Do you want to watch an ad for a boost?

I've been trying out some games on my new phone, recently installed this "idle" game called exominer. It's quite fun but not too different from the idle games I used to play back in the day when I was younger. It follows quite the same models where you mine a certain ore, then refine it, then you can choose to either sell the ore, the refined ore or build something new with it, etc, etc, while each new mine deposit costs exponentially more and gives you higher rewards with almost the same time/resource cost in between each level and new mineral/building. It's fun for a while but goes "meh" quick but I'm pretty sure that's the idea behind it. It tests your patience as a "free to play" player while constantly offering you "limited discounts" on abilities and speed improvements for your wallet.

Occasionally it also asks you if you want to watch an ad for an ingame boost. This activity entails you watch an ad for a specific amount of time, it won't let you click the ad away until the timer runs off, if you somehow manage to stop it or restart the game then you don't get the boost. Once the ad has finished playing and you click the X you're back in the game with some extra money or time sped up, etc. It's a win-win, right? The game gets some adrevenue and you save some time and get to your goal in the game faster all for the price of having spent 30 seconds watching this ad for another game.

It's kind of a weird situation if you really think about it, these other games pay a good amount of money for advertisement which goes into these other games, or websites, or influencers, etc, pockets all for the chance that you'd try the game out, possibly like it and get hooked and start dishing out money within the game. Everything mobile gaming has become such pay2win/pay2enjoy/pay2notgrind that even the advertisers possibly profit off of this and that's after having paid developers, artists, musicians, gamedesigners, etc, to create the game. There must be players spending money on these games else why would they pay such insane amounts of money to advertise them, right? They must be getting the better end deal out of this else this wouldn't be sustainable. Surely not all games must gain a net profit from this and probably eventually stop advertising or move on to the next game, I wonder what the graveyard of the playstore on google looks like.

I googled what the title in this address says: https://nextgenhero.io/what-do-games-make-from-ads/

the top 200 games usually earn almost $80,000 every day. However, that is just for the most popular games and if you consider the top 800 games, then their average revenue is around $3000.

Bear in mind this is from adrevenue alone, from games possibly not in the top 800, i.e. new ones competing for a spot to get adrevenue offers from other games to earn the same daily revenue amounts. If the game is good at forcing players to pay up to buy things in it then those adrevenue numbers are just a fraction of their daily earnings.

Anyway, this is neither here nor there, it is what it is.

But it got me thinking.

How the fuck are we still not making use of adrevenue in any way? Are we that good that we don't need it? Can we really just say no to it because our way of rewards through inflation is that much better? I know Hive account@leofinance is and during their peak they were probably getting a good amount of revenue considering how small the Hive userbase is and that they were even smaller. It just baffles me that we don't even have the infrastructure set up but not just the old popular one where the website/game/service gets all the revenue but rather it being spread out across all users.

It sounds quite obvious that that's going to be the next step not just to a more sustainable ecosystem and possibly hive price but because it's kind of dumb to ignore it when you shouldn't.

I get that many people like the fresh breath of no ads, but there's adblocks for those who absolutely don't want them because believe it or not if the model is proper some may want them.

Hive account@peakd for instance already has some analytics of page views, unique viewers, etc. While I understand we're still a smallish userbase and there may be some that will try to cheat the analytics in their favor if there's money on the line but those will surely be found when payday comes and we see certain stakeholders earn a weirdly high amount compared to the rest of their activity. Not to mention there could be different equations involved of how you could earn said revenue, not just direct pageviews and browsing time but other things that may not just encourage you to be social but maybe even hold some Hive Power, wouldn't that already sound like a win and addition to holding stake? Aside from the buy pressure of converting adrevenue money into Hive to distribute it to authors who manage to get a lot of views, engagement, etc, while at the same time dishing out rewards to consumers as long as they create a hive account.

We've yet to have a simple mobile game that uses ads in any way where the players or the token receive a buyback/burn from part if not all of the adrevenue it generates. Why not?

Think about it, if you know that watching that 30 second ad, not only will you get a small boost in that game but at the same time 0.1 Hive to your account, wouldn't you do it? 30 second ad, a few times per day. I'm sure for many smaller accounts that would triple their APY, or if anything allow them to buy and support the next ingame boost for free rather than adrevenue always just going to the game creators pockets the players get a choice in the matter.

It's not like anyone's being cheated here, the advertisers only care about imprinting their game into your brain. That's all most advertising is about.

If you really think about it we surely have a big enough userbase to get a mobile game started, make it somewhat fun to check out a few times per day and even if it's not that fun we could collectively just pretend it's nice and try boost its numbers. Possibly evolve it with adrevenue for a while if it really sucks early on cause we want it going as cheap as possible and then we start advertising it ourselves and get people to 1. create a hive account and 2. earn from playing that shitty game.

Look at all other apps and games that exist in the playstore that offer people to earn money, none of them work. The internet is still where it used to be where you can maybe earn a couple of cents per day doing some shady ad clicking or spamming people's emails instead of actually earning Hive rewards that we here today know work and work well. It would not only be sustainable but onboard these users onto Hive where a whole world would open up for them and their accounts.

I'm honestly surprised we're not putting more of the DHF funds into use of attracting more people in some clever ways but I guess that's a talk for another time, just wanted to rant a little about this and maybe someone finds it interesting.

Need some sleep now.