Seeking advice on monetizing a PC 'app' passively.

So I am working on an tool to assist people with playing other games. Not like a macro or any other such potentially malicious thing. A program they can put information into to track what they have and aid in planning strategies. So given that this is not quite a game I suspect it would not work well to have the video ads that seems to be most common with unity and it's mobile lean. So I am trying to find something like banner ads (though if there is a way to do video I suspect they pay better).

Any suggestions?

 

Well ads are out - because nobody is actually buying ad space for a desktop right now. So you might want to try a simple upsell, ie people pay to unlock full features like 3dmark?

 

Banner ads are a great idea... if you want to piss off PC users. You don't want to see the backlash that would come from it.

 

An interesting passive monetization angle I once used was Plura Processing. It was for web-based apps. You'd embed this little java applet and it would use very small slices of CPU time to do background processing of things like protein folding or statistical work for oil field exploration. They did a lot of charity work too -- university projects and the like. You were paid based on the amount of processing time your users generated.

They required full disclosure and an opt-out process, but ultimately users were unreasonably suspicious of it (I literally had users who complained about the use of their electricity -- we're talking handfuls of CPU clock-ticks here) and I'm pretty sure they're out of business now.

But I have to say it was one of the most novel monetization ideas I have ever seen.

 

The most obvious and popular monetisation strategy for PC is simply to charge people to download your product. Its still widely accepted as the norm.

As you get to a bigger user base you can switch to a subscription model.

With a smaller user base its common to give the product away for free and ask for donations. Being the best free software in a particular area can net you a lot of attention.

Human's are generally pretty inefficient at resource management. We all have our own computers, even though the processors sit idle most of the day. We all have our own cars, even though we could probably meet the needs of the population with a fleet half the size. But instead we dedicate huge amounts of land store the excess during the 20 odd hours a day we aren't using them.

 

In fact, this sounds like the type of product that I put that background processing thing into.

It was called PingMyGame and we built against various sites' turn-based game APIs to monitor game progress and statistics. It would notify you when it was your turn, for example. This was back when the windows "gadgets" were new (tiny lightweight HTML things docked to your desktop). There were monitors for a couple chess websites, a strategy game called weewar (that one even displayed mini-maps), one of the Diplomacy sites, and others. The way I implemented the background processor was even smart enough to only run a single instance, in case a user had multiple gadgets running.

Got a few thousand downloads, is all, then Plura went away and MS discontinued gadgets. Oh well. I made maybe $25 from it, lol.

But generally speaking "passive" monetization is necessarily going to involve collecting some kind of information and selling it to somebody else. On mobile you have things like location data and even when collected anonymously that gets people cranky. On PC there is probably very little anybody would agree to have collected. Somewhere I saw typical opt-out statistics for anonymous usage data collection that some apps do (Microsoft is heavily into that now) and it was very high, 98% or something like that.

People don't like to be tracked. Imagine that.

 

I did notice that the web browser version of slither.io was using google ads that show inside the app itself... not sure if that requires it to be browser based or if its embedded into the app itself. If it's embedded, maybe they have a service for desktop apps? Or maybe you can retarget your app to run inside a browser with html5 and use general google adsense on the page.

 

Microsoft went along this route with Visual Studio Code. It was developed with Electron which includes a portable browser.

http://electron.atom.io/

 

On PC I generally ask myself if something I've made is worth someone paying for. If it is, then I find a way to charge them for it that doesn't involve ads. If it's not, then I give it away for free.

Ads suck. If you're making something that people won't pay for, then you have to wonder what value it actually has. There are much better ways to utilize that information than slapping ads into it.