In this post I would like to throw out a suggestion for the Splinterlands team to generate some ad revenue by implementing 3rd party ads on the website.
A few things before diving into the details:
(1) This is not a community proposal. It is merely an idea to help the Splinterlands company generate revenue. Ultimately, it's their decision whether or not to do this. I'm writing this post simply to plant the seed and to hear some feedback.
(2) While there's typically a stigma around ads, it's important to note that many huge games monetize through ads. If it's done intelligently, and in a way that doesn't significantly diminish the user experience, then it just makes common sense and is often used as part of freemium business models in games.
(3) As you'll see below, we're not talking about a ton of money here. It's likely a few thousand dollars, and even with premium placement and the bonus idea I have at the end it would likely not exceed $10k/month, however that's probably better than zero if we can build these in such a way that they don't meaningfully harm the user experience.
(4) Of course I would prefer a gameplay experience that doesn't have ads. I think everyone would. I'm simply suggesting this as another way Splinterlands can generate some revenue based on an existing asset: traffic. It's also obviously not something the company would necessarily have to do forever, but it's a tactic that can be deployed to help pad the coffers.
Implementation
Implementing 3rd party ads is quite easy. At a high level it involves 3 steps:
(1) Setting up code blocks on an ad exchange provider (can be AdSense or an ad exchange aggregator).
(2) Updating several config files such as ads.txt which simply defines who's allowed to sell the ad inventory.
(3) Putting the ad blocks in the desired places on the product.
It's not completely trivial as you need to make sure the ads display correctly on different screen sizes (including being mobile-friendly) and don't adversely impact performance, among other things. But I can confidently say (having done this personally on other bigger websites) that it's very straightforward compared to just about anything else we're building here.
How to measure success
I would measure success by looking at maximizing incremental revenue while keeping user experience as unaffected as possible.
Revenue is based on the number of impressions (typically measured using CPM, which stands for "cost per mille" and represents the revenue per thousand impressions) and CPC ("cost per click", which measure revenue per click). The more impressions and clicks, the more revenue you get. Simple.
That DOESN'T mean you HAVE to make the ads intrusive/annoying/in-your-face. You can have ads that are embedded "nicely" into the design and don't provide huge distractions and STILL get revenue. Of course if it's too hidden, it'll generate less clicks, however it will still generate revenue.
Potential placements
I'm not a designer, so please don't take these potential placements as polished designs. They're purely a way to help visualize what this might look like. I intentionally picked a rather "obnoxious" looking ad. Some ads would look "better", others worse.
Goal
A good goal, in my opinion, would be to generate 150k ad impressions per day at a CPM of ~$1. This would then equate to ~$5k/month. If the revenue is significantly under that, then it's probably not worth keeping the ads.
While our daily page views may be less than 150k, ad platforms enable content refresh functionality, which means that one page view can yield more than one ad impression. You could therefore imagine how the "waiting" screen and "battle" screen could both yield 3-5 ad impressions, for example.
Of course these are just estimates, and it's possible our actual ad revenue would be significantly lower (or higher) than the goal. However, given how easy this is to set up, I think we'd be doing ourselves a disservice if we didn't try.
Bonus idea: watch an ad for Glint
Separately, we could increase the number of ad impressions by implementing a "watch an ad for Glint" system. Imagine a 15-30 second ad that yields 100 Glint and can be watched 3 times / day. These ads typically perform much better in terms of CPM/CPC, so this could be a way to generate significantly more revenue and it wouldn't hamper existing user flows as it would be entirely separate from core gameplay. Of course it would generate some Glint inflation, but given that's an in-game currency and that we could control how much is given, I think it would be fairly safe.
That's pretty much it. Simple idea to generate a bit of ad revenue. Nothing revolutionary. Would love to hear what you guys think.