SimianLogic

Remember that first website you made back in the 90’s? Did you ever join a web ring? I did. I joined lots of them. While I was in middle school, I’m pretty sure at different points I had an Aliens fan page in a sci-fi web ring, a “download movie quotes in wav form” website in a movie ring, a personal page dedicated to my short stories (this was before “blogs” existed) in a writer’s web-ring, and a few others that are even more embarassing. There was no such thing as Google Analytics back then, but if I had to guess the incoming traffic from those web-rings was piddling at best. After using MochiAds service for a couple of months now (ok, well, I’ve been a member since last April… but let’s just say I wasn’t “utilizing” the service until I released Filler back in January) and running a new experiment this week with paid search, I’ve come to the conclusion that the web ring is back in a big way–and it rocks.

Okay okay, so traffic share is nothing new. But it’s pretty sweet. I’ve never done any paid search before, so I thought I ought to experiment with it a little (hey, I can always write it off as an expense against my game profits). I was going to use AdSense, but as my website’s been hosted on Yahoo for years now I knew they had one of those “$100 in paid search” deals going. I forked over $30 to get an account going, and they matched my $30 with $100 of their own (although, as the service provider, it’s not like they actually have to pay anything). I set up some pretty simple text links to go in search/contextual spots, set the CPC as low as it could go ($0.10/click), set a limit of $10/day, and launched the sucker.

Not quite through the end of day one, they’ve shown my add to around 45k people, of which 158 have clicked through at a cost of $12.42. I have nothing against Yahoo’s advertising–they’ve so far given me exactly what I paid for: eyeballs at around 10 cents a pair. If I actually had a product that I was selling, I could see this sort of marketing working out quite well (or if I was trying to establish a brand). That being said, what I’ve mostly realized is how sweet of a deal the Mochi guys are giving their publishers.

I don’t have any hard numbers, but I’d figure that around 20-25% of the ads shown on the MochiAds network come from the traffic share program (EDIT: Mochi’s Bob Ippolito says it’s much lower, so my empirical data may not match what’s going on behind the scenes). This benefits the players and the paying advertisers (a much wider variety of ads), but it’s we developers who get to reap the rewards. My traffic for Filler has started to tail off a bit over the last few weeks (down to about 50,000 a day, of which around 15,000 are MochiAds-enabled), but even so the Mochi team has served my ad up to around 26,000 people in the last week. That’s sent 814 clicks my way, or just over 3%. Going with a $0.10 CPC, thats around $80 in free advertising in the last week alone.

Since I launched the game, the Mochi-enabled version has been played around 2,000,000 times (a little under 40% of its total take–the lion’s share coming from Kongregate and Addicting Games). Using the 25% estimate, that means they’ve kindly showed my own ad around 500,000 times, and the 3% CTR translates into 15,000 visitors over the last two months. At $0.10/click, that’s $1500 in free advertising. The actual number is a lot lower than that–I only just switched to the 3% CTR ad from one that was only garnering about a 1.5% CTR–but the potential of it is pretty impressive. It’s certainly a you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-your-back arrangement, as the only way to get a high number of traffic share views is to put out a game that’s going to make them (and you) a lot of money–but I can’t imagine Google or Yahoo doing anything similar (25% less ad views is 25% less profits…).

It could all be an artifact of the fact that Mochi is still relatively new and might not have the ad sales lined up for the next three years, but I’m hoping the program persists as the company grows. It sure beats the heck out of paying for traffic!