Deriving revenue from in game adverts in on-line mobile games

Abstract

With the increased ownership of smart phones online free to play gaming has become popular but deriving revenue for the game owner is difficult and relies on encouraging micro payments to buy in game tools or cross selling of other products. There is another revenue generating option, which is to show in-game advertising in which the game owner obtains income from an advertiser or owner of the advert if a player views the advert. Typically, a third-party act as an intermediary to provide advertisements from advert selling auction sites to the game. This provider must be able to embed adverts in the game in real time, so must use several auction sites to ensure advert supply. Some of the auction sites are of more value to the game than others and this value can depend on where in the world the game is played, and the device used. To optimise the supply and order of adverts requires geographical segmentation of the players. In this paper, a method to undertake this segmentation using publicly available data is presented.