Newgrounds Ad RevShare

By: Derek Yu

On: May 8th, 2009

Newgrounds

Newgrounds creator Tom Fulp announced last month that the site would be extending its ad revenue sharing program to all users. I_smell mentioned this one the forums when it was first announced, but I missed it. He wrote:

If you make browser games, you know the Flash portal Newgrounds. They’ve had their own embedded ads service since about May 2008, but now they’ve kicked it up a notch. Newgrounds now automatically share their ad revenue whether you sign up for the ads or not.

For example- I made a game recently and got it sponsored by a third party. The terms were that I wasn’t allowed to embed any ads in the game. So I didn’t, there are no ads in the game. Now Newgrounds will pay me regardless just because my game’s on their site. Not just games either, ad impressions come from audio submissions, animations and even my damn userpage. I made 3 cents for having a blog. Thanks!

The site has a nice interface for tracking your earnings here. You can see an example of it here. Thanks, I_smell!

It’s cool that Newgrounds (still my favorite Flash portal) is doing this. Since this program’s been up for a month now, has anyone had or heard of any success with it? How does it compare to, say, Kongregate’s service and similar programs?

Posted in Browser Games, Business, Community, Developers | Tags: Newgrounds

Glaiel Gamer

It’s a lot better than kongregate’s service IMO, the stat page is really easy to read.

Then again, I have 50 flash and 50 audio submissions on newgrounds, and only 7 games on kongregate.
Deacon Blues

I need to start making some bare minimum flash animations.
Bug

There are quote marks in the latter two links
http://www.mile222.com aeiowu

Without integrating any of their extra ad stuff (bare minimum) Effing Hail has made about $10.62 so far at 162K plays on Newgrounds with a rating of 4.31.

Effing Hail on Kongregate has made $82.02 (bare minimum which gives 25% to the dev) with 143K plays at a rating of 3.90.

Financially speaking, Kong seems to win out, but I find the Newgrounds community to be a lot more positive/gracious in general. Perhaps if we implemented the Newgrounds API and ad stuff the returns would increase dramatically, I dunno…
Raiten

One difference is that for Kongregate, you only get paid for ads shown on your games’ pages, but on Newgrounds, you get money for movie submissions and blog posts. But yeah, Kongregate’s eCPM is higher.
Raiten

“but on Newgrounds, you get money for movie submissions and blog posts as well”
http://www.agj.cl/ agj

The earnings are laughable. I have made like a bit over a dollar in Kongregate, and not a cent in Newgrounds. But this deal is better than nothing.
Paul Eres

Thanks for the info aeiowu; both 10$ and 80$ for 100k+ plays sound horrible to me actually. People are always saying how much money there is in Flash, but if you sell a game the old-fashioned way and get 100k+ plays of your demo, you’ll make thousands of dollars, not 10 or 80. Of course, it may be a bit harder to get 100k plays of a game demo than to get 100k plays of a Flash game, and I know most of the money in Flash games is in portal sponsorship rather than ad revenue, but still, it’s almost an insult to a game for it to get only 10$ for bringing entertainment to 100k+ people. That’s the size of a *large city*.
Malasdair

As a rule with flash, though, you’re only bringing entertainment to 100k people for 10 minutes or less. So I wouldn’t spit on 80 bucks for that?
moi

100k plays doesn’t mean 100k people, does it?
Paul Eres

I’m not sure how the site tracks numbers, maybe it’s uniques, maybe replays by the same guy over and over trying to get a higher score count as hundreds of plays. If it works like the latter, then the price sounds more reasonable (though still probably a lot less than it’s worth to the site owners in terms of ad revenue).
http://www.chinesegum.com Cool Games

Would you guys be interested if a site offed a revenue share, but you were required to build your own blog connected to the network?
Craig Stern

Going just purely on percentages:

“Kongregate shares between 25% and 50% of ad revenue generated by games with their respective developers.”

As for Newgrounds…well, I don’t see that info disclosed anywhere. (Here is the original NG thread where it was announced: http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1050288/1)

The eCPM might be peanuts on NG, but I find that it’s much much easier to rack up large numbers of hits there than on Kong. I think this is a positive development for developers of all stripes. :)
http://www.mile222.com aeiowu

Yea Paul, I agree. Unless you’re in the tip-top and getting multi-millions of plays pretty consistently (Sonny 2, Platform Racing 2, Gemcraft, DTD) you’re not really going to see any kind of difference-making money out of these ad systems if you’re trying to do this full-time.

Though for the hobbyist/amateur who is maybe still in high school or doing it on the side, making $100 off their game all tolled could be relatively great for them.

Nonetheless it’s a small piece of the total pie, and ultimately does not serve the dev like it should. Nonetheless, our next game will be in Flash, but shareware.
Glaiel Gamer

Also you have to realize that newgrounds didn’t go back and pay for all the impressions before their system was released.

My CPM for closure is about $0.58 on newgrounds but that might just be cause I have the ad inside the flash too.

@Paul:

There is a lot of money to be made in flash, but these types of ads aren’t necessarily the way to make it, they’re just one of the revenue streams available.
http://www.mile222.com aeiowu

oh right, for some reason I had it in my mind we put Effing Hail up on NG just after the rev-share was announced.

therefore, my figures are bunk.
I_smell

Just to make sure we all know- This is ONTOP of other revenue. Like you can get a game sponsored (AND put ads in it if you’re a greedy bastard) and then this automatic revenue would just be the icing on the cake.

Of course $80 is a dumb ammount to make on Flash games, but if Newgrounds is just giving it to you for no reason then that’s fantastic.

I didn’t even know Kongregate did this. Apparantly I’ve got $103 on there, but don’t know how to withdraw it. There’s no point comparing each service though, cos their both free and their both automatic.
Montoli

So what ARE realistic revenue numbers for a flash game on portals then? Several people in this thread seem to have some experience with it. I’d be interested to know what experiences people had. I’ve heard about sponsorship deals, but have no sense of how much of the total revenue they make up.

How much does a moderately-sized (call it 2-4 week) flash title make? How much comes from in-game ads, (mochiads, etc) how much comes from sponsorships, how much comes from portal sharing schemes like NG or Kongregate?

Anyone able to give even rough ballpark numbers for that sort of thing?
raiten

http://pgstudios.org/revenue.html
Montoli

Awesome, that is EXACTLY the kind of data I was wondering about. Thank you for the linkee!

Only other question is how common this distribution is. Is this how it breaks down for most people in the flash market, or is this an outlier? The numbers seem to mostly line up with Emanuele Feronato’s experiment in flash monentizing.

Anyone have any other data points they want to throw into the ring? This is great info!
Edmund

the %splits raiten posted seem about right.

For me i usually go with one sponsor, because doing smaller sub sponsors takes extra time and can be messy.. and its just more business work im not at all interested in.

If the game im doing is something like Aether or Coil i dont run in game ads. but for a game like Meat Boy or Spewer that i believe would become more “viral” then i put in loader ads for extra money.

realistically theres no way to make a living off only ad rev, it was to low and basically feels like a tip you get for a job well done.

i can give you some basic stats for meat boy though that might shed some light on this.

On kongregate Meat boy was played 500k times and made me and jon about 1000 bucks in ad share over 5 months.

On Newgrounds Meat Boy was played 3 million times and made us about 500 bucks. (note that not all these plays came from newgrounds.com but were related to the newgrounds ad’s) this was before ad share and purely from in game ads.

At this point i think we make like 40 cents a day off both sites at most from meat boy, usually after your games no long front page news your traffic slows to a crawl.

So basically what im saying is flash money isnt in the ads, but im not going to scoff at 1000 bucks, the ads i use arnt intrusive and only on the load screens of the games so i dont feel like im taking a loss for this. a year ago there was no such thing as ad share or ingame ads… and 3 years before that there was no such thing as sponsorships…so things are getting better for flash devs.

i hope this personal info was helpful.

-Edmund
I_smell

I put ads in a game in early 2008 and since then it’s made $1500. It makes pretty much nothing nowadays, like 3 cents a day.
The last game I made just recently I didn’t use ads, but got it sponsored for $4000. This Newgrounds thing threw an extra $20 my way cos they like my face.
Leonard

This doesn’t sound too appealing to someone who is a capable programmer and would consider entering the flash game market.

$1000 for a game I worked weeks on? Sounds like the audience treats these games like disposable crap, so no wonder in most cases that’s exactly what they get.
Edmund

yeah but keep in mind the money in flash games is in the sponsorships.

depending on the game you can get anywhere from 1-16k for a simple sponsorship, and if your business savy you can do sub sponsors for more.

also if your willing to sell your IP or do multi player games there are sites out there like adult swim that will dish out 60-100K for your game.
Montoli

It keeps deleting my follow up posts, but in case this is the one that gets through, THANK YOU everyone for the info and links, that’s exactly the kind of information I was looking for. It’s all tremendously helpful and informative.
raiten

I think I’ve made more money on non-exclusive licenses then sponsorships, but as Edmund said, there’s a lot of extra work for that.
Sparky

Thanks for the info, this has been a very useful discussion.