When you start your first arcade you are likely focused on two things. What games you have on there and how many ads you can put on there and it’s important to realize that you can’t just stick advertisements all over the place one because it impacts your load time, but it also increases the likelihood someone is going to use an adblocking software or bounce off your site entirely.
Less Is More
Having fewer advertisements sounds bizarre but there is a reason for this. If you have a popular portal showing less advertising can increase the CPM/CPC of your advertisements because advertisers have fewer spots to choose from driving up the demand for your advertising areas. Therefore maybe only showing 3 banners will increase your CPM and while mixing from different networks can increase your revenue it can also hurt the user experience. Advertisements are slow, bulky, and too many can cause users to use Adblock.
Don’t Give Them A Reason To Block Your Ads
Advertisements that are intrusive and malicious either cause users to not go to your sites or worse just block your advertising (which is worse because then you lose server resources and aren’t getting paid!).
Avoid using the following advertisements when you can.
- Pop Unders, they can bring in a lot of money but they also distribute the largest share of malware and are extremely intrusive.
- Pop-Ups (this isn’t 2004) they are annoying, most browsers block them, and they are spammy.
- Auto-Playing Videos. Exception: Videos within the game or that act as game preloaders seem to do well with users because they can clearly see it. Don’t post one in the sidebar that is near the bottom of the page where they can’t mute it.
- Info Links – Arcades aren’t sources for news and articles, therefore, networks like Infolinks don’t belong on your arcade (it can hurt user experience, and severely hurt load time).
Creative Advertisements that do work!
- Game & Video preloaders work wonderfully! They perform very well and have a high CPM.
- Site Skin Advertisements: Advertisements that take over the background of your website do perform quite well but make it feel natural don’t shove a flashing banner saying PLAY GAMES!!!! in the background it can look spammy and lead to users blocking your advertisements.
- Traditional Banner Advertisements: Adsense banners and others do work well don’t get caught up in the stats though you need to focus on generating unique organic traffic and the banners will take care of themselves.
- Affiliate Games: Using networks such as Famobi you can become an affiliate and share revenue with them from the banners that play in their games.
- Affiliate Store: Why not use WooCommerce to integrate a store with both products users can purchase with MyCred, and products you recommend through services like Amazon Affiliates? It works well, and your users will appreciate the goodies!
- Point System: Why not reward your user’s points from watching videos, and more! This can bring in organic traffic and users are more likely to prevent blocking advertisements (especially if you threaten to ban their accounts).
Concluding Thoughts
It’s important to balance the medium of revenue and user experience too many advertisements that are annoying turns your website off to potential visitors or encourages them to use tools such as Adblock. Too little and you don’t make enough money to keep it running. Perform A/B testing and as always keep that site loading quickly!