What do you think is a probable income for a free gaming site using ppc advertising per 1000 daily visitors? Let's assume the worst case scenario, that the players only see the ads when they enter the site but not when they play the game. I am confident I could create a popular play for free poker site with perhaps 5 000 daily visitors or even more, but I am not certain the incomes would be worth the costs ($10 000 for software + server costs). Another possibility is to advertise poker rooms but I am not sure it is so profitable (have tried it in a smaller scale) since the players are freebies. What is the best way to make money of such a site and is it worth the costs? Feel free to speculate it may be a difficult question to answer just like that.
From what I have seen (and having purchased such advertising for one of my sites), ingame advertising does NOT work well at all. Players are there to play the game, so they are VERY ad-blind. I would suggest having ads outside the games, or rooms, and see how well that works for you.
Yes that was what I was thinking about.. No good advertising opportunities inside the game anyway.. What PPC company do you think are suitable for this kind of site? Google doesn't allow adsense on pages that link to gambling sites, which I currently do. Perhaps having a 5 seconds long lasting redirect page with ads before the game starts the game is an option.
Yes the gamers are at your site to play games and are well and truly ad-blind. This is the down side to gaming sites when your trying to advertise the pages with the most hits give the least traffic to your ads. ~Sheen91
Making money of a gaming type site is not easy at all. Adsense earnings per click is minimal and other ad networks will not accept you as they already have alot of that type of publishers in their system.
I completely agree with this guy here. I've had a gaming site and it truly is hard getting into the better networks. Adsense was not doing well and so my site just sat there making minimal income.
Regardless what kind of site, let's just say you get an average 2% click thru on your ads. Thats 20 clicks a day on a site with 1,000 visitors. 20 X ? $0.15 = $3 a day.
You are rather lucky to get 2% clickthru rate and $0.15 per click with a gaming site unless your site looks horrible and your game is horrible then people will probably click to try and find better gaming sites. To get a good CTR you really need got optimization of the ads.
I am currently achieving 1% CTR with a standard banner with an online game. Although I do agree that games and forums alike suffer from Ad complacency. (Ad-blindness).