Advertising and Skotos

[Rupert]

This thread is on behalf of The Eternal City, but applies to all Skotos games in a sense.

Why don't we have more advertising? Our main source of new members comes from third party websites often only frequented by the people who vote on them for their -own- games. I obviously don't have the sales statistics infront of me to see what kinf of business Skotos is actually doing, but I imagine it's not exactly a successful business model.

So, why aren't we doing MORE advertising? I'm no economics major, but even I can click the 'create ad' button on facebook. And that's precisely what I did.

Following the process through, I took two paths. It gives you two options, one is a bulk sum you pay and it runs the ad until the money runs out. The other is a daily click regiment, and it stops running the ad after a set ammount of clicks has been placed on it that day, and then picks up the next day.

For 50 dollars, facebook will run an add for TEC for 30 days, at .87 cents a click. That's two premium accounts, and you potentially get back 60+ more. If you take the 5 dollar a day route, that adds up to potentially be, for the price of 150 dollars a month, less than a full year of premium Skotos service, we potentially bring in close to 200 players a month for the Skotos community as a whole.

The adds are directly targetted at people interested in them. You can literally put in 'roman themed text based MMO', and it will find an audience for it. Shannon, if players wanted to do this with their own money, or setup some kind of donations box among the Skotos games' communities, would Skotos itself stand in the way? We obviously would like to see our games be a bit better, and I know from personal experience over many of them they suffer mainly from lack of players.

I guess what I'm asking, is can -we- advertise with our own money on behalf of TEC?

[Rupert]

Is there perhaps another venue I can persue with this to get a better chance of response?

[UzakGM]

You could try contacting ShannonA at ce @ skotos.net or sending a private message in the forums.

[SHAzrael]

Skotos won't stop players advertising with their own money. That's been openly done before by players. I don't think Skotos has ever officially encouraged it (I guess it's weird to say "spend your own money on something that helps us") - but ANY advertising, monetary or not, is always appreciated.

There are webpages with advertising buttons & banners that can be used for advertising the various games, including TEC.

I suggest you go ahead with this, and see what sort of a response you get. If it gets a few new signups, Skotos might be more willing to set up something along these lines on a regular basis.

I know I originally found Skotos from advertising running on sluggy.com - I can only imagine modern advertising would be even more effective, both because it's more targetted, but also because many of the games are free.

[ShannonA]

We haven't done much advertising lately, because traditionally we found that it didn't pay out. Our Cost Per Acquisition was usually larger than the expected yearly return of a customer we'd get. I think the honest answer is that text games are a hard sell in a world won over by graphics, despite the better roleplaying we can offer and the more intricate mechanics that a game like TEC puts forth. That's resulted in player word-of-mouth being by far our best means of marketing.

(Though you suggest we could get 200 customers for $150, the real answer is that somewhere between 1 in 10 and 1 in 100 of clickers will even sign up for an account, and then somewhere between 1 in 10 and 1 in 100 of those will stay. So, we end up talking about 1 or 2 customers for $150, which starts to be a much more questionable value.)

Mind you, since our last real push on advertising, there's been more CPA (cost per acquisition) and CPC (cost per click) advertising out there, and in some places that's lowered costs. If there's an opportunity that you really think we're missing, drop me a line at shannona@skotos.net. If there are opportunities that *are* effective now, we of course want to be taking advantage of them.