To be honest with you, I did think about making the post before I clicked “post”.

One, because of my first comment, which sounded vitriolic, but wasn’t, and two, because you’re right, I have no idea how much you get from ad revenue.

Out of interest, would 1 click, per active player, per day, cover many of the costs?

A simple: “Click the ad, get 1 extra forum visit” per day, would help. It would spur the people who don’t donate to contribute in the little way they can.

Some people can’t donate, some people don’t donate. But if you had one person donate $10 in 3 months, or one person clicking an advert once a day for 3 months, even though I don’t know your accounts, I’d bet my girlfriend on the fact you would make more.

The added plus point being: More ad clicks = More you can reap from advertising deals.

Let me know if I’m way off the mark.

Edited to add: Just noticed your point about donating to remove ads.

Rather than an extra forum visit, why not one click = remove ads for the day? You still gain 1 click per user per day, and the people with spare notes, can donate.

Philanthropist Posted:

To be honest with you, I did think about making the post before I clicked “post”.

One, because of my first comment, which sounded vitriolic, but wasn’t, and two, because you’re right, I have no idea how much you get from ad revenue.

Out of interest, would 1 click, per active player, per day, cover many of the costs?

A simple: “Click the ad, get 1 extra forum visit” per day, would help. It would spur the people who don’t donate to contribute in the little way they can.

Some people can’t donate, some people don’t donate. But if you had one person donate $10 in 3 months, or one person clicking an advert once a day for 3 months, even though I don’t know your accounts, I’d bet my girlfriend on the fact you would make more.

The added plus point being: More ad clicks = More you can reap from advertising deals.

Let me know if I’m way off the mark.

Edited to add: Just noticed your point about donating to remove ads.

Rather than an extra forum visit, why not one click = remove ads for the day? You still gain 1 click per user per day, and the people with spare notes, can donate.

Two flaws to this post:

1. You once again fail to get the point he’s making. I would gladly pay for Ep2. And this forum visit thing has been gone over before. And that one click to remove ads is also very special, the companies would not want him to do that. If you really have such a ****fit about ads, somehow manage to reach your hand to your wallet (THIS IS THE HARD PART), take out that plastic card, and type in the number for some brownie points. Personally, I like the ads and make an attempt to once in a while click on one that seems relevant to my interests. If it wasn’t for ads, I would have never found this site.

2. You don’t have a girlfriend, gtfo.

I’m probably going to buy a couple new characters, and if the price was around $5-10 I’d probably pay for Episode 2 too.

Re: Ads

First off, I should point out that encouraging people to click on ads goes against the terms of services. The idea is, advertisers buy the ads from google under the impression that people who click on them are interested in what the ad is offering.

Also, Google has extremely advanced software for tracking who is clicking on ads. It might not seem like a fraudulent click to you, but if you clicked on one ad every day, google would eventually figure out you’re not clicking out of interest, you’re clicking for another reason, and I wouldn’t get paid for your clicks in the first place. So you haven’t really helped us by doing that.

Having said all that, ads work best when you see something you’d be interested in and follow through. We’ve tried to make sure Google shows ads for things you guys might like (like other web games), so that you can click on them if you’re curious.

tl;dr version: Click on ads if you are interested in the thing presented, because google won’t count it if you click hundreds of times anyway.

Mewmew Posted:

I’ve bought brownie points a few different times, and yet I still wouldn’t agree to pay to play. I love this game, a lot, but I’d rather you thought up more ways and reasons to make people want to get brownie points than to turn it pay to play.

There has to be many more things you could do with brownie points in order to get more people to buy them.

We already have a long list of Brownie Ideas, but we’d love to hear more from you guys. More things to buy will definitely be coming!

maddsurgeon Posted:

The Onion has an ad that you see every time you go to the site, while you’re being redirected to the main page. They’ve been running free for years, and have recently added streaming videos. Of course, they’re strictly a humor site and not a game, but the point is that you should be able to charge more for ads that are more prominently displayed.

I’m not a marketing person or anything, so I could be way off. But I still think more ads are a good way to make revenue. People who play browser games generally log on at least once a day. That’s a lot of traffic.

It’s hard to compare one site to another, especially a very dynamic game like ours to a largely static site like the onion. Man I wished all I had to do was show static articles, it would be so easy to serve that up Log in to see images! (although I do remember a time when every Wednesday the Onion would go slow as hell after their updates).

I think it’s possible we could make more money off our existing ads if we tuned them a bit, and we will probably look into that in the future.

No, thanks.Log in to see images!

I really like the game, but I wouldn’t pay to play it.

Philanthropist Posted:

Hell, I’ve reached for my card numerous times, and paid for games.

I’ll end up donating to this one after a few weeks I reckon, too.

That said, you “like the ads”? What, are you ****ing very special? If I wanted google ads, I’d search google for what I wanted.

1 click removes the ad for the day is a vastly flawed suggestion, and one which I’ll retract.

I’m telling my girlfriend on you, by the way. She is SO gonna beat your dad up.

How dare I want to find new websites!

To Moderators: If you feel that this shouldn’t be posted, feel free to delete the post.

A lot of people here have never had any experience from web ads so I’ll post some of my stats.

As i no longer use AdSense and have sold my website I’ll post some stats so you get a sort of picture of how much my site was pulling in from AdSense.

I was running a Arena calculator for World Of Warcraft before blizzard made their own. I got it linked in the community news on the wow-europe.com front page. When it peaked i had about 100,000 unique visitors a month and about 1,000,000 page views. The average clicks a day were 22,000 and around 21 clicks. That equals to around a ~0.10% click-trough-rate. The daily income from AdSense was 4-15$ with an average of 4.76$, making the monthly income somewhere between 100$-300$.

That page was about 1kb in size and used about 2gb of traffic per month. It used very little, like microscopic amounts of resource from the server. Now ForumWarz uses about 25gb of traffic A DAY[1]. And a powerful server thats taking 25-50 requests a second[2], so I’m guessing the costs of the server easily exceed at least what i made. And don’t forget development costs.

I wrote the “one click a day will skyrocket income” thing before without really taking everything int oconsideration, and as Evil Trout explain, it won’t work so I’ll take that back, but hopefully these numbers help to understand, at least to some degree how much web ads really pull in.

[1][2] – http://blog.forumwarz.com/rjs/slides.html

Evil Trout Posted:

It’s hard to compare one site to another, especially a very dynamic game like ours to a largely static site like the onion. Man I wished all I had to do was show static articles, it would be so easy to serve that up Log in to see images!

I remember that too, now that you mention it. I guess I didn’t think about how lots flashy ads could bog down the site…still, there’s room to grow, I’ll bet.

i would probably pay a small flat fee. like 3 brownie points or something.

I’d pay a one time fee…maybe…if it was 10 bucks or under.

And again, that’s a big maybe. And only if the second episode is as lengthy as the first.

The 4 visits per day help a lot to make it a more fun experience, last longer, etc.