Emanuele Feronato

Talking about Monetize.

Do you remember the post Ramblings about Flash game portals? I was wondering why portals spend thousands dollars sponsoring games.

So I decided to create my own Flash games portal called Triqui (read the post Play Flash games on Triqui.com) and as Triqui I sponsored the game Bees n’ Flowers as you can see on Experiment: monetizing a Flash game – Part 9.

Ok… now that you read all these posts, let’s start telling you what happened last Friday, May 16th

That day was a special one because Bees n’ Flowers was added on the Spill Group network. You should know the Spill Group network because of its most famous portal, Agame, but they have localized portals all over Europe.

In order to have my game listed in their portal I had to remove MochiAds, but it was ok, because I wanted to test how many people clicked on the sponsor banner and the revenue that they would generate from Triqui.

That’s what happened from May 16th to May 18th:

People on the Spill Group network played Bees n’ Flowers times about 125,000 times

According to Google Analytics, about 24,000 of them clicked on the banner, linking to a Triqui landing page, generating about 75,000 page views. Jumping to Adsense, I noticed the page eCPM was about $4 (yes! four bucks!)… and I did not count how many people will come back to Triqui.

So, let’s say that I could have sponsored Bees n’ Flowers for $300 without losing my money.

And I am talking about a game I am not very proud of, where people don’t click too much on “play more games” (you aren’t willing to see more games if the game you are playing sucks), and a portal that is just the millionth portal in the web

So, encouraged for the result of this first experiment, I’ll start adding new features to the portal, such as game ratings and comments. I know at the moment a visitor won’t come back to Triqui, but maybe when I’ll add some features, I can fidelize him.

Last but not least, I am planning to make a contest. It’s not a contest for developers, but a contest for players. I would like to pay something like $100 to the player that will make the top score in a game.

Maybe the idea will spread virally… who knows? With 100k players, I should pay the prize and buy me a Coke.

Would you play to win money? Would you talk about it? Would you buy my underpants?

This, and a lot more, coming soon