Serving In-Game Ads

Hi all!

I’ve been searching around the forums but haven’t found an answer, or at least an updated one. I’m wondering what the best way to serve in-game ads in PlayCanvas would be, or if anyone has suggestions for an ad service that allows developers to use an API to serve in-game ads that would be compatible with PlayCanvas.

I understand that we can implement things like Google Ads by hosting the PlayCanvas content elsewhere, but I’m more so looking for something that can be plugged directly into PlayCanvas, not using external code.

Back in the day when I used to develop Flash games, there were lots of SDKs that you could integrate directly using a code snippet. Hoping to find something similar for PlayCanvas.

Thanks!

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This thread may help: How do I monetize with PlayCanvas?

In a nutshell, any web based Ad Service would work. http://www.a4g.com/ would work. Here is an example of their integration with Phaser.js: https://github.com/ad4game/phaser-a4g

@devMidgard has integrated ads into his game Blast Arena here: Blast Arena Open Beta

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Thanks yaustar! I saw the Blast Arena post as well as the monetization thread, but I’ll take a look at a4g.com.

Thanks again!

If you google for DevMidgard and BlastIO, I think he has mentioned what he used in a Reddit thread some where or at least there’s a Reddit thread for this topic (ads on HTML5 games) where he may have posted in.

Thanks so much! I’ve been reading his Reddit posts and blog, and have found a couple of other ad companies to reach out to from that. :slight_smile:

I wouldn’t recommend a4g, many developers have expressed their sadness with their ads performance in comparison with other companies.

I would just go with adinplay and Google Adsense.

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Hey, thanks devMidgard! Actually, a4g told me that I need around 20,000 impressions per day before they will even consider allowing me to use their platform, so that wouldn’t have even happened anytime soon. :-/

Does adinplay have the same sort of requirements, in your experience?

For real? 20k Ad Impressions is a pretty high number.

My games are played by over 200k players monthly and to give you an example, blastarena.io - which is my most popular Multiplayer HTML5 Game to date is only generating around 3-4k impressions per day, which at least with Adinplay, it translates to 5-6€ per day.

That said, I have other games which only generate ~400 video ad impressions daily and Adinplay isn’t shutting the partner deal down.

I haven’t worked with a4g personally, but just because other html5 devs warned me about them and I decided to check out adinplay because it was on hordes.io, which is a very popular MMO-like game.

So far so good, adinplay is great with every range of partners, even if you’re a small dev, or a very big one.

In addition, I would look out for an alternative to Google Adsense, because their policy bans such things as displaying ads through iframes (web games live through iframes generally…) - so it’s just a matter of luck wether you get shut down or not.

Sadly, I haven’t found anything better than Adsense for static banner ads… so yeah, just kinda juicing it until I lose it.

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Hi devMidgard!

Thanks for the details! Really puts things into perspective. I used to do a lot of in-game and static banner ads back in the day when Flash was really popular (starting in 2003). Things still seem to be about the same in terms of how much volume you need to push to get a decent living out of solely advertising revenue.

I did contact AdInPlay through their contact form a while back but never got a reply, so I assumed they had the same restriction that you had to have pre-existing traffic to be considered. Maybe I’ll try them again.

Question - do you do any advertising of your own to bring players to your games yourself or is it all purely organic traffic?

I’m glad you found my input useful.

Haha! I wish the majority of my traffic was organic! :slight_smile:

No it’s in no way purely organic traffic. I use gaming portals as a launchpad for my games, implementing API’s or branding for those will get you big figures traffic and depending on how good your game is it can get spread everywhere very quickly.

Contact sites like a10.com, spilgames, etc.

Hey again!

Sorry, my bad - by purely organic traffic I meant that you weren’t doing any user acquisition via ads, and that users were finding your games and playing them on their own, whether through a gaming portal or your own website.

For me, I guess coming from a mobile game development background most recently, traffic is either organic (users searching for and installing your app on their own) or acquired (users installing/playing your app due to an ad click). I equate organic traffic with traffic you didn’t actually “pay” for.

I will definitely be using portals to generate volume - thanks for the site recommendations!

Beside video ads, adinplay is also a good alternative for static banner ads