Recently we looked at ways of monetising apps and games by charging nothing for them. Yes, I know it sounds ridiculous doesn’t it. Well, its not quite as ridiculous as it sounds. Its possible to make money from apps and games by either a) giving the game away for free and inserting ads in there (usually called ad-ware) and b) again, giving the game away for free but selling optional extras within the game (usually called freemium).
We recently implemented a platform agnostic API that uses the Marmalade SDK and Inner-actives M2M protocol to serve ads to all Marmalade SDK compatible phones and tablets. Currently supported platforms include iPhone, iPad, Android, Samsung Bada, Blackberry Playbook, Symbian, Windows Mobile, WebOS, PC and Mac.
The great thing about our ads is that they are different. Our ads don’t just sit at the top of the screen crying like babies for attention, instead they leap out at the user with animations and transitions, hypnotising the user into clicking on them. We like to see the process as bringing gaming to ads and not bringing ads to gaming.
We are opening up our API very soon for all Marmalade SDK developers. The ad engine will also become part of the IwGame engine with additional support for MobClix, AdWhirl and InMobi. Depending up on the API’s success we may also create bespoke versions for the iOS and Android SDK’s for those die hard developers that won’t convert to the Marmalade SDK. We will put a proper blog together when the time comes.
Our animating ads work very well and our click rate (CTR) is proof that the pudding is cooked well. Here are a few figures:
- Android – 3.23%
- iPhone – 7.34%
- iPad – 3.54%
- Samsung Bada – 5%
Our average CTR with static AdMob ads is 1.76%
Ok, now onto the real subject, we have released Funky Cam 3D across iPhone, iPad, Android and Samsung Bada (Bada 2.0 coming soon).
Funky Cam 3D FREE can be downloaded from the following stores:
So please feel free to download Funky Cam 3D for free and check out what our animating ads look like.
Hum those are impressive numbers!
Testing it now.
Impressive how good it looks now:)
I am not sure if I understand it fully. Do you using this service:http://inner-active.com/ ?
Thanks Roman. We are using inner-active ads to provide ads at the moment, although we are currently extending our API to support other ad providers too. We are hoping to make the API public this coming weekend so that all Marmalade developers have access to our ad system.
Inner-active fill rates are great on iPhone, but not so great on other platforms. We are not 100% sure about Android yet as we did have a problem with our user-agent string that could potentially cause undelivered ads, this has since been fixed but we haven’t distributed a new version of FC3D yet to test out our latest changes.
This far our ad system works on iPhone, iPad, Android, Bada, Playbook and PC.
We are getting some great CTR using our animating ads system ranging from 3%+ on Android to 8% iPhone.