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.