How Free-to-Play Mobile Game Creators Get Rich Off of False Advertising
All that Mafia Wars and Farmville spam in your Facebook news feed was paying off for someone
If you’ve recently played any mobile game — particularly the “free to play” — you’ve probably seen more full-screen interstitial ads for other mobile games than you could ever possibly want. The reason is simple: A North American mobile interstitial ad can earn a solid $5 CPM. Translated: Each viewed video is worth more than listening to one stream on Spotify. Today, you can reliably earn more by spamming the App Store with slot machine games than by recording an album.
In this particular flavor of predatory advertising, free games earn money by showing ads for other free games, bouncing users from one honeypot to another until they eventually land in one in which they’re willing to buy some honey. It’s equivalent to running ads for free tastes of soda between every sip of a water fountain — a momentary loss of willpower leads into another new land of dopamine stimulation.
But the ads weren’t free; that money came from somewhere.
More specifically: Those free-to-play game ads were purchased by earlier mobile game dopamine addicts. I don’t use the “A” word lightly here. The behavioral pattern that…
