Hello, i was wondering is ads and inapp purchases hard to implement for a newbie? Has any newbie implemented it succesfull?
Kind regards
Isak
From a pure code perspective with Corona and Lua, ads are easy. IAP is medium difficulty. But conceptually and implementation and testing ramps up the difficulty significantly. Lets look at each.
Ads. First you have to know how you plan to use ads? Are you going to use banners and or interstitials? Banner ads don’t pay well because you deliver a bunch of them and people only interact with a few of them. Showing banner ads during game play is a waste of advertisers money (which is one reason they don’t pay well). Your game players are not going to tap on ads in the middle of playing a game. Interstitial ads do much better income wise, but they are full screen and you only show them at points where it makes sense to interrupt the flow of the app or game. You don’t show them as often but when you do, they are interacted with more and you get better performance.
Next you have to understand that until your app gains reputation, you may not always get ads. If you show a banner ad every 30 seconds, your ad provider may simply not have enough ads to fill your demand for them. This is a term called fill rate. To combat this many people will use multiple ad providers, detect when they didn’t get an ad from the provider and then request an ad from another provider. Now you’ve ramped up the complexity of your code from easy to medium difficulty.
Finally you have to setup accounts with any ad provider you want to use. Each provider has different requirements, different methods of setting up, different payout system and rules. You have to navigate all of this on your own. We can’t really help you with any of this. Each ad vendor will give you a different ID string per ad type you use, which is one of the reasons the previous paragraph ramped up the complexity.
The good news is we are getting really close to releasing the Fuse Powered plugin which will hopefully get you more, good paying ads (interstitial) and be simpler to implement.
Now for IAP: While Corona SDK supports IAP for Apple, Google, Amazon, Ouya and for just about everyone else through the Fortumo plugin, they are all somewhat different. Apple, Google and Amazon are close enough that 90% of the code you write will work for all three. That code itself is medium difficulty. But the problem comes in that everyone wants to do something a little different from the other person. Because I may want people to buy coins and you may just want to unlock features, how you go about doing that in your code makes providing a “drop-in” module quite difficult and difficult to get support for.
Its compounded by having to setup a lot of stuff in the platform’s portal (i.e. iTunes Connect for Apple, Google Play for Google, etc.) Each provider has different testing rules which frustrates programmers to no end. Also this is a very event driven asynchronous process. That is you request something and your app needs to go on and work with no idea if or when the request will complete. You have to build your app to handle this. For instance, if you call the function to restore past purchases, if there are none, you will never get a response saying “nothing to restore”. Your app has to react to when it gets things and make changes and work when you don’t get anything. All of this makes IAP pretty hard.
Rob
Implementing ads in Corona apps is easy. You can read and download the admob template here
From a pure code perspective with Corona and Lua, ads are easy. IAP is medium difficulty. But conceptually and implementation and testing ramps up the difficulty significantly. Lets look at each.
Ads. First you have to know how you plan to use ads? Are you going to use banners and or interstitials? Banner ads don’t pay well because you deliver a bunch of them and people only interact with a few of them. Showing banner ads during game play is a waste of advertisers money (which is one reason they don’t pay well). Your game players are not going to tap on ads in the middle of playing a game. Interstitial ads do much better income wise, but they are full screen and you only show them at points where it makes sense to interrupt the flow of the app or game. You don’t show them as often but when you do, they are interacted with more and you get better performance.
Next you have to understand that until your app gains reputation, you may not always get ads. If you show a banner ad every 30 seconds, your ad provider may simply not have enough ads to fill your demand for them. This is a term called fill rate. To combat this many people will use multiple ad providers, detect when they didn’t get an ad from the provider and then request an ad from another provider. Now you’ve ramped up the complexity of your code from easy to medium difficulty.
Finally you have to setup accounts with any ad provider you want to use. Each provider has different requirements, different methods of setting up, different payout system and rules. You have to navigate all of this on your own. We can’t really help you with any of this. Each ad vendor will give you a different ID string per ad type you use, which is one of the reasons the previous paragraph ramped up the complexity.
The good news is we are getting really close to releasing the Fuse Powered plugin which will hopefully get you more, good paying ads (interstitial) and be simpler to implement.
Now for IAP: While Corona SDK supports IAP for Apple, Google, Amazon, Ouya and for just about everyone else through the Fortumo plugin, they are all somewhat different. Apple, Google and Amazon are close enough that 90% of the code you write will work for all three. That code itself is medium difficulty. But the problem comes in that everyone wants to do something a little different from the other person. Because I may want people to buy coins and you may just want to unlock features, how you go about doing that in your code makes providing a “drop-in” module quite difficult and difficult to get support for.
Its compounded by having to setup a lot of stuff in the platform’s portal (i.e. iTunes Connect for Apple, Google Play for Google, etc.) Each provider has different testing rules which frustrates programmers to no end. Also this is a very event driven asynchronous process. That is you request something and your app needs to go on and work with no idea if or when the request will complete. You have to build your app to handle this. For instance, if you call the function to restore past purchases, if there are none, you will never get a response saying “nothing to restore”. Your app has to react to when it gets things and make changes and work when you don’t get anything. All of this makes IAP pretty hard.
Rob
Implementing ads in Corona apps is easy. You can read and download the admob template here