android ad-supported games

I think what Rovio is doing very clever, Android tends to be installed more on shovelware type devices so there are a lot of Android equipped devices out there, given its open nature it's easier to 'jailbreak' it. So they just put ads on it and make the best of the situation.

Ad supported models probably work on a large scale though probably not for games with smaller install bases...

 

Android dev who both sells paid apps and uses in-game advertising here...

I think it's safe to assume that Rovio is doing very well. The ad-based approach on Android is smart, since piracy is rampant. It's not a silver bullet, though, and I'm having played the Android version, I'm not very happy with their implementation of ads, which often obscure game play and are very annoying. Annoyance can actually be a strategy if you want to induce users to upgrade to an ad-free version, but since Angry Birds doesn't offer this option, the annoyance is simply an annoyance. I have no doubt that a significant percentage of their advertising clicks are accidental (though I suppose that's an issue for the ad providers to mostly worry about).

Currently the game displays a full-screen video ad some percentage of the time on start up, with banner ads displayed on the actual game screen. I would think they'd get better click-through rates by serving up interstitial ads after the completion of a level and on menu screens (I think a user is much less likely to want to navigate away from the game while in the middle of a level than between levels, at least, on purpose).

For my own games, ad revenue has generally been down this year, and I was hoping the holidays would show an increase in eCPM, but the improvement has been marginal, even though I switched to AdWhirl to allow me to serve up multiple ad networks and adjust the percentage served of each on the fly. It would probably work better if AdWhirl supported more networks on Android (I'm just using 3 right now).

 

It varies by ad network, but it's sad to say, I'm typically getting eCPMs of between $0.10-0.20. Last year around this time I had stretches where I was getting around $1.00. I really miss those days.