作者：Nicholas Lovell

我并不认为广告模式是个可行的盈利方案，许多人（尤其是传统媒体领域从业者）都认为，免费=广告赞助。但这种看法并不妥当，甚至可能影响你的业务。

以下是我不赞成在免费游戏中植入广告的5个理由：

1.广告追求的是以量取胜的模式

如果要从广告赞助项目中盈利，你就需要庞大的数量做后盾。这也是传统媒介领域为何信奉收视率，而广告销售主管总是关注“发行量”或“收视率”等不精确而无益数据的原因所在。

广告商常假设，每个购买《星期天泰晤士报》的读者都会看到报纸上的每条广告，广告商要根据发行商支付广告费用。电视收视率的情况与此类似，该领域的广告商总是设想每个观众都会看广告，并根据这种情况来制定广告预算。

但在游戏行业，我们并不会遇这种数据不精确的问题，因为我们可以准确衡量情况。不过我们仍要面临用户规模的问题。

举例来说，如果你要从免费游戏中的一个广告项目中创收1万英磅，需要实现哪些条件？答案=广告印象次数 X eCPM/1000

假设你的eCPM能够达到0.1美元，那你就需要收获1亿次广告印象。就算你可以将CPM提升到1美元，那也还是需要1000万次广告印象。

而拥有如此庞大的数量，却也仍然只能赚到1万英磅。

当然，你也可以将eCPM提高到1美元以上，你可以让广告自动刷新，这样你每分钟都可以显示一两个新广告，还可以在游戏中植入更多广告，但这种操作极为困难。

但如果你想让广告赞助版游戏每年创收10万美元，那你就得确保一年可实现1亿至10亿次广告印象。这可是个惊人的数据。

2.无法保证有效的用户获取成本

一般来说，成功的网络项目都必须满足CPA < LTV 这个条件。

也就是说，“如果你能够用低于用户终身价值的成本获得用户，那你的项目就具有盈利性”。

但这很困难。智能手机平台上的用户获取成本与日俱增。据Fiksu数据显示，2011年12月份这一数据已经上涨至每用户1.81美元。

假设在这种情况下，你的CPM是1美元，那么就需要让每个用户看到1810个广告才有可能让你实现收支平衡。

3.虚拟商品交易模式更可行

在2011年，应用营收前10强榜单中，有7款应用属于免费增值产品，它们的收益都超过了2000万美元。Flurry数据显示，美国智能手机平台平均每笔IAP交易额为14美元，有51%的IAP收益来自那些至少在游戏中消费20美元的用户。

但这与广告赞助模式并不相同，因为并非所有用户都会消费虚拟商品。虽然每笔交易额可能是14美元，但如果99.9%的用户都是非付费用户，那么你的游戏还是不能盈利。

Gamesbrief网站曾发布的图表显示，假如采用虚拟商品交易功能，那么一款游戏只要每月新增20万用户，就可以在一年内创收300万美元。而如果是广告赞助模式，你得有3亿至300亿次广告印象才能实现这一目标。

4.广告易耗电池寿命和网络流量

ad supported apps are killing battery(from lifehacker.com)

普渡大学最近调查报告指出，运行广告的免费手机应用有多达75%的能量被广告内容所消耗。

David Braben通过Twitter指出，广告易消耗用户的手机数据流量，而这正是那些采用固定套餐用户所担心的事情。

5.广告占用过多屏幕空间

iPhone屏幕已经很小了，用户每次运行iOS游戏时可能已经会遇到屏幕空间的问题。因植入广告而缩小游戏运行空间，这对游戏设计师和玩家来说都是一桩麻烦事。针对这一问题，有些人选择使用弹窗或插页式广告而非条幅广告。

但广告的存在仍会增加设计师的工作量，也会影响玩家的游戏体验。

结论

有一些情况可以植入广告，例如交叉推广自己的游戏，或者其他合作伙伴/开发者的游戏，这种方式也有助于游戏获得成功。

不过如果是我设计游戏，我不会担心有95%用户从来不付费的问题，我会让他们免费玩游戏，并为那5%的付费玩家提供真正有价值的内容，促使他们进行消费。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Five reasons why you shouldn’t use Ads in your free game

Nicholas Lovell

I am not a believer in the ad-supported business model. Too many people (mainly those working in traditional media) believe that free=ad-supported. This is flawed, and wrong, and dangerous for your business.

Here are my five reasons why you should not use ads in your free game.

1. Ads require massive volume to be successful

In order to make money from an ad-business, you need massive volume. That is why in traditional media, ratings are key, and ad sales executives focus on inaccurate and unhelpful numbers like “circulation” or “ratings”.

There is a fiction sold to advertisers that everyone who buys a copy of the Sunday Times, say, sees every single ad, and the rates an advertiser pays are based on the circulation.

Similarly, the incredibly inaccurate television ratings, and the flawed assumption that everyone watches the ads, are used to work out the cost of an ad spend in TV land.

In games, we don’t have the inaccuracy problem because we can measure the effect accurately. We still have the problem of audience size mattering.

To take an example, what do you need to achieve to earn £10,000 from an ad campaign for your free game. The basic answer = Number of impressions x eCPM / 1,000

Assuming that you can achieve an effective CPM of $0.10, you need 100 million impressions. If you are able to push your CPM up to one dollar, you still need 10 million impressions.

That’s a million people playing your game 10 times, or a hundred thousand people playing your game 100 times.

And that only gets you £10,000.

Of course, you can play with this further. You might be able to push your eCPM above a dollar. You can put an auto-refresh on the ads so you show a new add every minute or two. You can try to squeeze more than one ad in, although that is pretty tough.

But if you want to make $100,000 a year from your ad supported game, you need between 100 million and a billion impressions a year. That’s a hell of a lot.

2. You can’t acquire ad-funded customers cost-effectively

The basic equation of any successful online business is:

CPA < LTV

Which basically says “if you can acquire your customers for less than their value over their lifetime with you, you have a viable business.”

This is getting harder. Customer acquisition costs on smartphones are reaching an all-time high. Fiksu said that the figure was $1.81 per user in December 2011.

To put that into context, assuming that you can achieve a CPM of $1.00, every single user would have to see 1,810 ads in order to break even on the acquisition cost.

3. Virtual goods are better suited to monetising niches

The virtual goods business model is demonstrably better. In 2011, 7 of the 10 top grossing apps were free to play, making over $20 million each. Flurry has shown us that the average transaction value for a smartphone IAP in the US is $14. 51% of IAP revenue comes from customers spending $20 or more in your game.

It’s not quite as simple as that, because, unlike in an advertising model, not everyone is monetised. The average transaction value may be $14, but if 99.9% of your users are not converting, you won’t make any money.

The GAMESbrief free-to-play spreadsheet shows an example, using virtual goods, where a game that gains 200,000 new users a month will generate $3 million in gross revenue during year one.

You’d need between 3 and 30 billion ad impressions to achieve that revenue from ads.

4. Ads sap battery life.

A recent survey from Purdue University (and reported by the BBC) showed that free apps running ad software could see as much as 75% of their energy usage from powering the ads.

David Braben pointed out via Twitter that serving ads also uses data, an issue for users paying for data on a PAYG scheme.

5. Ads take up scarce screen real estate

An iPhone screen is pretty small. Every time I’ve worked on an iOS game, real estate has been an issue. Losing space to an ad makes life difficult for designers and players. There are solutions: pop-ups/interstitials rather than banners, for example.

However you look at it, ads make the designer’s life harder and, on a smartphone, the player’s experience less fun.

So drop the ads

There are some reasons to carry ads. I think that cross-promotion of your own games, or those of friends/partners/fellow developers is critical to success on smartphones.

But if I were designing a game, I would stop worrying about the 95% of players who will never pay for it. Enjoy letting them have it for free and put all your effort into offering things that the 5% will truly value, and spend lots of money on.（source:gamesbrief）