作者：Matt Warren

首先来看看背景资料。我的首款iPhone游戏《UFO Invader》于1周前发行，是款99美分付费应用。这是款试验作品，所以我在游戏菜单屏幕底部植入一条广告，作为额外营收渠道。我能够分别从苹果和AdMob那获悉应用的销售数据与广告印象和点击率。

menu with ad from gamesbrief.com

这周二，情况开始变得有些奇怪。

我发现应用的广告印象（游戏邦注：包括点击率）突然蹿升至高峰。但销量并未获得相应增长。这或许是计算错误，否则就是我错过某些信息。这和我原本的销量预期相差甚远。

盗版带来的曝光

查看数据后，我发现体验游戏的玩家远远多于购买游戏的玩家。

在作品发行4天，宣传有限的情况下，其销量是30份。但其广告点击量超过200次，广告印象超过1200次（1天1000次）。游戏在Game Center有400多位不同高分注册玩家。

谷歌搜索解开了我的疑惑——有很多论坛和自动化博客都连接至游戏破解版本。

我心情复杂，不知该如何看待此现象。一方面作为独立开发商，游戏能够覆盖1000名用户，算是个不错曝光成绩，它能够有效推动销量。至于另一方面，我稍后将加以阐述。

盗版的影响

首先，下图显示应用入驻App Store头1周的销售数量和广告收益。

pirate chart from gamesbrief.com

你会发现游戏直到9号才开始形成少量广告印象。购买游戏的30位用户平均每天带来5-10次广告印象。随后广告印象很快就升至1000次每天。这推动广告收入增加。遗憾的是，这并未给销量带来积极影响，这是因为出现盗版内容。

我熟知广告活动的两方参与者（广告商和发行商），因此有些数据自然也在我的关注范围内。我开展一个测试性广告活动，看看自己是否能够通过开展广告活动获得销售收入。遗憾的是，只有1%的点击量转换成游戏买家，即便是以0.03美元/点击的低成本来计算，开发者也无法通过开展广告获利。这非常糟糕。若大家能够通过广告盈利，我的资金问题也就能够得到解决。

点击欺诈

我在AdMob运作的广告据说有0.5%的点击率。而游戏中的广告据说有18%的点击率。

在我看来，18%的点击率显然存在欺骗性。没有人会如此频繁点击广告。

究竟怎么回事？下载破解版本游戏的玩家似乎有意点击广告，以“帮”我赚钱。遗憾的是，点击欺诈具有消极影响。这会降低那些处在最低竞价水平以下点击量的价值。这意味着我和其他独立游戏开发商都无法有效借助移动广告发现用户。

以下是游戏数据的具体信息：

* 10美元广告按照0.03美元/点击标准，能够购买334次点击量。我在0.99美元游戏中的分成是0.7美元，这意味着投放价值10美元的广告，我的作品就得售出10/0.7=14.3份（游戏邦注：或者需要确保具有4.3%的转换率），这样才能平衡广告支出。

* 实现4.3%转换率或推动99美分即兴购买都不是难事。我对这类游戏的转化率预期是10-20%左右。

* 遗憾的是，我无从知晓我所购买的广告有多大比例的欺骗性点击量，但根据过去4年开展网络广告活动的经验来看，移动广告通常令人生厌，我猜想至少有75%的点击量是不真实的。

我的游戏有1%的转换率，若去除虚假点击量应该能够大幅提升应用收益。

点击欺诈的影响

此种欺骗会给开发商带来巨大问题。

1. 点击价值非常低，因此借助广告创收变得行不通（游戏邦注：据《UFO Invader》数据显示，1次点击仅带来2.8美分收入）。

2. 所有具有优秀作品的广告商都不会购买广告，因为他们已在虚假点击上付出了太多成本。

3. 开发商无法通过移动广告创收。

4. 《UFO Invader》所拥有的高点击量可能使游戏遭屏蔽，帐号被封锁，玩家要求退款，现在会阻碍游戏创收或者未来会阻碍广告营收。

下载游戏破解版本的玩家，若希望给予开发者一定帮助，以下是最好举措：

1. 不要点击任何广告，除非你真的对内容感兴趣。

2. 告诉好友你发现的有趣应用。

同盗版作品共生

我平静看待那些下载盗版《UFO Invader》的玩家。无论如何，他们也不会购买这款游戏。通过少量适当营销活动，我还能够同他们进行沟通，宣传未来应用，向他们出售虚拟商品，促使他们同好友宣传我的游戏。但破坏此广告生态系统会令我的工作变得越发困难。其消除我原本向潜在玩家宣传游戏的最便捷方式。

作为游戏开发者，我就解决此问题的看法如何？

1. 发行免费游戏，积极探索创收渠道。

2. 忽略盗版，放弃通过移动广告宣传作品。

3. 确保能够通过通知、邮件或游戏消息同玩家沟通。

遗憾的是，我们没有什么措施能够阻止黑客行为。若他们想破解某软件，总是有办法做到。最糟糕的是若我的帐号被禁止，点击欺诈将令我同大把钞票失之交臂。

但我的游戏目前还处在初期阶段，且让我们静候其未来几个月的发展态势。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Game Theft Affects the Bottom Line

By Matt Warren

In my last post I wrote about some strange numbers that I was seeing in my app that I just had to investigate.

But first just some background information. My first iPhone Game (UFO Invader) was released just one week ago as a $0.99 paid app. It’s also a bit of an experiment so I included an ad at the bottom of the the menu screens as an extra way to make some money. With the App I can see the sales in my reports from Apple and I can see my ad impressions and clicks in reports from AdMob.

On Tuesday, things started to get a bit wacky.

I noticed my ad impressions (and clicks) spiking massively. However there wasn’t a corresponding increase in sales to account for it. Either something was not counting properly or I was missing something. This was a big discrepancy on the order of 1000x what I would have been expecting for the day.

Discovering Theft

After looking at the numbers it became obvious that more people were playing the game than had bought it. A lot more.

At this point with limited publicity and 4 days after launching the game I had registered 30 sales. But there were over 200 ad clicks and over 1200 ad impressions (1000 in one day). There were 400+ different users with top scores registered in Game Center.

A Google search revealed what I suspected. A handful of forums and automated blogs were linking to cracked versions of my game. (I won’t link to them because I don’t want to give them any SEO Juice)

I wasn’t sure how to feel about this. On the one hand as a small one man developer shop getting my game into the hands of 1000 kids is awesome exposure and it might help drive sales. The other hand I’ll explain in a bit.

Effects of Piracy

First, here’s a couple of graphs showing my sales and ad revenue for the first week on the App Store.

You’ll notice there were negligible ad impressions until the 9th. The 30 people who bought the game at that point were registering 5-10 ad impressions per day. It very quickly spiked up to 1000 per day. This correlated with an increase in ad revenue. Unfortunately there has not been any positive effect on sales (yet) as a result of being pirated.

There were some other numbers that caught my attention as someone who is familiar with both side of the advertising fence – advertiser and publisher. I had run a test ad campaign to see if I could profitably make sales by advertising my game. Unfortunately only 1% of clicks converted into buyers, and even at a very cheap $0.03/click it wasn’t possible to run advertisements at a profit. That sucks. If it were possible to profitably advertise then my money worries would be over. Alas.

Click Fraud

The advertising that I did run on AdMob reported about a 0.5% CTR. The ads that my game was serving was reporting a 18% CTR.

To me, 18% CTR is clearly evidence of click fraud. Nobody clicks ads that much.

What was going on? Well it seems that people who download cracked copies of the game are clicking ads in order to “help” me, the developer, make some money. Unfortunately click fraud has the opposite effect. It reduces the value of those clicks below the minimum bid allowed for everybody. Meaning that I and every other indie game developer cannot effectively use mobile advertising to find customers.

Here’s a concrete example with my numbers:

$10 in advertising buys 334 clicks at $0.03/click. My cut on a $0.99 game is $0.70 which means I need to make 10/0.7 = 14.3 sales on average for every $10 worth of ads or a 4.3% conversion on clicks in order to break even on the advertising.

4.3% for a $0.99 impulse purchase should be EASY. Without knowing any better I would expect to see closer to 10-20% for something like this.

Unfortunately it is impossible to know what percentage of the ads I paid for were actually fraudulent but based on experience running ad campaigns for the last 4 years on the web it seems like mobile ads are terrible and my best guess is that AT LEAST 75% of clicks were fraudulent.

I was seeing a 1% conversion, but removing the fraudulent clicks might have bumped it up into the realm of profitability.

Effects of Click Fraud

This level of fraud creates a huge problem for developers.

1. The value of a click is so low that using ads to make money doesn’t work. (My stats show a click pays just 2.8 cents)

2. All the Advertisers who have good things to sell won’t buy ads because they’re paying too much for fraudulent clicks.

3. Developers can’t profitably advertise their Apps with mobile advertising

4. The high volume of clicks that I saw with my Game could potentially get it flagged, accounts locked, money taken back, and prevent any money being made now or in the future from advertising.

To those people who download cracked iPhone apps and want to help the developer here’s the best thing to do:

1. Don’t click any ads unless you are actually interested in what they’re advertising. Ever.

2. Tell your friends to check out any cool apps you find.

Living with Piracy

You know I’m cool with people pirating my game.  They wouldn’t have bought it anyway.  And with the right bits of marketing in place I could still communicate with them, promote future apps, sell in-app-purchases to them and ask them to tell their friends about my games.  But destroying the advertising ecosystem makes my job more difficult.  It eliminates what would be the simplest way for me to promote my game to people who might actually buy it.

What are my options as a game developer to deal with this?

1. Release free to play games and be more creative about monetizing them.

2. Ignore pirates and forget about trying mobile advertising to advertise.

3. Ensure you have ways to communicate with users through push notifications, email, or in-game messages.

Unfortunately, There’s pretty much nothing that can be done to thwart hackers.  If they want to crack software bad enough there’s always a way to do it.  What sucks most of all is that the click fraud puts me at risk of losing a lot of money if my account gets flagged.

But this is also very early on and it will be interesting to see how things change over the next few months.（Source：gamesbrief）