About the inclusion of ads in Geotastic
Hey gang! Some of you might already have noticed some of the additions in regards to ads in geotastic already. I now completed the inclusion of banner ads with the help of adinplay and hopefully, this will have the desired effect.
Why ads now?
When I started out, there were no ads in geotastic. Like most people, I’m not a huge fan of banner ads in general. Things worked out rather nicely back then. The player base was small and people donated enough for me to be able to cover the costs for most of the months. In a perfect world, this trend would’ve lasted up until now, but…
… fast forward one and half year: The player base has increased significantly and the ratio of paying players to to free players is getting smaller by the day. In addition to increasing api costs, I am also trying to run a business full time and have to see that enough monthly revenue is generated for me to stay afloat. Geotastic is the main product I’m maintaining so I have to make sure that it returns some profit in the very least, which is a rather difficult thing to do in the current state. The initial hype has died away and attracting new players that care enough to invest in the game is a daunting task in it’s own right.
Some people also directly asked me to include ads since helping out financially was not possible for them. These requests go back almost a year. So, there isn’t really a way around this. But I’m still happy that I was able to keep the game ad free for such a long time! Thanks to everyone who helped make this possible.
How are the ads implemented?
First of all, ads are generally available for everyone whose accumulated in-game api costs are larger then the amount of financial support. This means that the total supporter level actually has no say in whether ads are delivered or not. My aim is to motivate people to cover their own costs and in turn raise their supporter level to unlock the paid features progressively. This also means that it’s rather cheap to unlock the ad-free experience for casual players. Even in the long run, it should never exceed the price of a single coffee to cover your costs each month. It’s usually even less.
Adinplay allows for classic banner ads as well as video ads. Video ads can be watched voluntarily when starting a local or online game. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but don’t worry about that! Banner ads on the other hand will be delivered on the home view as well as the game play view. I decided to not add any ad space during general game play to not take away any of the precious screen space. Banners will come up during the warm-up, result and finished screens though, which should work out nicely.
Ads in the online lobbies itself are reserved for the sponsorship with wetter.de
Enabling/Disabling Ads
Ads are disabled by default as soon as you donated more than necessary and your account balance is positive. You can, if you like, enable ads either way to support the game further. There is a switch you can toggle in your account settings as well as the support page.
Will this generate enough revenue to pay for all free games?
That’s a good question which I can’t answer right now. I’ll have a look the numbers from day to day and will include the final verdict to this month’s total expenses and donations graph. You can easily check how big of an impact the ads had in retrospect.
Since adblockers are a thing , I’m very curious on how much revenue can even be generated. There is a message for everyone using adblockers on the start screen so hopefully, I can convince some of you to disable it for geotastic to keep the whole thing going.
See you next time!
