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Advertising in Mobile Games is Broken

blog.betable.com

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Re: Advertising in Mobile Games is Broken

#31

Post by jff »

drcube wrote: post #18

My wife stopped letting our son play Angry Birds on her phone because of the scantily clad ladies advertising "meet sexy singles in your area". When will Adblock Plus port to Android?

Here's the solution I use: turn off all networking capabilities when playing Angry Birds. The Power Control widget (on my phone at least, Droid Incredible with Cyanogenmod) allows you to quickly turn off wifi and cell data transfers. You can still receive calls and texts, but the ads won't load.

Moral questions raised by this are left as an exercise to the reader.

Re: Advertising in Mobile Games is Broken

#32

Post by jff »

TapMeJoshua wrote: post #12

Josh from Tap.Me here. We are taking a game design approach to solve this problem in a no-popup or banner ad way. More Google AdSense. Here is why we are doing it right: http://tap.me/wp/2011/05/game-flow-and-in-game-advertising/ We think the players should have the fun they are there to have and will appreciate it when brands add value to that experience vs. get in their way.

An ad in the comments of an article about how annoying ads in games are. And the article itself turns out to be a sales pitch at the end. Is this... is this double-irony?

Re: Advertising in Mobile Games is Broken

#33

Post by drcube »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #19
drcube wrote: post #18

My wife stopped letting our son play Angry Birds on her phone because of the scantily clad ladies advertising "meet sexy singles in your area". When will Adblock Plus port to Android?

Sorry, but AdBlock on a game like Angry Birds IS stealing. Rovio certainly has a lot of money, but other developers aren't so lucky -- and many are barely scraping by. Try investing nearly $5000 and seven months of your life in developing a game that's being ad supported, where your income relies on ads, and then watch people joke about blocking them. It sucks, trust me.

Is changing channels during the commercial break "stealing"?

Re: Advertising in Mobile Games is Broken

#35

Post by TapMeJoshua »

jff wrote: post #32
TapMeJoshua wrote: post #12

Josh from Tap.Me here. We are taking a game design approach to solve this problem in a no-popup or banner ad way. More Google AdSense. Here is why we are doing it right: http://tap.me/wp/2011/05/game-flow-and-in-game-advertising/ We think the players should have the fun they are there to have and will appreciate it when brands add value to that experience vs. get in their way.

An ad in the comments of an article about how annoying ads in games are. And the article itself turns out to be a sales pitch at the end. Is this... is this double-irony?

Just letting readers know about our option in the space. There are few comments about how no one is taken an adSense approach to how in-game ads work and I wanted to let people know that we are.

Yes it's ironic ;).

Re: Advertising in Mobile Games is Broken

#36

Post by TapMeJoshua »

sscheper wrote: post #34

I don't get why it's broken? Any numbers/data to share? Why does Angry Birds contain ads if they're broken? Honestly, not trying to be a dick, just trying to understand the problem.

These guys make plenty of cash with those ads. The bigger problem is that it is one of the only options they have and it comes with the price tag of some users complaining about the experience.

Re: Advertising in Mobile Games is Broken

#37

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

svmegatron wrote: post #25
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but AdBlock on a game like Angry Birds IS stealing. Rovio certainly has a lot of money, but other developers aren't so lucky -- and many are barely scraping by. Try investing nearly $5000 and seven months of your life in developing a game that's being ad supported, where your income relies on ads, and then watch people joke about blocking them. It sucks, trust me.

I don't disagree with you, but drcube's point is a serious and valid one. It also smells like an opportunity for devs and/or ad networks to provide much better targeting. Ad-supported games for kids should be able to get kid-appropriate ads if the developer or the parent so choose. I haven't done enough ad-supported game development to know if that kind of thing is currently possible, but its something I would look i…

It's a tricky problem, actually.

My game as an example: Almost half of the users are under 18, but most of the other half are in the 18-35 range (according to Flurry metrics, which guesses what the age of a user is based on what OTHER apps on the device are reporting -- I'm not asking them myself).

Unless I ask each user how old they are, I can't know whether or not to serve them ads. And if I DO ask them, then people often feel like I'm prying too much. ESPECIALLY if I'm asking if they are under 15 (and finding out they're under 13 would cause COPPA to kick in [1]).

I already have the "no adult ads" selected in my ad provider, which is supposed to block singles ads, but I've seen them come up anyway. Presumably if I fed them an age that I'd gotten from a user they would be filtering the ads more, if only to target them better.

Don't know.

[1] http://www.coppa.org/

Re: Advertising in Mobile Games is Broken

#38

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

jbermudes wrote: post #29
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but AdBlock on a game like Angry Birds IS stealing. Rovio certainly has a lot of money, but other developers aren't so lucky -- and many are barely scraping by. Try investing nearly $5000 and seven months of your life in developing a game that's being ad supported, where your income relies on ads, and then watch people joke about blocking them. It sucks, trust me.

How is removing something that was given to you in a package stealing? If someone gave me a free magazine, but the magazine had ads, you're saying it'd be stealing to rip those pages out?

Magazines are paid for the number of ads they distribute. And the ads DID make it to you, so even if you go through them all and rip them out, you ARE being exposed to them, if only briefly. And the ads can't be all destroyed unilaterally by installing MagazineAdBlock.

If you block ads, you have NO chance of seeing them, and therefore I have no chance of making the $0.03 that's typical from a single click. And worse, if you block those annoying ads, then you have no motivation to BUY the version without ads!

If everyone blocked ads, you would have no more free games to steal. If you don't want ads, buy games without ads. Don't try to hide behind bogus rationalizations. Blocking ads is clearly unethical, even if you don't want to call it stealing, because the developer intends to make money on his product and is giving it to you with the express understanding that it's ad supported.

Re: Advertising in Mobile Games is Broken

#39

Post by dlss »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #19
drcube wrote: post #18

My wife stopped letting our son play Angry Birds on her phone because of the scantily clad ladies advertising "meet sexy singles in your area". When will Adblock Plus port to Android?

Sorry, but AdBlock on a game like Angry Birds IS stealing. Rovio certainly has a lot of money, but other developers aren't so lucky -- and many are barely scraping by. Try investing nearly $5000 and seven months of your life in developing a game that's being ad supported, where your income relies on ads, and then watch people joke about blocking them. It sucks, trust me.

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/1121596044/how-piracy-works

Re: Advertising in Mobile Games is Broken

#40

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

dlss wrote: post #39
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but AdBlock on a game like Angry Birds IS stealing. Rovio certainly has a lot of money, but other developers aren't so lucky -- and many are barely scraping by. Try investing nearly $5000 and seven months of your life in developing a game that's being ad supported, where your income relies on ads, and then watch people joke about blocking them. It sucks, trust me.

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/1121596044/how-piracy-works

He theorizes that pirates actually might promote the game. My Flurry numbers beg to differ.

My "unlocked" version of the game was pirated on July 15. Almost 2000 new users ran it that day, and all but about 10 of them were pirated copies.

So did I see my sales jump? I sold about 10 units that day, and 5 the next day. I don't think I've seen the numbers top 20 sales per day. If there are moral pirates out there, they didn't show up in sufficient numbers to make up for the devastation that followed.

How about downloads of the free version? Over the next two days, it crashed from consistently getting 750-900 downloads a day to about 350 downloads a day. And because of that drop, it fell off the charts and continued to crash down to 100-200 downloads a day.

So as nice as the theory is -- and as much as it might work for music, where the numbers are MUCH larger and there is some data supporting the theory -- it simply doesn't work for games.

In fact, it pretty much killed my game, because of the way the market rankings work -- the crash in downloads meant it lost position, which meant even fewer downloads, and a death spiral ensued.

So don't give me "piracy is actually good for your game!" when it killed mine. And it's still rated 4.5 stars, with tons of "Awesome game!" reviews, so don't tell me people don't like it.

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