with adsense on guildofblades.com for a while, but it never really added up to much revenue, in spite of some fair traffic to the site. We found folks on the site were largely there for a specific thing and less inclined to "click away" towards something else.

However, on our turn based MMO game sites, adsense generates a good return and we easily surpass the minimum payment theshholds each month, often times hitting several multiples of the minimum. But those sites get a lot of "casual" traffic for folks just checking the sites and games out, of regular players who are there participating in the forums or doing player to plaayer e-mails, none of which has them overly glued to the site, so they are more prone to clicking on adsense ads should one of them seem interesting to them.

Thanks,
Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Retail Group - http://www.gobretail.com
Guild of Blades Publishing Group - http://www.guildofblades.com
1483 Online - http://www.1483online.com

[Callan S.]

Thanks for the info!

I was thinking more in terms of CPM, if I'm using the right acronym, where you get some money just for visits. And well done on surpassing the minimum paymenth threshold each month! Admirable Just a question on that - does your game have a certain amount of action points per day? I'm thinking players use up all action points, now they have nothing to do at the site the adsense adverts right there, waiting for them = a click? Just hypothesizing. I wish I knew how to make a browser based game - are there any websites around about that?

[guildofblades]

Well, our game isn't a browser based game. It does have a download and install for the map aspects of the game. However, when in the game program, the game simply ports in the website for itself (using IE) for all aspects other than the map viewer.

People don't really run out of credits as games are turned based, and other than a blitz game (which functionally aren't working at the moment as we restructure things once again), games move at a maxumum rate one turn per night. Though a person might be signed up to multiple different ongoing games. But each game will require a player to go through a number of phases, with each phase being a new web page (and hence new ads) or new step to do on the map, and with each phase in the map, we have a php page above the map load in new, loading in a new leaderboard. Additionally since they are games of diplomacy as much as anything else, players have on in-site e-mail box where they can send and recieve messages to other players in the game. Each mail page read generates more ad displays.

We use a number of CPM based ad agencies as the primary ad choices, but when they run out of ads to sell for display to a particular user, they default into secondary ad lines. We use google ads as one of those secondaries. We are signed up to the CPM campaigns, but they never seem to have much of those, so most ads default to the adsense standard of pay per click.

Ultimately we found that there is a limit to the value you can derive from displaying a multitute of ads to the same person. After just a few views most networks will have shown all the relevent ads they can within a limited time frame and will default to your secondary networks. So while it may be possible to display 500 ads to a person within a prolonged session of play, realistically, until you are a giant in the field and have a multitude of ad networks to work with, you'll be lucky to monitize a small fraction of those ads. As a smaller publisher, generating ad sales revenues from online sites generally require a broad set of unique users as opposed to offering a deep emersion to each user. That can change somewhat if you ever grow large enough to have your own internal ad sales teams or you can attact the largest of ad networks.

Thanks,
Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Retail Group - http://www.gobretail.com
Guild of Blades Publishing Group - http://www.guildofblades.com
1483 Online - http://www.1483online.com

[Callan S.]

Oh, so your like one of the classic play by post games and only partly automated...and just in adverts your turning over a fair bit each month? Wow, nice work there! And it sounds like that e-mail thing helps a community to form and bond over your game, which I'm guessing really helps keep player numbers up.

I want to ask what CPM agencies you use and how you make it that it switches over to adsense after they run out? But the technical part of that may be too complicated to describe, I understand. Still, I'm curious. And I agree, adsense doesn't seem to do alot of CPM.

A bit on the side though - some of your adds are the teeth whitening ones. I heard adsense stopped carrying them as it was a pyramid scam or something. That might not be the case, but what do you think about that as an issue?

Thanks again, Ryan!