So I've been working on a little Android game for a while now. Mainly as a first effort, small scope, learn the technology sorta deal. So it's pretty simple in concept.

Anyway it's getting to the end of development now, mainly just polishing and tweaking, so I decided to take a crack at making an ad supported version. Generally Ad Mob is meant to integrate with standard Android UI elements, and not just an all encompassing OpenGL ES canvas, so it look a little shoe horning to get it in there, but it's in now.

I had been loading it up and trying it out, clicking the ads and testing how well my app resumed and such. And then I looked at my Ad Mob account... I had made $0.02!!! That's real money! I mean not a lot obviously, but man! I was expecting like $0.00000001 or something! I mean after all it had only been me messing around for a few hours testing my app!

Now up until this point I had been taking care to only show ads in non-intrusive places, like on the menus, or only after you died in the game. But man! For a moment I had a flash of "holy cr@p! I could make real money off of this! Lets put ads EVERYWHERE!!!!"

I started rationalizing to myself how I could display ads during the actual game play, and I could use Ad Mob's feature for interstitial ads ( for those of you that don't know, an interstitial ad is one that takes up the whole screen and is usually placed in the middle of a flow between screens and must be manually skipped to continue on to the next screen, they are terribly terribly annoying ) to get even more ads in there!

I began tweaking some things and then stopped myself. I know how I feel about ad supported software to begin with. And especially software that's just crammed with intrusive ads all over the place. Usually doesn't stay installed on my phone too long.

I want this to be software that I would want to use. I want it to be a quality (if small) game that can still make at least some money. I plan on releasing the ad supported version along with a $1 ad free version. I feel like that's the best compromise. And one that I would be happy with as a consumer & gamer.

But man... wouldn't it be awesome to see that # in Ad Mob go way up