Internet Advertising

[aquarius]

Lets say one of us were willing to spend five hundred dollars on advertising continuum.

My initial thought is to do google ads. But I have no idea who to target, and what search terms to advertise.

How do you suggest they advertise? Or spend the money?

[Incomplete]

Not really sure on how all this works. What about getting a little advertisement on certain websites. For example Facebook, they advertise things down the side of their page.

[Russky]

internet advertising fails because i block banner adds in fire fox

[Yavaris]

So do I, but ads don't fail else noone would advertize. Don't know if it'll work for continuum though since there are a lot of games out there that are better and also for free.

[★ doc flabby]

It would be more worthwhile trying to improve our conversion rate. (ie ratio of downloads to players)

 

Improving the Continuum installer, would be a far better thing to do. Alot of people struggle to even install continuum because of issues with the installer, it needs updating, and making more userfriendly (and vista compatable)

[rootbear75]

i also had some problems with my antivirus blocking the installer because a lof of malware uses the same type of installer

[Wild Luck]

you would need to make a home page as a start page for the advertising, to put keywords in meta content

 

Good keywords would be: free online game, free multiplayer game, free games, space games, spaceships.

 

And maybe some others

Edited January 28, 2008 by Wild Luck

[aquarius]

So step one, update the installers. Before we advertise. By the way, someone is offering the money.

[rootbear75]

oh really? who is?

[aquarius]

That doesn't matter plus I didn't talk with him about releasing his name.

[★ Dav]

im sure we could have a donation scheeme set up, of course somone very trustworthy in the community would have to be on its recieving end.

 

we would easily raise a nice pot for this if the community got behind it.

 

trouble is i see these games that resort to this kind of advertising and assume they suck.

[★ doc flabby]

My contribution is this.

 

An average of 400-500 people download contiuum every month. How many people each month end up playing (not many)

 

I am willing develop a new, more user friendly installer. If the community is willing to support it.

 

I'm not going to bother to create something, then only to be told its not "official" or we dont "trust" it, so its not going to be used.

Edited January 29, 2008 by doc flabby

[🜲 Samapico]

An average of 400-500 people download contiuum every month

Wow, didn't know that... we definitly just need a more friendly installer I guess.

I'm with you doc! And I'm sure Polix will support that too... And then the SSDL file can be changed (or a new file added, and getcontinuum.com linked to it, whatever)

 

I have no idea how to do something like that, but perhaps if you make it open-sourced, or release the source once you're done, other people will be able to improve stuff, and keep things up to date (zones list, for example)

[Static Burn]

An average of 400-500 people download contiuum every month. How many people each month end up playing (not many)

 

400-500? I think it's a lot more than that. I'm !@#$%^&*uming you get this number from http://getcontinuum.com/webalizer/ Then you just look at how many people clicked on:

 

/downloads/continuum/Continuum040Setup.exe

 

But that's just the number of people being referred from http://rdr.sscuservers.net/cont39/ and the mirror download link on getcontinuum.com

 

The big DOWNLOAD CONTINUUM on www.getcontinuum.com links to the continuum 0.40 file on www.subspacedownloads.com

 

The counter for that file on www.subspacedownloads.com is 27167 and that file was released in September I believe. That's a lot more than 400-500 a month. And that's not including people downloading continuum from sites like download.com, etc.

Edited January 29, 2008 by Static Burn

[★ doc flabby]

27167 downloads in 5 months, wow, where is everyone

 

i guess I was being very conservative in my estimates. Most of the people being refered to http://rdr.sscuservers.net/cont39/ are probably downloading off sites with the old version of continuum. 0.40 has been out so long, no regular player is going to be downloading it now.

 

This is why I think the whole advertising thing is pointless, untill we improve our conversion rate. We already have great advertising.

 

I have no idea how to do something like that, but perhaps if you make it open-sourced, or release the source once you're done, other people will be able to improve stuff, and keep things up to date (zones list, for example)

would be more than willing to do that. Edited January 29, 2008 by doc flabby

[★ candygirl]

A lot of them d/l may be new players trying to get the thing working and can't so they give up.

[🜲 PoLiX]

I have talked to a friend about making an installer for me.

 

It will generate a random default# username, ranging from default1 to default999999, and seed a random password. It will also have chat techhelp set by default, and will contain a slightly smaller, but more aimed zone list. Mostly zones that don't seem to constantly change servers, and have a few years in, as these will (as long as another sscx situation doesn't happen) not go red for a long time, no issues with someone dling the game and having 6 red zones right away. I also plan to replace the tips.dat (have it in there as tips2.dat) and have 1 message in it recommending them to which zones would be good for which style of gameplay they like. This may help get them caught from the beginning.

 

It is all just in theory that it might help work. We've got all the regedits .40 made over .39, and will also make a patcher, rather then players who have yet to upgrade to .40 downloading the full, they only need a small patch download to get everything they need. Something we've lacked for many years now.

 

This should help new players, and also make it easier for older players returning. That, and if you show we had a recent patch, it might give the appearance we do have development of the client. Granted we'd be lying, but they won't care/know for quite some time.

[Cancer+]

Could it be that the 27,000 some could be all the same users upgrading to .40?

[★ freakmonger]

that 27k number is new players + current players upgrading to .40. Its downloads OVERALL, not just new players.

[🜲 PoLiX]

Oh, and 1 thing I wish zones would take advantage of, that'd save many of the headaches with red zones, the nice DNS feature priit added in.

 

I'd be more than happy to setup name.sscentral.com pointing to your zone's ip, and update as needed. As long as the port stays the same, the client will see the ip down, and resorts to the dns and updates the ip without even needing a zone list download. Granted there isn't/wasn't much do!@#$%^&*entation or announcement of it, but it is a nice helpful feature.

[JoWie]

Wait, one can report a domain name to the directory servers?

[🜲 PoLiX]

Setup a subdomain (directly in the dns, not a redirect).

Point the IP for the subdomain to IP of server zone is on.

In description add ss://sub.domain.tld

If IP changes, change ip in DNS.

 

Continuum will add this dns entry into the zone.dat as a back-up (some have said it even takes priority over ip, dunno), and if zone is down, it will check ip against the dns ip, and update the ip automatically if changed. If port is changed, it kills this, as it is only an ip updater, but it is useful.

[🜲 Samapico]

It will generate a random default# username, ranging from default1 to default999999, and seed a random password.

Couldn't it ask for a username and password? And perhaps check if the username is in use already by coding some half-!@#$%^&*ed client with the installer that would just attempt to connect.

[L.C.]

I don't know if anyone mentioned yet, but usernames should be randomly generated in as many different ways possible. Not just numbers, but letters too. If it were just incrementing numbers, someone would eventually go and preregister a whole range of those numbers.

 

Perhaps a dictionary should be used to generate a username: apple1895611, zebra869202, tanker951968.

[Hakaku]

Why not allow the user to create a name and password, but automatically suffix the name with randomly generated numbers instead. But numbers are still pretty ugly, and I'd prefer a name reset over that were I a new player.