Digital games has become one of the biggest activities on the internet. Games are in fact the biggest driver of revenue on both the iOS app store and Google Play. This rise of mobile gaming has even changed the demographics and consumption habits of an entire industry. Did you know that 52% of women are gamers?
The user base of Candy Crush is over 60% female, with 42% of these players between 21- 35 years old and almost 40% above 35 years old. However, a lot of bloggers have not capitalised on the digital games opportunity by earning advertising dollars from games advertisers or within games.
The huge shift in demographics has opened up a massive opportunity for bloggers, allowing them to monetize a much larger audience and therefore maximize their revenue potential.
There are several effective ways to monetize your traffic with digital games. Below is a list of 3 highly effective ways to do this, with guidance on how to do each.
1. Have a Games Portal on your Site.
A games portal is an area of your website that users can see a list of games and can play them within your website. Having a game portal on your site is a great way to engage your users for longer, helping to convert your site into a hub where users can spend more time.
Having a selection of popular and familiar games will help to engage more users which translates into increase repeat visitors and higher advertising revenue. These same users will then also visit your core content more frequently as well.
2. Embed Games into your Articles.
Inserting games into an article on your site has many benefits. In exchange for providing your users a free game, you can show them video pre-roll ads. Typically, a video ad would earn you a multiple of 5 times the CPM of a banner ad, so this is a highly monetizable ad unit which contributes highly to boosting your eRPM.
Additionally, users that play games will increase their time on page and your average user duration. This will increase the likelihood of them clicking on other ads on your site such as Google Adsense. A combination of both higher ad clicks and higher eCPM ad units can make a massive impact to your overall RPM.
There are 3 options to embed a game into your site. You can either custom build, license or white label a game. It’s important to get a HTML5 game as these can be played across all devices. To get a game custom built for you will cost around $10k per game. Acquiring a license costs around $999 per game, which is usually for a single site license. To white label a game you either pay on a usage basis, like pay as you go, or on a revenue share on advertising revenue generated.
Developing a custom-game is expensive but can be a good solution for a very large publisher like Yahoo. It requires a lot of time and technical expertise. Using a white label provider on a revenue share basis, such as AddPlay is free and is profitable from day 1 which is generally the best option for bloggers.
3. Generate Free Users and Traffic
Social media sites like Facebook are used by most people for entertainment. This makes for a great fit to engage users with any type of entertainment content, which is why a lot of entertainment sites get lots of traffic from Facebook.
If you have a Games Portal, not only can you drive your existing followers back into your site, but you can post on your social channels to engage a new audience of users. A percentage of these new users will then go onto read your core content, therefore, helping you to generate new users and increase your advertising income.
Have you monetized your site with digital games? Which of these strategies have worked well for you or would be most interesting to test?
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