For now. corona team used to say that they would not change ad-mob and iAds (when it worked) as basic free plug-ins. that only new monetization plug-ins will be rev-shared or offered as paid plaug-ins. Now you’ve broken that promise and changed it. whose to say you wont change things 3 months from now?
what is this cut off date? Perhaps I’m missing something here. I have many apps using ad-mob v2 live on store. I do not intend to update them in the near future. Will they continue to work as expected and provide impressions or are they dependent somehow on your back-end or on some setup between you and ad-mob which will be shut off soon? They must function properly so long as they are live on store!
Hi @rune7,
Although I’m not on the core engineering side of things, I don’t think it’s even technically possible to “shut down” the old AdMob and its impressions upon apps that are already released to the market. But as I’ve said earlier in this thread, you should begin deciding what to do with those apps when you need to update them sometime in the future and the old AdMob plugin is shut off. As always, it’s inevitable that Apple or Google will make a breaking change in some respect that requires all app developers to update existing apps, and we (Corona) will of course need to follow suit so that developers can continue to build/release apps and have them accepted by Apple or Google. This is and always has been the nature of the ever-advancing app industry. So, at some point you will be forced to update your apps, and when the legacy AdMob plugin is unavailable, you will need to migrate to the paid version or explore other monetization options.
As for the pricing/policy changes, I’m not aware of any business in any industry in all of history that did not need to re-evaluate, change, and adapt to their respective industry, competition, market trends, etc. iAds was terminated by Apple, not by Corona, although at some point Apple probably believed that iAds was the future of mobile advertising for eternity. Instead, they terminated it and left all iAds users scrambling for alternatives. I would hope you can understand that we, like Apple or anybody else, do not make decisions with some type of “malice” toward the Corona community… in fact, the spirit and passion of the Corona community personally keeps me going day to day, even when it’s negative or critical.
Best regards,
Brent
But how do you intend to know your revenues as you won’t have access anymore to the dashboard once the date is here ? Unless you pay your fee for the plugin…
I imagine the plugins like Coronaads chartboost and admob will still work on existing delivered apps. But my guess is that the revenues will value 0 unless the fee is paid… Would be more than unlikely that the apps crashes out of a sudden 
Edit: owned by Brent here 
@Brent or any other Corona Staff, as @Vince_ mentioned earlier, can you guarantee that you will keep those plugins up-to-date and not lag behind if we paid for the subscription? For example, is the current AdMob plugin(the one with $495/year price tag) up-to-date? Does it support everything that AdMob offers?
They should have upgraded the Admob plugin first to support all the latest features such as Native Ads Express before introducing the price change. I believe that might convince few more guys over to their subscription plan though $495 is still way beyond what I am willing to pay.
Hi Brent,
It all depends on your implementation. Its fairly easy to be able to force us to go through your back-end before handing off to admob server. I simply don’t know what you did. I do hope that you did no such thing.
regarding pricing, I do not argue, I simply state my observation. If you wish to go along the path of Unity, by all means go, but you will find many of your current users prefer their mature eco-system to yours when the price difference is so minor. I would have personally preferred the old pro license route which does not tie the license to some plug-ins which may or may not be relevant few months from now.
@christian rozor,
I have not used the fairly new corona ads so I never used their dashboard. I only integrated admob directly using its plug-in and created my own user account on admob a few years ago.
the current ad-mob plug-in is very basic and does not not contain admob latest releases, such as support for mediation partners (sdk less), native ads and few other things. I think there are feature requests for most.
After so many replies and discussion, Corona has not shed any light about the new Admob plugin. What does it support? You’re asking developers to pay $495 per year, why is there no info in the documentation at all?
Ben
I think we all understand that business models change, but Apple ran iAd for 6 years and gave 6 months notice before shutting it down. Even Parse.com, which had Facebook’s backing, eventually shut down but they gave their customers 1 year’s notice and open sourced their software.
In contrast Corona keeps changing its business model every few months and giving only 30 days notice. First you guys say that you’re going to roll another ad plugin into Corona Ads, then two weeks later you say you’re shutting down Corona Ads altogether. You hyped up partnering with Develephant for Coronium cloud then quietly shut that down without so much as an announcement. I had to find out through a tweet. The splash screen was suddenly thrust upon us in a very poorly planned rollout with a pretty much mandatory build of Corona.
All we’re asking for is a little more stability and longer notification times when you announce sweeping changes like this. And if you’re going to start charging premium prices like this then a discount to get everyone on board first would make things easier to swallow.
As others have said, I used to recommend Corona all the time on places like Reddit. But I can’t do that anymore as I don’t think it’s fair to introduce new developers to such an unstable platform.
To those upgrading to the new AdMob (paid), we understand that time=money, so I just wanted to mention that conversion (from old AdMob “v2”) should be extremely easy… and honestly, the new AdMob plugin is better and cleaner as well.
To assist you, I just created a sample project on GitHub using the new AdMob plugin which you can use as a model for your own apps.
And, as follows are some basic tips/guidelines for updating, along with notes of various improvements. If you need more details, the documentation should be (as always) your first go-to source.
-
Include the new AdMob plugin in your “build.settings” file:
settings = { plugins = { [“plugin.admob”] = { publisherId = “com.coronalabs”, supportedPlatforms = { iphone=true, android=true } }, }, }
-
Do your Lua require() as “require( “plugin.admob” )”, not the old “ads” CoronaProvider framework.
local admob = require( “plugin.admob” )
-
Initialize the AdMob plugin with “admob.init()”, but skip the “providerName” argument and follow the new syntax. Since you should only be calling this function once per app, this change should take literally no time:
– OLD admob.init( providerName, appId, adListener ) – NEW admob.init( adListener, { appId=“YOUR_ADMOB_APP_ID”, testMode=true } )
-
Load ads via “admob.load()”. This function has been improved in the new plugin and it now works with both interstitial and banner ads. The old plugin was awkward in how this call would only pre-load interstitial ads, while the “.show()” call would attempt to both load and show banner ads (but only show interstitials). Essentialily, we’ve re-designed “admob.load()” to work far more logically: pre-load the exact ad type you want, along with an AdMob ad unit ID from their dashboard. You can even load COPPA-compliant ads for child-safe apps directly in this call. For example:
admob.load( “interstitial”, { adUnitId=“YOUR_ADMOB_AD_UNIT_ID”, childSafe=true } )
-
Once you know an ad is loaded, using the familiar “admob.isLoaded()” call or by checking for a “loaded” event phase, show an ad via “admob.show()”. In the new AdMob plugin, this call has the added bonus of a “top” and “bottom” screen positioning string for banners, in addition to custom y positioning (number)… this surpasses the awkwardness of the old plugin and dealing with content area, content scale, Android “immersiveSticky” mode, and other issues. Also, the x positioning of banners is now gone since the new plugin uses “smart banners” that span the entire width. Finally, some strange aspects of this call from the old plugin have been resolved: you don’t specify test mode here (that’s now done in “admob.init()”) and you don’t specify child-safe ads here (that’s now done in “admob.load()”). Here’s an example of the new “admob.show()” call:
admob.show( “banner”, { y=“top” } )
OTHER
Other improvements include better implementation of the “admob.height()” call for banners. In the old plugin, this call was awkward because you’d need to call “.show()” and then “.height()” to get the height of the banner “after the fact” for custom y positioning. Now, since banners are pre-loaded, you can get the height of the banner before you show it, allowing you to get a pixel-perfect vertical alignment with other UI elements in your app, if you need that level of control… or, as mentioned above, just use “top” or “bottom” for screen-edge alignment and forget about the messy issues the old plugin entailed.
Finally, the new plugin works seamlessly with the new Android Dependency framework (this is why it requires daily build 2016.3005 or higher). For a long, long time, the old AdMob plugin caused compatibility issues with other plugins like Google Play Games Services and Google Analytics, among other monetization plugins, making maintenance of it extremely difficult and causing all sorts of support issues for developers who tried to use various plugins in tandem with it. The new AdMob plugin fully resolves these issues and is future-proof for Android.
I hope this helps explain basic conversion to the new AdMob plugin, along with logical improvements we made to it.
Happy holidays,
Brent
[quote=“bjsorrentino,post:170,topic:342466”]
To those upgrading to the new AdMob (paid), we understand that time=money, so I just wanted to mention that conversion (from old AdMob “v2”) should be extremely easy… and honestly, the new AdMob plugin is better and cleaner as well.
To assist you, I just created a sample project on GitHub using the new AdMob plugin which you can use as a model for your own apps.
And, as follows are some basic tips/guidelines for updating, along with notes of various improvements. If you need more details, the documentation should be (as always) your first go-to source.
-
Include the new AdMob plugin in your “build.settings” file:
settings = { plugins = { [“plugin.admob”] = { publisherId = “com.coronalabs”, supportedPlatforms = { iphone=true, android=true } }, }, }
-
Do your Lua require() as “require( “plugin.admob” )”, not the old “ads” CoronaProvider framework.
local admob = require( “plugin.admob” )
-
Initialize the AdMob plugin with “admob.init()”, but skip the “providerName” argument and follow the new syntax. Since you should only be calling this function once per app, this change should take literally no time:
– OLD admob.init( providerName, appId, adListener ) – NEW admob.init( adListener, { appId=“YOUR_ADMOB_APP_ID”, testMode=true } )
-
Load ads via “admob.load()”. This function has been improved in the new plugin and it now works with both interstitial and banner ads. The old plugin was awkward in how this call would only pre-load interstitial ads, while the “.show()” call would attempt to both load and show banner ads (but only show interstitials). Essentialily, we’ve re-designed “admob.load()” to work far more logically: pre-load the exact ad type you want, along with an AdMob ad unit ID from their dashboard. You can even load COPPA-compliant ads for child-safe apps directly in this call. For example:
admob.load( “interstitial”, { adUnitId=“YOUR_ADMOB_AD_UNIT_ID”, childSafe=true } )
-
Once you know an ad is loaded, using the familiar “admob.isLoaded()” call or by checking for a “loaded” event phase, show an ad via “admob.show()”. In the new AdMob plugin, this call has the added bonus of a “top” and “bottom” screen positioning string for banners, in addition to custom y positioning (number)… this surpasses the awkwardness of the old plugin and dealing with content area, content scale, Android “immersiveSticky” mode, and other issues. Also, the x positioning of banners is now gone since the new plugin uses “smart banners” that span the entire width. Finally, some strange aspects of this call from the old plugin have been resolved: you don’t specify test mode here (that’s now done in “admob.init()”) and you don’t specify child-safe ads here (that’s now done in “admob.load()”). Here’s an example of the new “admob.show()” call:
admob.show( “banner”, { y=“top” } )
OTHER
Other improvements include better implementation of the “admob.height()” call for banners. In the old plugin, this call was awkward because you’d need to call “.show()” and then “.height()” to get the height of the banner “after the fact” for custom y positioning. Now, since banners are pre-loaded, you can get the height of the banner before you show it, allowing you to get a pixel-perfect vertical alignment with other UI elements in your app, if you need that level of control… or, as mentioned above, just use “top” or “bottom” for screen-edge alignment and forget about the messy issues the old plugin entailed.
Finally, the new plugin works seamlessly with the new Android Dependency framework (this is why it requires daily build 2016.3005 or higher). For a long, long time, the old AdMob plugin caused compatibility issues with other plugins like Google Play Games Services and Google Analytics, among other monetization plugins, making maintenance of it extremely difficult and causing all sorts of support issues for developers who tried to use various plugins in tandem with it. The new AdMob plugin fully resolves these issues and is future-proof for Android.
I hope this helps explain basic conversion to the new AdMob plugin, along with logical improvements we made to it.
Happy holidays,
Brent [/quote]
Does the new admob plugin work with firebase?
Just saw the latest announcement. Adding Unity Ads and reducing the price of the bundle and the individual plugins. Now we’re talking! Thanks for listening to us Roj and team.
Hi all,
In light of the updated terms outlined in our latest announcement, we are locking this thread and directing discussion to the new thread. Please continue to discuss and field questions there:
https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/67049-announcement-welcome-unity-ads-plugin-pricing-changes/
Thanks for your patience and understanding,
Brent