ID:1749503
 
Applies to:DM Language
Status: Open

Issue hasn't been assigned a status value.
I was playing a free version of Solitaire on my phone when I noticed between each game it would display a brief, full-screen advertizement. I thought to myself, why doesn't BYOND do that?

What I propose is adding a way for developers to take advantage of BYOND's build-in ad support by allowing us to display ads at runtime. Instead of just having that single ad play when starting a game up, developers could have ads play between multiplayer matches, on timed intervals, or whenever appropriate depending on the game.

Developers will need a way to either dictate how long a static ad should be displayed or figure out how long an animated ad is going to take to finish. In order to get everyone on-board with playing ads you're going to need to give developers a portion of the ad revenue. That would incentivise developers to make use of it and allow them to charge a fee to disable those ads altogether. Either way, BYOND gets a cut from both the ad revenue and the subscription fees.
I agree with this. Ads can bring in decent money if done correctly. It could also be where if people build ads in to their game it could be removed from when the game loads. People could use ads to give people coins/perks/bonuses in their games and BYOND and the developer both get abortion of the proceeds.
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The ads played by choice of the developer should give a cut to the dev, but the initial start-up, of course, should be BYOND only. There would also have to be some sort if check to see if the game's even available to play ads, like subscriptions.
I don't see that we need that..
Since we already can make it on our screens
In response to Maxsteel13
Maxsteel13 wrote:
I don't see that we need that..
Since we already can make it on our screens

It is simple to make it , code your ad , make sure it is a HUD and boom your annoying ads will apear on the map(screen) when you are playing
It would be nice to be able to do revenue sharing with the existing ads, but that is problematic from a technical/financial POV, because we then have to track user payments, issue 1099s, and so forth. It's one of the main reasons we switched the subscription model to go from being BYOND-processed to user-processed (unfortunately there is no such equivalent system for ads).

That said, there's really no reason you can't just put your own ads in your games if you want, as Maxsteel13 said.
I think revenue sharing would be nice. Newgrounds does this and forks over the cash once you reach 50$ in ad sharing.
In response to Tom
A tutorial on how to add ads to your game would be nice.
In response to Tom
That makes sense, though it's a darn shame.
In response to Tom
YouTube manages just fine with it, but if it's not feasible as a built-in feature, oh wells. My main concern with ads being generated on our end is that, without client-side processing, they wouldn't be near as smooth as they should be. Sure, once the ad is displayed the client shiuld handle it, but the server would have to handle displaying the ads to the client.
Generating an ad is just a matter of outputting a code in your html. It will run on the client, just like our ads.

Hmm, although come to think of it, it probably won't work properly for flash ads in the embedded browser due to some security on our end (HTML5/mobile ads should be fine though). One could probably do a link() based ad in the default browser though.

I will keep thinking about the revenue share because I agree that it is a somewhat ideal way of doing things as it gives an easy incentive for the dev. I did look into this very early on though and couldn't come up with a good way to do it without heavily involving ourselves in the payment processing (which BYONDDimes showed us was not feasible for an operation of our size).