Charging money from an online game

[Entelekhia]

First of all I hope this is the right place for this...

I have a site that is build by a friend of mine who is an artist. It's a sort of online paperdoll game where you can dress up many different celebrities with all different kind of clothes. It's build with Flash. The site is very addictive, it's getting 12.000 to 15.000 unique visitors and 100.000 to 130.000 page impressions a day. And it's growing all the time. It's not on high places in search engines but visitors are telling their friends and so one. Last month the website had 1.500.000 page impressions, this month it seems that it's getting 2.500.000 impressions.

The owner is interested to make some money with it and she asked me to help. Is there a good way of charging money from using it? Visitors are mostly young girls so I don't know how they are able to pay. We were thinking like 5 dollars per 6 months or something like that.

Affiliate programs don't seem to make any money on our site, because they are playing the game, not clicking on ads.

Any ideas how to turn this site profitable? I am from finland (visitors are all from north-america) and here we have a very used method of paying with text messages. Do they have that method in USA and Canada?

And are there legal problems if you make money with celebrities? (should have been the first question)

Thanks for any suggestions and ideas!

[Leosghost]

Maybe a dialer?
Subscriptions?
Celebrity magazine subscription affiliate progs?
Banners from celebrity magazines ..clothing groups etc ..
You're in the unusaual position of having asite that works more like TV or print magazine in the way it attracts and hold visitors ...think more that way ...

Use of celeb pics depends on where you are hosted ..and where you are ..

[derekwong28]

I would put Google Adsense on the site. Your visitors do not have to make a purchase at the advertiser's web site in order to make you money

[sem4u]

I would probably go for teen targeted banners. I don't think AdSense would work because apart from the Flash game I expect there is not much actual 'content' on the site.

[Entelekhia]

As I said, I don't want to use affiliate programs no more. They just seem to be almost free advertisement in my case. Adsense was good until they kicked me out because of invalid clicks (that I most certainly didn't produce!). By the way, we have pages that only contain flash and you can still use Adsense, it can recognize the page's title and meta tags. For Madonna, we got Madonna ads and so on.

I browsed the net and SMS Kambi is a company that provides SMS payment services. Strange that USA doesn't have text message payment systems. I live in Finland and I can even buy tickets to tram or bus with my cell phone. When this system gets to USA and Canada, I think I'll try it. 2 dollars for a months gaming wouldn't be such a sacrifice and if you can get it via text message, it would be really worth trying. I hope it get's there soon.

[Essex_boy]

I dont know if it still happens but how about pay per impression banner adverts?

You could get $1 a thousand on 2.5 million thats $2500 per month.... Not bad at all.

[Entelekhia]

Yes that's true, but I don't want no pop-ups or any other ads that people hate. I'd rather keep the visitor rates going up and then I'll switch to SMS payment.

Kambi really seems quite ok.

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 1:12 pm (utc) on July 30, 2004]
[edit reason] No URLs please [/edit]

[tomld2]

Why don't use require email regisration and use it to build an optin email list?

[thaedge]

There are advertising companies that do pay per impression or CPM and let you choose the ads that appear as well as the size.

Try some affiliate networks and join some magazines, posters, related items and link to them much like Leosghost said.

[Entelekhia]

I would gladly hear comments about sms payment system and charging from an online game