I hurt my back chopping wood, how tragic. This means I am a) in agony and b) not able to talk about gamecamp in London, because I couldn’t go :(
Instead, I shall waffle on about advertising!
I’m one of the few indie devs that actually believes in advertising. Everyone else seems to think it does not work on a small scale, as in <$500,000. It does. Even spending $1 on ads will make a difference, the problem is, that it’s a difference too tiny to measure. Measuring ad results is a minefield I’ve blogged about a lot in the past.
One thing I like about ads is that it’s truly remote and spontaneous spreading of news about your game. Most indies don’t get spontaneous website coverage unless they actively find a reviewer, send him a copy and pester him/her for a review. By definition, that narrows the circle of publicity about your game. Who knows how many Ukrainian gaming blogs have readers who are oblivious to Gratuitous Tank Battles, because I don’t know those blogs exist?
I rely heavily on hard evidence and stats to pick the best advert designs, but here are some GTB ads. Let me know what is good / bad about them, or if you have any cool ideas for them. I tend to use static, not animated ads, as I find animated ones have little real difference to CTR, and frankly, I don’t like being associated with cheesy flashing things.









I’m planning on using these on google adwords, but maybe project wonderful and game-advertising online. I like the way google lets me target certain countries and restrict it to PC’s rather than macs/phones, but I hate the complexity and approval delays for their campaigns. I wish many more gaming sites would investigate using project wonderful instead. They are really good.