$1000 for advertising our app? :P

$1000 is a lot. Touch Arcade is really the best place to spend any cash on ads, but you have to make your ads either graphically inviting, somewhat clever, or both. Angry Birds and Immersive Sea... something rather caught my eye. I clicked both, actually.

 

I don't understand talk about using iphone ads to "build a brand." If you don't think an ad will pay for itself, I see no point to running it.

The way the AppStore is structured, the only logical use of ads is to promote a game at the time of its initial release - this is a means to an end. If the ad gives you enough concentrated buys to get your app onto a top list, it'll end up paying for itself many times over, long after the ad stops running.

Bryan, correct me if I'm wrong, but like many top apps, Geared never really had an exceptional amount of discussion here on TA threads. You'll never really know how well Geared would have done without that initial ad budget, but I think you're probably spot on that this was critical to its success. The same goes for Trenches and Doodle Jump - both heavily promoted at the time of their release.

 

Have them report back every week with links

 

As a player of libra balance, I don't see it as a type of game that could produce a relevant and intersting enought banner to get a click.

 

It's not just the graphics style. I think the game itself is hard to represent as a single image. It has to be played to be really understood I think. I say make a banner and post it before you pay for it to be placed. I think the members could tell you if it's a good representation of the game. Not sure if TA allows gifs, but if the banner had a moving background of the balls rolling as the pan moved, I think it could show how the game plays.

Not having "characters", in my opinion, is going to make it harder to do a catchy banner. Look at banners TA hosted such as RavenSword, Trenches, and Angry Birds. The characters is what grabbed my attention. But geared just had a gear with thier name Ina really cool font, which also grabbed my attention, so it can be done! Best of luck.

 

I am charging $10 gift card + promo code for lots of advertising, good reviews on many different forums and blog commenting on iphone related blogs. PM me for more info.

 

@carlos: if you do go the route of picking kids for cheap money i suggest not paying them until the end of the month because some kids will try to scam you out of the money. Another thing is that you should choose the people wisely because not everyone is good at spreading the news

 

Carlos, save that money, and invest it into your game! Make the game more fun!

 

Don't buy online banners

Waste of your money. Even TA. We paid big bucks for many ads on different sites, even here on TA, and according to statistics even the ads here were just waste of our money and time.

 

From what I've seen getting your game to sell past making the game quality is 90% luck. Some games just are just seen by a lot of people, compels them, and they buy it. I've seen great games get swept under the carpet just because nobody ever saw them. While advertising can help, and if you play your cards perfectly, it can get you into the charts (which is unlikely to happen) the risk outweighs the low of chance of success.

 

i agree with that...but its also coming up with something new and exciting....it could be great graphics, killer gameplay, or an entire new gene. there is already a dominating laybrinth game in the appstore, so why try and compete? I think you should go back to the drawing board and come up with something so different and fun that it will make a splash....look at other devs who found a void in the app store like distinctive games and stinger games developing hockey games. There were none in the appstore, and stinger games got to the top 25 in a lot of countries...they got featured becuase they came up with something different. Try coming up with something that you will have no competition for, like for instance there are no lacross games, and there are many other voids in the app store and it will be worth your while to come up with a great idea

 

+1 +2 +3

 

these apps are not too polished and not really original, but every single one was luckey enough to have been featured by apple at some point....and most of them are original....like for example cupcakes...its the #4 top paid app, and its a totally original idea.....making and sharing virtual cupcakes....so they expanded it to more foods

cell phone tracker....neither simple nor creative, but its a classic trick people know....i still think www.celltrace.org is cooler, so you could try and create something like that where it finds your phone, and then shows you a disturbing video.

so if you see where i have gone with my last 2 posts here is that you need to come up with something totally different....if its a good idea, apple will find it and feature it because then they can make money off of it. However dont look at other games and point the finger at them and say "they arent polished...so how come they can sell games." you have to look at them for inspiration, because you can see the success they had just from coming up with a new idea. I also say that you should go to flash game sites like www.addictinggames.com and look for inspiration there....there are endless possibilities for games....you just need to find a niche where you can fit it

 

As someone who advocates advertising their game upon release, someone asked me this past week at GDC how much I would spend on acquiring a user. At first, assuming the royalty was 70 cents I answered, "69 Cents!"

Then I thought about it for a moment. "Well, no, given that the success of a game is largely based on achieving visibility in the top games lists, assuming I could get as many users as I wanted, I would gladly pay 70 cents for a user."

Then I thought about that for a moment. "Well...at a cost of 70 cents per user, I would have the ability to climb the charts at no cost to myself. The ability to climb the charts is obviously worth something, so I'd pay more than 70 cents per user."

Add onto that, if some percentage of users show their friends, post on youtube, post in the forums, or just generally promote the game and generate word of mouth, the value of a user climbs even more above the 70 cent price.

That is why I believe that paying $X to acquire $Y revenue is still a good idea even when X is greater than Y. At what point it becomes a bad idea is hard to know. Will paying $2 to get $1 ultimately lead to a profit in the long run? Will $5 for $1? It's difficult to make any claims regarding the exact figures. All I know is that I would pay 71 cents to gain a 70 cent sale all day long because that sale is far from being the only profit.