A new game has just been released on the SmileyGamer Arcade, named Jumping Jack.

Help Jack to run around avoiding all the obstacles, by making precision small and big jumps. Timing your jumps is important to survive in this action/skill game! The gameplay is based on the popular City Jumper game, but Jumping Jack features nicer graphics and more varied obstacles.

Jumping Jack is created by Eugeniu Lipcean, and sponsored by my flash games arcade SmileyGamer.com.

If you have your own online games site, you can download this game package. There’s also a version without blood available, for family friendly sites. You can find more games to put on your site on SmileyGamer.com!

This is the first game I am sponsoring, but I’m starting to look for more games to sponsor, in order to promote the SmileyGamer website. If you’re a games developer and want to get some money for your work, contact me, and we can discuss a possible sponsorship!

Spill Group, the owner of more than 20 online game portals, has published my flash game Enigmatica on their network! Since last weekend, Enigmatica can be played on all their sites, including www.gamesgames.com, www.spelletjes.be and many others.

This is great news of course, since it means a lot of new people discover my game (about 180000 gameplays in the first 5 days), and a good percentage of those people also click the links in the game to my own online games site, www.smileygamer.com. It’s nice to see Enigmatica getting a bit of a second life, after a slow start!

After the recent release of Smiley Memory, I’m currently working on a new flash game. This one will be a mini arcade game, to be finished somewhere next week. It’s main purpose, besides being fun, is to attract more visitors to my Smiley Gamer site. Since Smiley Memory will only be distributed to other gaming sites at the end of october, this smaller game should fill the void, and give me a chance to develop another larger smiley related game.

Today I woke up, realizing it’s already March! It’s amazing how fast time flies when you’re having fun! It’s that time again to ponder a bit about my business and what happened during the last month. Checking my blog, I noticed I only published 3 articles last month…

On the other hand, this blog is getting more visitors again, thanks to the article To Flash Or Not To Flash, which was included in the second Carnival of Game Production on GameProducer.net! I’ll follow up on that article soon, when I have some screenshots of the first Flash game I’m currently developing.

It’s also still doing good with Text-Link-Ads, thanks to these sponsors: Mortgage Lenders, Cell Phone Covers, Iron Realms - Text MMORPG’s and Skill games.

Our Speeltijd.net site has had a little fallback again, with 6792 visitors last month (15% down). Of course february was a couple of days shorter than january As a consequence, Google Adsense income also dropped. But the good news is that I received my money from Google for the first time since I started using Adsense, little over a year ago. I had let the money pile up a bit, so it was already over $250!

I’ve been thinking about my business model last month, and decided to change it a bit. More precisely, I’m going to move from the shareware model to a combined model: webgames with advertising and a deluxe shareware version for the popular webgames. This is also the main reason I’m partly moving to Flash.

There’s a huge audience for free online games, and there are an increasing number of possibilities for developers to monetize on them, using advertising. Of course, it’s also a great method to make more people aware of the deluxe shareware version, although the conversion rate with this audience will be pretty low. I’ll write more about this as my plans develop!

A couple of days ago, I posted about the Google pagerank and Alexa rank increases of my Bubblomania and Speeltijd websites. Now it’s time for some traffic stats of january, beginning with the Speeltijd site.

The second week was really good, we broke another record, with 381 visits on 1 day! Total visits was 7965, 47% more than last month. Google Adsense revenue was only 7% higher, for some reason, the CPM was significantly lower last month…

Traffic for this blog remained more or less the same from last month. It’s still making some nice money with these 3 Text-Link-Ads sponsors: Mortgage Lenders, Cell Phone Covers and Iron Realms - Text MMORPG’s.

The Bubblomania site has seen a serious traffic increase, thanks to StumbleUpon, a couple of banner exchange programs and Project Wonderful.

A few weeks ago, I started using Project Wonderful for advertising and selling advertising space. They use an “infinite auction” system, where you bid on an advertising place in CPD, which stands for Cost Per Day. The advantage of their system is that eliminates click fraud, so it’s an interesting change from the usual cost per click (CPC) or cost per impressions (CPM) advertising. All bids start at $0, which means you can do free advertising!

I’m also using them to sell advertising space on my 3 websites. This brings in a bit of money, which I use again to advertise through them. Sites with higher traffic quickly run out of free advertising spots, and paying a few cents a day makes sure you have a good spot.

The only drawback for me is that a lot of the sites advertising and publishing at Project Wonderful are from the comics community. It could use an influx of game related sites! But apart from that, I’m happy with the results up till now.

It seems like Google has done another round of pagerank updates. My www.bubblomania.com domain has received a PR of 3, coming from 0. Also the Alexa rank of that site has improved: currently at 981,176 (with a 1 week average of 323,024).

Our www.speeltijd.net site also received a PR of 3, coming from 2. The Alexa rank has changed to 2,063,153, coming from over 4,000,000 previously (with a 1 week average of 575,064).

This site, www.darkmoonsw.com, is still at PR 4, with an Alexa rank of 637,113 (slight improvement).

This is a very good evolution of these sites, which I hope will help in raising their advertising potential. I didn’t expect that the change in Google PR would have such a big effect on Alexa rank, but I’m not complaining!

Ok, this sounds more impressive than it really is, but our dutch website Speeltijd is named website of the month by the site Het Knutselhuis, a dutch online shop for hobby and crafts products!

So this means we’ll be on their front page for the month of December. I expect this to bring in some extra traffic!

My girlfriend, who creates the content for that site, is really happy with this. It seems our efforts really are appreciated!

Another month has passed, so it’s statistics time again! Yay, I love statistics!

Our Speeltijd website reached 6000 visitors, representing a growth of 24%. Exactly the same growthrate as last month! With almost 28000 pageviews, we’re maintaining a nice average of 4.6 pageviews per visitor. On our best day, we had 281 visitors!

The adsense revenue of the site grew by 57% this month, which is very interesting considering the fact that pageviews only grew by 22% and I did not change the ad layout at all! So it seems to be true that ad revenue grows at a faster rate than traffic.

The site still has no other revenue streams besides adsense, which is a bit disappointing. I have yet to see the first Performancing link, and AdEngage declined the site. On the bright side, there have been early talks with a major brand about a possible cooperation! But I can’t say anything about this yet…

Traffic on this blog and the Dark Moon Software site in general grew by 22% this month, despite moving the page for my Bubblomania X downloadable game to the new Bubblomania website. Adsense revenue for this site is negligable, but since traffic has been growing for several months, I re-introduced the Google ads on the blog today.

On the other hand, the Text-Link-Ads on this blog are still going strong! Big thanks to the 4 current sponsors, who will continue sponsoring for the whole month of december: Mortgage Lenders, Cell Phone Covers, Iron Realms - Text MMORPG’s and MaraPets Games! I still have 4 spots available for sponsors, click here to buy a link, including a blog post with permanent link!

The beta version of my new Bubblomania website has been launched a few weeks ago, and it already has a number of repeat visitors. So it looks promising, although there’s quite some work left on both the webgame and the site. I’m currently thinking hard about possible marketing and monetization options.

Ok, this was a longer than usual post, time to shut up

Here I am again with the visitor stats for our Speeltijd website. I’m happy to announce that the growth from July continued: our traffic doubled in August!

Halfway in August, we did some offline website promotion, by distributing some flyers at a neighbourhood kids party. In the second half of August, we experienced some noticable growth. But I think the contribution of the flyers was only marginal. There was a small increase in direct hits, and 1 newsletter signup as a result.

Anyway, in the style of the Seeking Revenue site, here’s the Google Analytics charts for August:

For those not familiar with Google Analytics charts or the Dutch language: the blue graph represents the number of visits (2,698 total), and the orange one represents pageviews (12,436). There’s a pattern of drops on Friday/Saturday, followed by a spike on Sunday/Monday. The overall traffic is increasing nicely, and continues to do so for September.

The value of the site is in the content, which keeps growing at a rate of about 8 articles a month. This can also be seen by the fact that we get 4.6 pageviews per visit on average!

On the downside, it turns out to be a hard site to monetize. Our audience is clearly more interested in our own content, than in the Adsense ads. I tried a new program a few months ago: www.linki.nl, which as an adsense variant, but only for dutch ads. The good thing about linki is that they pay some money for banner views, but on the downside, their CPC is very low, unless you have a very high CTR…

So, any ideas are welcome!