Flappy Birds' viral strategy?

I got in on it, makes a good chunk of change to cover business expenses. I did zero marketing, zero pushes to get it out there other than mentioned it on twitter twice in one day. 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flap-cake/id821826330?mt=8

I do think that people submitting NOW are out of the game, I know plenty of people who’s app is hitting now and it’s too late. I started work on my when it was in the lower top 10, and after some challenges I got it out last friday. 

I downloaded yours and probably sent a few pennies your way.   I’ll be honest, I don’t see the draw with this game.   I gave up after failing to get past the first one a dozen times.    The banner ads between each try didn’t help.   

Five of the top six free games are Flappy clones.   Amazing.   

May I ask which ad network you’re using? I released mine with RevMob but so far performance is less than satisfactory. Many times ads are not filled. Thanks for sharing. 

Chartboost. Used minimum floors. Chartboost only recently started implementing corona sdk support, where as before you had to be enterprise Corona (I know some people who are, and they are really happy about this as they don’t have to pay enterprise prices anymore). 

My only concern is you have to be careful where you show the ads, since they are full screen only. You can do it on bootup, and on game over. I don’t recommend on retry as the ad sometimes lags so the player may hit retry, start playing and the ad shows up. This happened to me, and I submitted an update to address that issue. The lag is due in part to network conditions (3g, vs 4g and the quality of connection). If the speed is slow, then the ad pops up later. Keep in mind, you set up a cacheInterstatial() (which pre loads some in advance) but once those run out then it’s pulling in real time. I could blab on an on about that, but I think you get the idea :slight_smile:

Check out their site, they have a github with the corona plug in. The analytics are great.

Let me know if you have more questions, it’s pretty interesting :slight_smile:

-Nick

Hey, that’s cool. Help a brother out and leave a review, unless you hate cake then I understand. Poor defenseless little cake, just wants to live his dream. I understand, it’s ok.

:slight_smile:

Is it working? 

Also for what it’s worth, I would have not submitted a clone if it wasn’t pulled in the first place (the original Flappy Bird). However, it left a hole, so many people like myself saw a void and decided to fill it. Unfortunately, EVERYONE is trying to do that :slight_smile:

@nicholasclayg, thank you very much for sharing your experience. I stuck with banner ads thinking full screen annoys people more and hence might reduce take-up. I will reconsider this soon though and jump over. Appreciate the insight. 

PS. I love cake! :slight_smile:

I’m with you on the full screen, I’m still not sure about them. I think if you have logic in there using a count variable or something, so that every other game over it shows would be fine. I didn’t do that, but you can adjust “ads per hour” on charboost dashboard. Keep in mind though the ads per hour work as follows: If you set ads per hour to 10, you’ll see 10 ads back to back until 10 is reached, then you see nothing. I have mine set to 10 for now, until the new update then I’ll have them on max since it will be on game over and not retry. 

We’ll see what happens. I’m actually toying with iAds AND chartboost. As in on bootup, show banner ads and on game over show chartboost ads. I’ve never used any ad network before 2 weeks ago, so charboost is my first experience as everyone told me to use it. While I do think it’s great, I’ll take your point that full screen ads are annoying, I don’t like them but then again if I treat it as a business and not a half ass indie love art project, then it makes sense. 

Heh he. I’m with you. Treating it as business is exactly where I’m coming from.

I’m finding that the less annoying the ads are the more downloads I’m getting. The more downloads equal more ad impressions and so the vicious cycle goes. I think its a reasonable strategy to get the downloads first and create a following and then gradually introduce monetization as opposed to going heavy at first and not getting much traction at all.

Then again what do I know… Just a beginner here when it comes to games and monetization.

Awesome.  Flappy Spam.

@davemikesell, can I ask a favor, instead of posting a comment about the spam in the thread, please hit the “Report” link and let us manage the post.  The reason I ask is now that I’ve dealt with the post, anyone else reading this thread will be confused when they see your post about the spam that’s not there.

Thanks

Rob