Google says game developers can rely on ads for income | Hacker News Reader

Google says game developers can rely on ads for income

venturebeat.com

21 pointsDanielRibeiro10 comments

This has been a trend for the last six months or so. Backflip Studios tried a free game as a promotional strategy, and it's turned into a core piece of their business. More small developers are realizing promotion is easier with free apps and the market is now large enough to support ad revenue models.

http://148apps.biz/backflip-studios-brings-in-serious-cash-w...

Whether this is true or not, it's a bit nutty to risk the fate of my livelihood on Google ads because Google is saying I "can".

And in other news, my barber always thinks I need a haircut, and my mechanic always finds something wrong with my car that needs to be fixed.

Who clicks on ads when playing games? I wonder how many of these are accidental click (accidental touches on a phone are a lot easier than accidental mouse clicks).

Does anyone have conversion data on clickthroughs from game ads?

My last startup had 181 mobile AdWords clicks, but none of them converted. Our AdWords guy hadn't even known our content network ads were being displayed on mobile devices.

Given that our product was a niche B2B product that appealed to maybe 1 person in 100,000, I'm guessing that all these clicks were accidental. We had 20,764 impressions and 181 clicks, for a CTR of 0.87%, which is a lot of accidental clicks.

The ratio would obviously be better for a B2C product with broad appeal. But I'm guessing that a large fraction of mobile advertisers are AdWords novices, and they're getting burned.

I saw the exact same thing. I had something like 1.25%-1.5% CTR from the mobile network, with no conversions. It was pretty terrible, and I disabled advertising on mobile networks (on by default) to save the wasted funds.

I've also now seen hundreds of networks where I get 100% CTR (2-3 impressions, all leading to clicks) on what are obviously junk/spam sites. Each of these only cost me a couple quarters, but it quickly adds up.

When are we going to stop referring to the developer of apps like "Ant Smasher" as game developers? If I spend the time and resources to develop a real game, something that gamers will come back to after a few days, I'm not going to rely on ad revenue. Ant Smasher is not a game, it's a casual entertainment app.

Casual games are real games even if they don't have significant replayability (though some do).

Says the ad company! I love Google as much as the next guy, but I think entrepreneurs and creatives would create more wealth & the world would be a better place if there was more focus on real products & services rather than trying to grab more time on peoples' eyeballs.

Don't take this the wrong way but... It's a free market: go ahead and actually do what you advocate. If you succeed, you'll be a role model and people will be inspired by your approach.

As I like to say, entrepreneurs do, everyone else talks about what should be done.

Game where the point is to quickly tap the screen all over the place gets a high CTR? What are the odds?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com