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[Nix]

The thing is that we can't open an account on CPM star without the support of an approved sponsor.

It's not that hard to get a sponsor account though, or at least to find someone to sponsor you. I know a developer who was given a sponsor account by CPMstar just because he had a ton of games. It's really just to prevent rampant abuse by pong-clones, which is perhaps MochiAds' greatest flaw.

[Arts]

In-game ads doesn't work

[Nix]

In-game ads doesn't work

That's just not true.

[Leroy Binks]

This is a simply depressing thread.  There hasn't been a single person who supports creative use of advertisements in games and they are referred to as a "necessary evil".  Farmville recently had a free item and free crop boost if you visited and liked the Frito Lay page on facebook.  This was a boon to Zynga and a boon to the player who has an acutal Frito Lay truck and not just _____ delivery truck. And I'm sure Frito Lay compensated them for it.  In the Burnout series of racing games I remember seeing billboards for actual products as I raced through. 

What is wrong/difficult with this level of product placement and advertising in flash games>

[synapse]

What is wrong/difficult with this level of product placement and advertising in flash games>

It was probably ok for Zynga because they reach tens of thousands times the number users than most flash games.  What do you think would happen if you tried to negotiate a direct ad deal with a major company?  It really is just a bad model in general.

[Nix]

What is wrong/difficult with this level of product placement and advertising in flash games>

It was probably ok for Zynga because they reach tens of thousands times the number users than most flash games.  What do you think would happen if you tried to negotiate a direct ad deal with a major company?  It really is just a bad model in general.

Not for small shit games. I'm curious how many people in this thread who have condemned ads have actually used them, and how good the game was.

I have personally earned a fair amount of revenue from ads on a game that otherwise would had earned me nothing. Perhaps ads aren't the end-all solution for every single game ever (and I would argue that they aren't), but they will always be the best way to go for a significant subset of web-based games.

[droqen]

Nix, give us some numbers or some explanation. You're not saying very much other than 'ads worked for me'. What is a 'fair amount of revenue'?

My experience with ads has been the following:

~$60 from ~120k views (more like 200k, actually, but those are offsite views)
~$25 from ~45k views

and that's pretty shitty.

(Not that I'm unhappy overall; I made two games I'm incredibly happy with and that's grand. Ads just blow. And we're going to one-up 'em. Just you wait.)