Using UBM To Advertise Your Game Online

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/gdco-ubm.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at GDC Online at Austin, Texas and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Fabre: Hi, my name is Fabre [sp] Demotte. I work at UBM. It’s a big corporation based out of London, and we have an office in San Francisco which is UBM TechWeb, a subsidiary of Game Advertising Online. Game Advertising Online was recently acquired by UBM, originally started by Valera Koltsov in New Zealand and acquired by UBM in February-March of this year. We’re now building a bigger team in San Francisco.

Interviewer: What can Game Advertising Online do for smaller game developers? What does the service offer, actually?

Fabre: So, essentially we’re a CPC display network, and we’re focused entirely on gaming and so…

Interviewer: Is the advertising targeted towards gamers then?

Fabre: Yeah. Gamers are the audience. Gamers are the advertisers. So, it’s both. We don’t advertise any other products but games, and we only advertise with gamers on, I would say, small, medium and large websites that are gaming focused.

What we offer is a self-service platform for advertisers of any size, really. If someone wants to advertise a game for, like, $20, $100 a month, $200 a month, $500 a month, that’s fine. If you want to be an advertiser spending $100,000 a month, that’s fine, too.

Interviewer: You have a kind of self-service product that, say, smaller game developers can use to target ads towards gamers on various sites.

Fabre: Yes. Our system is super granular which means that it can be a little bit time consuming for the advertisers if they want to go and actually find out where to place the ads which is what I still would recommend, but the granularity of it allows you to actually find the exact location of where you want to run your ad.

So, you can pick a specific work site and a specific ad format, and we’ll tell you what the minimum bid is for a click. And you can bid on it. You can bid as much as you want or as little as you want as long as it’s above the minimum bid, which is usually around, like, starting at three cents to, in some cases, up to 30 cents per click.

Interviewer: Are you guys targeting mostly Western countries in terms of gamers, or are you also…

Fabre: Our biggest market would be English speaking countries, but Spanish speaking Latin American countries are big, you know, all the European countries. They’re not as big, obviously, as the English speaking market, but we do have a presence in Continental Europe, the Middle East. Turkey, in particular, actually is a pretty active market.

So, we’re all over the world. If you were to say, “I want to target users in Peru,” I don’t know how many I could actually offer you. But if you want to say, Latin American users, I think I can give you a more interesting figure of users that you can target there.

Interviewer: So, in addition to actually allowing game developers to advertise their games through your service, you also have it where these game developers, if they have that browser based site, they can actually place ads on their site from your service. Can you talk about that more?

Fabre: Yeah, they can. Basically, since we’re an ad network, we basically bring together the advertisers and the publishers, the people who own the websites. As I mentioned already, a lot of our publishers are actually just small-medium size websites. And so, for those guys we offer them an extra bonus if they decide to do both, be a publisher and an advertiser.

So, you can actually make revenue, generate revenue from being a publisher on our network and use that revenue directly to advertise your game or your website. We do offer you some attractive bonus plans, depending on your volume. You can actually use the money that you’ve earned to advertise your own site.

So, there’s a great arbitrage opportunity for particularly the small guys, who want to advertise but, maybe, don’t have really big budgets. That way you can actually supplement your budget by actually becoming a publisher as well.

Interviewer: And where can developers find out more information or even get started with the service?

Fabre: You can go to gameadvertisingonline.com, just in one word and look up the site. There is a tab for publishers, one for advertisers. Under either one of them you can fill out a contact request form or an application to join as a publisher or as an advertiser.

We’ll contact you as a response. There’s also a chat now button on the website where you can click on the button and talk to a technical representative, talk to a sales or advertising specialist, and actually talk to someone there directly through the website. And find out if there’s an opportunity for you there in working with us as a publisher or an advertiser, if it makes sense for you, what your options are and just talk to someone there directly.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.