As you may know I’m working on a persistent browser game, together with some friends. It’s free for the most part, with a subscription option for those that want the bonuses and are willing to pay. Since I’m the one in charge with the monetization of the game, I’ve been thinking for a while now about the ways that I can keep the game free to play and still be able to pay the dedicated server(s). Eventually I have to make sure that we make enough to allow the other three members of the team to quit their day jobs and work full time on the game.
I’ll give you a basic tour of my ideas and plans so far on monetizing the game and launching new sites by taking advantage of the user base that the game will have. I hope it can help you with your own plans to expand your sites or make more money from them.
The Game
It’s going to be monetized with Adsense in the beginning and by private ads down the road. CPM banners would be great but the average number of page views per visit is 25 in the current tests, so I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t be accepted by those offering CPM, or our account would be closed pretty fast.
Right now I’m also considering using affiliate programs, by targeting according to the age, sex and location that users put in their profile, in certain periods of the year when people tend to shop more online (Christmas, Valentines, etc).
Subscriptions are my main bet as far as the game monetization is concerned. While the game can be played easily without subscriptions, if they do pay $6 they have access to more options for 3 months, both for the way their profile looks and to certain tasks that will allow them to spend less time in the game and still remain competitive.
The Official Blog
Once we manage to get the ball rolling and get players to the game, we also expect to see the number of subscribers to the official blog rise higher, so naturally I’m thinking of monetizing the blog as well. Even without the subscribers, when the blog is updated, the link to it from the game will turn red, and will remain so until the gamer clicks on it to see the latest updates on the blog. So, most of the active players will see the blog each time we update it. That should mean a good number of page views on the official blog.
An example of this would be: if we have 10 blog updates per month and 5,000 players that visit the blog for each post, it should mean 50,000 page views easily. It might take a few good months to reach that number of players, but it’s definitely doable.
The possibilities that I see right now on monetizing the blog are:
Private Ads – finding sponsors for the sidebar
CPM banners – due to the much lower ratio of page views per visit, we might be able to use CPM banners here
The Game Forums
I intend to put a lot of time into the game forums, to attract as many players to them and encourage the conversation. I want an active community and I’m looking into the option of rewarding the active forum members and giving them free subscriptions in the game or some bonuses on the forums (no ads for those that are active for example).
Also, I’m working on the search engine optimization for it, with friendly URL’s already in place. Now, normal conversations about the game should revolve around the same keywords usually, so the number of search engine visits might be limited there. I’m going to try and encourage discussions in the offtopic areas, to cover more keywords and hopefully boost the number of search engine visitors.
As for the monetization part, here are a few of the options I’ll be testing to see which one brings the best results:
Adsense – I’ll try different positions for the ads, and also showing them only to those that aren’t logged in.
Private Ads – The forum needs to grow a bit for this, but I hope this will work better than Adsense
Kontera – I’ve heard that Kontera has good results in forums, so I have high hopes for it. It will probably be implemented only for visitors that aren’t logged in.
CPM banners – as with the game, I don’t know if we’ll be able to use them on forums. I heard that companies that offer CPM aren’t very happy about having their ads on forums.
Affiliate offers – no idea how well these would work on forums, but I figure I can give it a shot. Maybe replacing Adsense ads with affiliate banners promoting casual games or that latest release from Blizzard. I’ll have to test and see what works.
Expanding In Other Markets
Part of my plan to monetize the game and keep it free in the long run, is expanding the number of services we offer, based on what the players need. I played persistent browser games for around 7 years now, and I found out that usually players need additional services to support their game experience. They usually find these services in other places, but I’m hoping we can provide them ourselves.
Image Host
For example, some playing a strategy game like ours will need an image host to put screenshots of their battle reports on it. We can start an image host like ImageShack and put an option in the game to export screenshots of battle reports directly to it.
Once they get used to it, they might also use it for purposes other than those game related. It can be a way to launch a new service, and use your current assets (the players or members) to give it a boost in the beginning. In the meantime, this image host would be monetized with Adsense.
Free Forums On Subdomains
Despite the fact that they will have a basic forum inside the game, many alliances create their own forum on sites that offer this service for free. We can start such a site ourselves and offer it directly from the game menu, when someone creates a new alliance. Active gamers will generally visit the alliance forum daily and see what’s new, so it should be a substantial number of page views.
Monetization could be through private ads, CPM banners, Kontera. I didn’t take Adsense into consideration because those forums are private and self moderated, so you don’t control what content is near the ads. It can get you banned from Adsense.
These kind of free forums might be a hassle though, as they can be hacked, and we wouldn’t have that much time to focus on the administration and customer support.
If we decide that we don’t want to take this step, we can always partner with a portal that offers forums for game clans, and recommend them to our players. Either for money, or in exchange for ads with our game on their free forums that are full of gamers.
Role Playing
Initially I want to encourage role-playing in the forums, based on what people do in the game (battles, alliance wars, etc). If it takes of, we might be interested in launching a site for role-playing, and the players could be the initial members.
Other Games
I already have a list of 4-5 possible games that we could make once this one reaches a certain size. It should be much easier to get a good number of players in them if we market them to the players that we’ll already have in Imperial Ages.
Conclusions
When starting a new site, game or whatever, don’t limit yourself to just pasting some ads into the code. Look for ways to expand it by starting new services and promoting them to your existing members. See what else they need and make it happen for them.
In my opinion it’s much easier to grow your portfolio this way, than starting new ventures with no conn
ection to the existing ones.
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