Dhaneel.Com

Virtual Currency - Ad network review

Hi guys,

I’m launching a few new apps and have been looking at the monetizing offer services out there. I’m sure there are others but I picked to look at Super Rewards (http://www.srpoints.com) and Offerpal (http://www.offerpalmedia.com) and see how they were to setup, use, and track. NOTE: I have not gone live on my apps and don’t have real users completing offers so I can’t tell you anything about paybacks, etc.

I am also having look at gwallet (http://www.gwallet.com) and will update this post if I find it better than these two.

I thought I would just post some first experiences up here on setting up both and how they were to start dealing with in the hopes it will help others better evaluate choices.

Monetizing apps
Basically these services offer a virtual point system that you setup an exchange to your own game currency to provide users. A user will select an “offer” that the services display. It might be as simple as “get free cell phone ringtones” or “create an account on an online gambling site”. You don’t control the offers (however in the case of SR you can block certain ones) but you don’t need to. They’re managed by these services so it makes converting user clicks to your game currency a breeze. A user accepts an offer and in exchange they get some number of your currency items based on the value of the offer they’re fulfilling.

Your user currency is just that. Something that’s relevent to your application. It might be gummy bears, tokens, pimp dollars, whatever. It’s a special item that you reserve for basically “paying users”. In exchange, its up to you as to how you let users spend their currency. It could also be points or something but just be careful to not voilate FB TOS when you engage these services.

As an example, Fish Wrangler has a type of chum (the stuff you have to use every time you go fishing) called Red Love Chum (RLC). This chum is different from the regular ones users purchase with game gold (gold earned by playing the game, not real money). RLC attracts fish 95% of the time and doesn’t get wasted (i.e. floats away) if you don’t catch a fish. It also levels up your fishing pole faster and I’m sure has some other features. In any case, it’s a special thing that you offer your users. Don’t upset the balance of the game with it but it gives users who want to complete offers a bit of an edge (and in return, you get $$$ for it).

(apologies if I’m not explaining the process and concept very clearly)

Super Rewards
I went to the SR site and created an account. My first impression was that the site itself is a little clunky (for example they don’t have a “remember me” feature for logging in) but it gets the job done. After creating an account (no email confirmation or authorization required) I was able to start configuring my app.

I had a bit of a struggle with the site. There was a link to a PDF developers guide which was broken. When I tried to use the contact form to inform them about it, that failed with a PHP error. Needless to say, I wasn’t getting a warm and fuzzy already. If they can’t run a simple website how can I entrust them to run their service? Within a few hours I was emailed a copy of the PDF (not very cool IMHO since the file was 2+mb in size) and they explained the site had been updated recently and that’s why I was having problems.

As for configuring the application, it was a breeze. For your account they have simple stats and information on hits and earnings. For each app they have stats as well. Configuring the app is easy. It’s a single page with the IFRAME code you use, what game currency you’re using (Red Love Chum, Robot Tokens, whatever) and the exchange rate of their “SuperRewards Points” to your game currency.

There’s a list of FB ids you can provide that are your testers/admins which then enables a test link where you can simulate an offer acknowledgement to be sent back to your callback url (not your game callback, but one you provide SR to process an offer). This allows testers to test the feature but not have to go through a real offer.

There’s an option to have a nightly email report sent to you which is nice. All in all, easy to configure and the website is simple.

As for setting up your app, it’s pretty basic. Take the IFRAME code they give you and put it in a page. For me, I’m using FBML so I used the fb:iframe tag. The nice thing about FBML is that Super Rewards will pull the user id from the POST that Facebook already sends it. Otherwise if you’re using IFRAME you have to provide the user id of the user selecting the offer. No big deal but a nice feature.

Super Rewards has a secret key (not your app secret!) that is used to verify the authenticy of postbacks. I guess this is so people can’t just figure out the url and start rewarding themselves tokens.

In minutes I had my FBML page displaying a list of offers with a test link, showing my game currency. Easy, sleazy.

The big issue I see with SR is payment. I have no idea how payment works and the website doesn’t seem to allow for you to tell it anything about this. Offerpal for example lets you enter your paypal email address so I assume it’s just going to drop money in your account. SR doesn’t seem to have anything that shows this (however I’m sure people get paid, I just don’t know how or how to configure it).

Offerpal
Offerpal Media is a bit different from the SR experience. I’ve seen more apps use this but that by no means is a real sampling of data (I dont’ have a time for a lot of games these days). Offerpal has a website but it’s pretty much marketing fluff. The actual application where you configure your apps is a Facebook app itself (http://apps.facebook.com/offerpalmedia).

I went through the initial signup. They seem to ask for a lot of information (like tax # or SSN # which, being in Canada, I don’t have as we have a different system). In any case I filled it out and waited. It took about a day or two until they approved my submission (I recall doing this before and being told I was approved but coming back, the FB app thought I wasn’t so I signed up again).

Payment for apps can be done by cheque, paypal or wire transfer.

Configuring an app is similar to SR. You enter the name of the app, the currency name and the exchange rate. SR uses 1 SR point = whatever in your app, Offerpal is configured to do a conversion of $1 of payout to whatever your game currency is.

What had me confused was the additional info Offerpal wants. They want to know estimated gender and age breakdown, and where people are from. Of course I just guessed but I could be way off. I suppose this information is for “tuning” the offers to the audience and of course you can go in and adjust it. I just found it a rather difficult set of numbers to come up (it’s in % so you dont’ have to know how many users, just what the breakdown is). In any case, you can tweak it but this seems like something Offerpal should be doing for me maybe. I guess the theory is that the better tuning you get, the more offers they might click on which in turn gives you more money so it’s in your best interest to come up with fairly good numbers. I’m not sure if it’s a violation of FB TOS to track the gender, age and country of your users or not so check first before you start doing that. You can certainly track the country of origin using regular web stats on your server so that might help.

Like SR, you provide a callback for Offerpal to contact you when an offer is complete. They’ll pass you the userid and the currency amount. It’s up to you to update your game database or whatever and reward the player with that. They also require another callback where they can have customer service ping in case users need a credit or something. I can somewhat see this as being abused, but whatever.

They have a testing form where you enter a user id and the number of the currency to credit and it’ll call your callback url and you update your system accordingly. There’s no validation on the test, it just sends you the info for your game.

Viewing reports in Offerpal is kind of weird too. You go to a page where you enter a username/password then go to an external site to see a dashboard. The reports look informative and there’s some features (like different types of charts) but no export.

Summary
I’m not decided yet which is better of the two. SR seems more easier to work with and there are some basic things that I don’t like about Offerpal (for example the involved stats prediction setup). Right now I’m going to run both side by side in two different apps (and maybe rotate them out in each app) and see where that ends up.

Basically they’re both the same. They might have more offers in one than another, but give it time. It’s like MSFT and Apple. They’ll just keep improving and adding features on both sides of the fence.

Super Rewards
* Easy to setup
* No authoriziation or wait time
* FBML integration (using IFRAME) so no additional processing required to invoke url
* Authentication on completed offers
* Single website for stats/setup/etc.
* Integrated testing in your app without completing a real offer
* No idea how payment is done?

Offerpal
* More involved but not too complicated
* Requires predictive analysis on user breakdown (gender, age, country)
* Wait time for authorization to setup apps
* Need to pass user id back to callback
* Uses old size canvas (600px)
* No authorization on completed offers
* Offerpal hosted testing, not integrated
* Multiple payment options

I am also trying gwallet.com for virtual currency and will update you guys if i find anything interesting.

Again, these are my experiences and YMMV. Of course if you have your own experience with these or other services please post them here!

Thanks!

Broadcast Live

I was looking for a way to broadcast my trips live. I found out ustream.tv. Here is the review of it.

Ustream.TV is the live interactive video broadcast platform that enables anyone with a camera and an Internet connection to quickly and easily broadcast to a global audience of unlimited size. In less than two minutes, anyone can become a broadcaster by creating their own channel on Ustream or by broadcasting through their own site, empowering them to engage with their audience and further build their brand. Click here to start a broadcast now or learn more about broadcasting.

http://www.ustream.tv/

Facebook or Google???

No doubt facebook is giving tough competition for google in all it’s product line. Like Social Networking site and now Email. ( Read about Mantis project for facebook at http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/05/facebooks-project-titan-a-full-featured-webmail-product/ ). I am very much sure after email facebook will launch something like facesearch and I think which is really very good idea for facebook to launch facebook search. A complete social media search which finds out what people (400 million) are talking in social media.
Who knows like we have website page rank now and may be facebook people may start user rank. ( May be I am giving them a idea .. :P) Like “dhaneel” is having social rank of 5 so whatever he says is more valid than a guy with social rank of 4 or 3. ..

Sangam and Mekedatu

On Sunday morning we planned to goto Mekedatu.. I preferred to take bike as it was just 90 Km from bangalore.

CBZ xtreme

We started around 10 Am in the morning. Took Kanakpura road. From bangalore to Kanakpura is around 50 km and then to mekedatu around 40 Km. Roads are pretty good and I found it to be more biky roads. ..

YouTube videoMekedatu Road

mekedatu

First we went to Chunchi falls. There were not many people and it was not that good. Here is the photos and videos of Chunchi falls.

YouTube videoChunchi falls

chunchi falls

Then we headed to sangam. We need to cross the river and take bus for Mekedatu. It was fun crossing the river.

sangam

It was 10 min drive from Sangam to Mekedatu and here is the video of Mekedatu.

YouTube videoMekedatu

That’s it. We came back had lunch and headed back to bangalore.
In whole trip I only liked the biking. It took me 1 and half hours to reach bangalore from Mekedatu.
I can give a rating of 2/5 for this.

Generating proxy class using svcutil

I was in need of generating proxy class in WCF because Visual Studio was not able to generate one. I tried this

SvcUtil.exe http://localhost:3
790/BusinessFaceData.svc /out:C:\Proxy.cs

this thing worked fine for me but I was using Generic List on WCF side.. so this will not work with that. To specify the type of proxy class to generate we need to use

SvcUtil.exe http://localhost:3
790/BusinessFaceData.svc /out:C:\Proxy.cs /ct:System.Collections.Generic.List`1

In place of /ct:System.Collections.Generic.List`1 You can specify any name like

proxyclasstypes