For about a year and a half I’ve had Google Adsense adverts up on WipEoutZone to try and generate some revenue. Not a killing, of course, just enough to help pay for the forums and hosting.
The traffic for the site ebbs and flows. If there’s a new WipEout game on the way or one just launched, then it swells and there’s an influx of new visitors. At other times the virtual tumbleweeds have been rolling down the virtual streets of what becomes a ghost town.
So, with that in mind it didn’t really bother me what the adverts made – every little helps and I was hardly going to retire on the profit. So, Google Adsense was trucking away for most of 2007, and then in early 2008 I get an email from some company who want to “put our ads on your site.”
Say wha’?
Convinced it was a scam of some sort, I was pretty guarded in my dialogue with them. They said that if I agreed they would send me some php code to add their ads to the footer of my site, and a plugin to add the same to the forums, and when I’d done that they would start paying me. Oh, really?
Suspicious, I went through their code when I received it with a fine toothcomb, but all it was doing was loading an XML file of advert text and displaying it on the site. It appeared there was nothing nefarious going on, so I decided to take a chance and add their stuff to WipEoutZone. When I had, I let them know. By reply, I received a PayPal transaction notification email that said I had been paid $30.
Well, that was easy, I thought. That was at the start of February. At the end of February I received another $30, and have received the same amount each month since then. There has been no further dialogue, save for the monthly emails from PayPal to tell me I’ve received new funds. Just like that.
Now, WipEoutZone has peaked at over 2000 daily visitors and over 330,000 page views in the last few weeks, due to the release of WipEout HD. That might not sound like much, but it’s four times what the traffic was back in February, so said faceless company are at least getting their monies worth now. That $30 each month isn’t a big deal, especially with the prevailing unfavourable exchange rate for the US dollar. But it all mounts up, and with the WipEoutZone forum license due for renewal I transfered £60 in real money from my PayPal account to cover it from money that had built up over the summer, which is great.
And those Google Adsense adverts?
In a year and a half they have grossed $55.
Yay for mysterious, faceless corporations!
Have you thought about adding affiliate links to the games mate?
Obviously trickier with WipEout HD but you could probably make some money from affiliates with those sort of page views.
Alternatively, I asked for donations for the podcast and I’ve already covered my hosting costs for the year in only 2 months.
I had a PayPal donation thing going for a while, a few years back, but it felt a bit too much like sitting there with a cap in hand. I did get well over £100 from it, though, so it covered a good chunk of the hosting fees at the time.
To be fair, the affiliates thing is not something I’ve tried for a few years, but you’re right – it wouldn’t work with HD! 😉
I suppose I just need to get my finger out and explore all these options – I spend too much of my spare time playing games.