So since moving to Vancouver in November 2008 in order to work for Big Fish Games I’ve had to remove all affiliate games from my website. This is due to an anti-compete clause in my contract with BFG, which is pretty standard even though some people seem shocked by it. It’s a shame as I was making some money from Reflexive Arcade and My Big Fish Games via affiliate games sales. But it wasn’t big money and certainly not worth creating a fuss over when starting a new job with a company that has been very accommodating in many ways.

Paid for Site Modifications

At the start of 2008 I paid a php developer to modify my site to include a database of affiliate titles so it was really easy for me to modify it and put new ones on. Then I paid someone else to do a load of data entry to populate the site with the best games that I knew of. I was pleased with the results, but I didn’t update it very often and failed to send out newsletters about new games which is pretty important when running an affiliate site! It’s also pretty dumb considering I’m paying £15 a quarter to YMLP for a newsletter service that I’ve barely used … ho hum.

As a side note, I maybe could have made the site modifications and done the data entry myself, but it would have taken me AGES (and may have been bugged) because I’m not a web developer, and would have been totally cost ineffective – that’s why I paid to get it done. It was fun thinking about how I wanted it to work, discussing it with the web developer and getting their ideas too, and then seeing it take form. Spending the money on it was fun instead of being an agonisingly slow learning process had I done it myself.

Affiliate Games Income

Despite letting my site stagnate a bit in terms of new affiliate games, I still made some money from affiliate sales (and adsense). I made about $800 in 2 years from Reflexive and about $850 from MyBFG in 1 year. Reflexive was pretty good in the first year but it really slowed down in the second year and the conversion rate dropped really low. I don’t know if anyone else using Reflexive found this? Perhaps it was because I was writing less news and reviews on Binary Joy with affiliate links.

Adsense

As a matter of interest I’ve made about $720 via Adsense in just under 3 years on this site and Binary Joy, so that’s not a big earner – traffic is the key though, more traffic = more money, simple really. (Oh and good adsense placement too of course). Probably most of the money is from Binary Joy to be honest as the webmaster there really knows his stuff.

Text Link Adverts

Oh I also made $750 in 2008 from selling text links on my site. In fact I made $650 in 2007 from text links, which is a total of $1400 in two years – so they have proved very profitable! Things like this are easy to implement and help to pay for my webhosting fees.

Loss of Passive Income

Anyway I’m a bit sad to see the affiliate links go because I just LOVE passive income streams and I could have built the affiliate sales up with a little more effort. Also I had to remove the links of various Indie games made in Blitz which is a shame for them. However, my site is a lot neater now that it’s just focused on my own games and works well as a portfolio, so that’s cool. Besides the trade off is that I now work for Big Fish Games who are really great to work for and I’m learning loads, meeting cool people and getting a steady (good) income.

Also I’m still earning money from adsense and text link ads so that’s something. Plus I mustn’t forget that big far my biggest passive income stream is direct sales of my games (small) and royalties from my games sold on portals (large) – the other income streams are small by comparison.

One more thing, I’m no longer receiving passive income from sales of my BlitzMax Game Framework either, but more on that soon…(it’s not a bad thing, trust me).

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 6:49 am and is filed under Grey Alien Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.