We in the UK have something called Spotify. Spotify on one hand us brilliant — it allows you to stream virtually any song or album from a massive online library at a high bitrate with virtually no delay to your computer for your listening pleasure. But Spotify is also the source of some of the most annoying advertising the world has ever heard. Every three songs or so it will blurt out a 30 second ad through your speakers, which will tell you about music that you’d never buy or how to join the army or the latest dating service for your single friends. By far the worst adverts, though, are Spotify’s own, with a monotonous, condescending voice that spikes the mike levels. You try and turn it down, but turn it down too far and the ad stops playing! It’s infuriating. Now you can stop these ads by paying a monthly fee, but every time I hear one and consider this I think about how useless Spotify are and how undeserving of any of my money they are, and how I’d much rather spend that money on an album each month.
Advertising’s such an odd thing. Usually we think of it as being a nuisance, something that interrupts our consumption of content. I have a friend who would rather pull the plug on his HD projector than suffer through the audio-visual monstrosity of another Go Compare advert. Yet we’ll deliberately go and seek out a gorilla playing the drums and show all our friends on YouTube. Film trailers are essentially adverts, but I go looking for interesting trailers regularly. Then there’s vouchers, which benefit the consumer so much that they forget that it’s just another form of advertising (incidentally, a good friend of mine has a start-up called VouChaCha which delivers location aware vouchers to mobile devices — very interesting stuff!).
This brings us on to advertising in apps. I border on obsessive when it comes to what I allow in my games. I realise that my design skills are a very long way from being outstanding, but every pixel displayed to you in one of my games has been thought about, and every aspect of user experience considered. This is why I cringe every time my word of mouth marketing works, and I see someone download Brainz, only for them to be presented with an irrelevant and slightly unattractive OpenFeint pop-up as soon as they launch the game for the first time (please someone tell me how to stop this!). But this is counterbalanced by the fact that OpenFeint provides a great service that would be very costly to reimplement, as well as the fact that I tell myself I’ll customise it all one day. So up until now, ugly ads from AdMob or Google have been out of the question for me. Then iAds come along, and the question of whether to include ads or not is now a lot harder to answer. People question Jobs’ motivation for getting into the advertising space, and I’m sure there are many reasons, but I truly believe one of his greatest motivations is to improve end user experience.
I started a small side project the other week, which has spiralled a little, but I don’t expect to take too long to finish off. It seems that monetisation of games is a hot topic of conversation amongst fellow iDevBlogADay folk (check out Pondering Monetization and Should Be Free? posts from this week), with no-one 100% sure of their strategy yet. I’m fairly settled on In App Purchase for this next project. It seems like a good testing ground for it, and the concept fits it perfectly, so the real question I’m asking now is whether it’s worthwhile putting ads in the free to play version. It’s not only a question of how worthwhile it might be, but more importantly whether I trust Apple with those precious on screen pixels. The answer? I think it’s worth a shot. Probably.
This is the big question. The game I’m currently working on is going to have in app purchase, and ads until something is purchased. Thing is, I’ve yet to see an iAd. This only tells me that the fill rates are diabolical. Yes, someone made $1400 in a day but I’ve got the app and I’ve not see a single ad in it so I can only assume he’s making nothing now. The solution I’m going to opt for is to have iAds but also to have admob as a fallback. And of course, choose when to show the ads carefully. No one is going to click on an ad when they launch a game or are in the middle of playing it. Once they’ve finished a game though, that’s more likely.
As for getting rid of the OpenFeint screen, easy. Stop using OpenFeint. I used them before, their design is disgusting. I’m not entirely convinced anyone ever found my game via their dashboard. Therefore the only reason I was really using it was to have their leaderboards. Trying to integrate their leaderboards without having to go into the dashboard is more trouble that it’s worth. I’ve opted to forget about them and implemented my own leaderboards which suited me better as it allowed me more options.