Ask HN: Requesting feedback on idea | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Requesting feedback on idea

6 pointsmikeknoop7 comments

In one sentence: An advertising network for 3rd-party map developers (within video games).

Basically you have a large community of individuals who design and develop maps for video games. See: http://www.fpsbanana.com/maps

They currently develop maps for personal notoriety and for fun.

The idea is to build an advertising network which would interface with advertisers and 3rd party map creators to include props/textures in their custom maps which advertise a product. Currently there is no existing market for this as far as I can tell.

There are some interesting technical challenges as you can't exactly do "page views" but you can track when a specific map is being played, by how many people, and for how long. The other variable would be advertisement visibility within the map. I have a good understanding of the technicalities and abilities within this niche platform.

Other troubles: maps are permanent unless they get updated by developers and re-uploaded to the server. So advertisers can't exactly run "weekend specials".

I am just brainstorming this right now; I appreciate your criticisms or other thoughts you have.

Mike

I like the idea.

The permanent nature of ads built into a map can be a good thing. The advertiser gets lifetime product placement and doesn't have to worry about the developer removing it. However, details are irrelevant if the map is only going to be played by a dozen people.

Advertisers will want metrics.The best place to get data will be directly from the game servers. You could make a small utility that gathers traffic/gameplay/map data and sends it back to you. Then you give server owners a piece of the action in exchange for sending you data and running more maps with ads.

If you go down that road, you might as well find a few hackers to make mods that dynamically place ads in the game. I'm guessing some games might already provide native functionality that could help with this.

By the way, Google is already doing web-based game ads: http://www.google.com/ads/games/index.html

My recommendation would be that asking for advice in this form is not productive. This is talked about in "Art of the Start". He essentially says that when you present a new idea to people in mass everyone is just going to tell you why it won't work, and that you should ignore all this.

Obviously it is natural and probably helpful on some level to ask people what they think of your idea, but you should be a lot more selective in whose opinion you care about.

While I don't really know anything about this market it sounds like an abstractly interesting idea. But like I said that really isn't important. My suggestion would be to find 3 people you are pretty confident will love this idea (friends of yours on the maps forum) and ask them why it sucks. Then find 3 people who you're pretty sure will hate this idea and ask them why it rocks. Really you just want to pick these people's brains asking very specific questions. Keep doing this until you have refined the idea enough (and have a strong enough grasp of its market potential) that you are ready to take the next step (whatever that may be).

Oh and if this first step takes you more than a week, you're doing it wrong.

I am largely expecting to get negative opinions -- then again, I no nothing about how advertising network operate on a day to day basis filling inventory.

I was hoping I would catch the opinion of someone who has worked at or attempted to start an advertising network and has some experience. Mainly, how tough is it to fill ad inventory and how anal advertisers are about traditional vs. new forms of advertising?

This is the sort of domain specific insight I think people on HN might have where others would not.

Thanks for your feedback Daniel, I am going to take action on your advise in addition to the hope I can find someone with previous ad network experience here.

I'm wondering how casual map developers can be easily reached to tell them about the service.

Permanent ads don't sound like a roadblock. Product placement in a movie is also permanent.

If the price is right, I would start with advertising on some of the major custom map aggregator websites. If things go well I would try to build out a deeper relationship with the aggregators to get more prominent placement.

Good insight on the permanent ads, I had not thought about that.

Maybe you could get advertisers to bid on games they want to place permanent ads inside before they are built. Over time, game developers will build a reputation based on the returns they give to advertisers.

I don't think it's a bad idea, take a look at the history of Massive (http://www.massiveincorporated.com/) before you start out. From what I understand they attempted to put big brand ads into the maps of AAA games and haven't been very successful.

I know this isn't exactly what you were thinking, but there may be lessons to learn from them.

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