How to make $1 with android games?
Yes $1. Something that me and my partner cannot even make on a game with 2 different types of ads with more than 50 installs.
I want to find out from those with experience on how to make even as little as $1 from android games on the google play store. We have used Admob and AdColony for our Brewery Defence game and it hasn't even made 0.5$ so we are doing something very wrong. Maybe our ads aren't intrusive enough and when they get viewed it doesn't generate a lot because they are only visible for like 2 seconds?
Please guys. We aren't able to sell the game because of the google wallet restriction but want some advice on how we can make as little as $1 and work from there.
I want to find out from those with experience on how to make even as little as $1 from android games on the google play store. We have used Admob and AdColony for our Brewery Defence game and it hasn't even made 0.5$ so we are doing something very wrong. Maybe our ads aren't intrusive enough and when they get viewed it doesn't generate a lot because they are only visible for like 2 seconds?
Please guys. We aren't able to sell the game because of the google wallet restriction but want some advice on how we can make as little as $1 and work from there.
Comments
50 installs won't cut it, I'm afraid.
From a thread I found via a quick google search to illustrate:
I think with AdColony its very clear that we need to make the in-game reward for watching videos much better but for AdMob I don't want it to show on the screen all the time as it makes the game feel worse.
1. A good game
2. Marketing
Both of these will contribute to numbers, 50 installs just isn't really good enough in a market that's tuned for titles to average like 1000+ sales. Market prices and forces adjust to those expectations.
Personally, I'd ask what your user retention stats are like. Yes, 50 users doesn't cut it, 50 users who open the game once and never again aren't going to help as much as 1 user that plays for 1 hour for a month. There's a big difference between active users and installs/downloads.
I'm not sure that trying to earn $1 from advertising is actually a useful thing to aim for though. It seems like building a large active user base is more important than earning first, because a small user base means that there's little info for the ads you get served to be targeted, meaning you're getting the "bad ads" that don't convert well, are targeted at the lowest common denominator and thus tend to pay well under $1CPM. Stuff like Evony or Fire Battle Boobs or whatever is currently occupying that slot.
Basically, I don't believe that relationship with ads is as linear as that article makes out. 100 active users is probably well under $1 a day. Take the Flappy Bird numbers: If 10M active users a day mean $50K ad revenue, and the game shows you an ad every time you die in the game (which is a lot, even a long game is generally less than a minute) so let's conservatively 3 monetization ad shows per minute. With a conservative playtime per active user per day of 1 minute (which is pretty huge, TBH). That's 30M nominal ad shows per day, so that meant maybe Flappy Bird was earning $1.6CPM. If users played for twice as long, that takes CPM down to $0.8... There's a ton of variance in that signal, is what I'm saying.
I'm actually not sure if anyone from SA is making money with ads in games. I'd love to find out if someone is though.
Now for the video ads what we are doing is awarding the player with "power points" which they use to cast abilities in the game. I think that the abilities aren't used as much and don't make the player really wanting more points by watching the ad.
So far what I have seen is the following.
AdMob = Needs to be displayed as often as possible and very useful in games where you die often etc
AdColony = Games that use energy or something similar where each time you do a battle it would use x amount of energy and your energy gets replenished over an hour or so. The video ad would be the shortcut to get extra energy. This method would probably require the game to be addictive instead of scaring the player away from the game when they have run out of energy. I think it would be nice to know the exact ways to use the ads instead of having a game with 1000 users but the ads aren't performing because they are being used incorrectly. I understand that more users would be more revenue but there is also better ways to use the ads and I know that my game is currently not using it correctly.
Threes has a very slow ad-cycle, but it does really well because it's got a huge user base and was redesigned around ads when they decided to make a free version. There are many ways to do this.
The above is all really correct, but note that ad earnings can vary drastically based on the time of the year, the games popularity, the genre and many other things. Thats why it's so difficult to estimate earnings. In short - ads are worth what people are willing to pay to be seen, much like Adwords (insurance adwords are super expensive for instance as it's competitive).
We've made money on ads in our games, eventually this became about 60% versus 40% for IAP, so it was a significant return. To make it work though you need a few things:
1) The game needs to have users, it needs to retain those users and it needs to be engaging so that your play periods are high. The ads companies then reward that with increased revenue because they're making more. In addition you can use your popularity to sell 'ad space' directly to other companies. Many of the ad companies have marketplaces that you can do direct deals with and we 'sold' a lot directly at key periods like xmas, since we had users playing our game - this meant we could charge up to 5x more per ad shown. Unfortunately this tactic takes a ton of time and you first need a ton of users or nobody will engage with you.
2) Your ads need to be focussed and not obtrusive. Soccer Moves initially had static ads (between levels) and while they worked there wasn't a high click through and so the money earned went up and down (due to time periods). When we added 'reward' video ads this drastically increased the revenue as there was a solid incentive (don't do rubbish "click me for 1/80th of a coin" ones, but real solid "why wouldn't I click this" type incentives - give away $1 worth of in game currency for instance). Importantly though you need to target the ads that can be displayed in your game - don't let just anything be displayed, since it lowers the interest of the viewer, since it's not focussed. We very specifically only worked with select types of ads, ones that were interesting to our target audience, and so our audience then clicked on these more often. The more clicks you then get, the higher the revenue return, which in turn results in the higher interest in partnering with you...things just keep repeating (if you can keep users playing). This again takes a ton of time and monitoring.
3) Initially you can also use the ad marketplaces to cross promote. We used Chartboost to engage with select developers and agreed to co-promote each others games for a specified target (say 10,000 views or you could specify installs). The idea is to promote their game in yours, provided they give the same. This can work really well if you can link to a big title that is of similar interest to your audience. It's a way to drive up your stats with regards to getting people to view the ads, plus it really helps with driving people to your game in the first place. Provided you can get agreements in place. We did a direct deal with Top Gear (outside of the app marketplaces) in the first place, and they guaranteed us 100,000 installs, provided we gave them 100,000 installs over the xmas period. For us this was a no brainer as we were guaranteed 100,000 users - we did realise we would loss money over a key period since that would be non-revenue generating ads, but the chance to grow our audience offset that and we figured we could retain those users and monetise later.
4) Use multiple ad networks within the game and switch to the one that's paying the most. There are API's and services out there to help with this even. The benefit is that your game will display the ad that will earn you the most revenue at that moment.
Thats the way to make money with ads, but note that this world changes so often and quick. It's very much the type of place that you need someone focussed on this 100% of their time rather than just periods of time. Setting up deals is key.
Saying that, much of this is irrelevant if you don't have the users playing the game. For now I would focus on making the game as sticky as possible so that people who play it never want to stop. If you can get that right, then you can start to increase audience numbers with Facebook ad spending as thats a simply way to get people to see your game. Advertise with 'install target' ads so that you only pay for a user who installs the app and then if the app is stick
There is a also a more in depth paper you can download.