In Game Advertising - Yes or No?

Before I go into detail about those two stores, Play Store and App Store, there is an important question that really needs to be asked.

Do we have in-App advertising?

In today's very consumer driven world, there is little value that is applied to innovation or investment when it comes to the mass driven app gaming market.  People have an expectation of high quality and low (free!) cost to them.  No longer do people think they should be paying for applications, everything should be free!  Well..shouldn't it?

A truly successful app can be given away for free, and the developers will still make plenty of money via a variety of mechanisms, including:

• in-App product placement advertising for other products
• in-App purchases to help progress in the game
• Website traffic advertising
• Sponsorship
• etc.

But let's face it, unless your name is Mojang or SuperCell or one of the big boys, the opportunity for revenue from these mechanisms isn't great.  If you don't have traffic, you won't make money.  If you charge for your app, there is a strong probability that you won't get much traffic.  The trouble is that you have just spent either lots of your own time or lots of your own money in order to get the app to market.

Somehow, this has to make good Commercial sense.  If it doesn't, it is an investment in time or money as a labour of love for the marketplace.  This is noble, but unless you have some money hidden somewhere, at some point this is not sustainable.

Enter in-App advertising.  This was a concept that didn't even exist only a few short years ago.  By simply showing ads to hundreds if not thousands of pair of eyes it has all of a sudden channeled an entirely new opportunity for income.

This means you can release an App for FREE and still MAKE MONEY!  Wow.  This is a model that could make everyone happy!  Awesome!

It seems like a real win-win, the best of both worlds.  The consumer literally gets something for nothing and the developer can still make it viable for them to create these free apps.

...and this mostly works well.

Unfortunately, there are still some people who will whinge and complain about seeing an ad.  They see it as invasive and "Why should I have to see ads?" and "I expect to get stuff for free".  This kind of selfish attitude really is a disappointing but very real part of the world we currently live in.

Because of these selfish people, if you choose to run ads, expect to get some 1 star ratings.  It is simply a fact of life unfortunately.

For Save My Bacon, we have decided to run a simple ad that is to appear briefly at the end of the game.  It is certainly a struggle to generate much cash in these early days, but there are some semi-promising signs.

We have decided to go with Chartboost.  It has simple integration, seems to pay OK and has a nice dashboard.  I'll be posting pics of progress, for a while at least, every week as we progress along this marketing journey.

And to start that off, here is my dashboard after 7 days.  The only marketing so far has been some simply Tweeting which I'll talk about soon.

It will improve, because it must!

Please leave me a comment on whether you agree with in-App advertising and your reasons?

Also, what advertising network do you use?

The journey continues...

AG