How things stand today

Choice of Games didn’t make most of its money from Google AdSense on the website (though it was a noticeable portion of our income). Most of our money came from advertising on iPhone and Android.

Unfortunately, most of our mobile advertising money came from AdMob, one of the largest mobile advertising networks, and they were just acquired by Google earlier this year. AdMob’s products are already a part of Google’s new “AdSense for Mobile Apps” product (which is currently an invitation-only limited beta); there’s every reason to think that eventually the old AdMob will go away and AdSense for Mobile Apps will open to the public. We’re banned from all Google AdSense products, not just Google AdSense for Content, so we’ll be banned from AdSense for Mobile Apps, too.

Ideally, we’d like to offer our games to you for free.

Partly that’s because we love you so much, but it’s also because our products tend to be like bad prom dates: our games have a great personality, once you get to know them, but they don’t look very exciting at first glance. We don’t have flashy 3D graphics or heart-wrenching music. Multiple-choice games, like “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels, aren’t usually very much fun in the first 30 seconds. Sometimes people ask us to provide “screenshots” of our games; you can imagine their surprise when they get a picture of a paragraph of text and some radio buttons!

Even before we were banned by Google AdSense, we were looking for ways to increase our revenue so that we could produce more and better games. We have been experimenting with selling our product online, and the results have indicated that online sales may be the right way to go. As some of you have noticed, although we offer our new games “Choice of Romance” and “Choice of the Vampire” online for free on the web and on Android, we charge $2 each on iPhone.

Romance has only been out for a week or so; if we compare the number times players have downloaded Romance for iPhone with the number of players who downloaded Broadsides for iPhone in its first week, we find that Romance got only 10% of the number of downloads Broadsides had, but Romance has made 10000% more revenue in that week than Broadsides did. Choice of Romance has already made more money in iPhone sales alone than Choice of Broadsides has ever made from iPhone, web, and Android advertising combined.

So, what are our options?

1. Just keep using the advertising networks. There are alternatives to Google on the web, (AdBrite and Project Wonderful are recommended) but they reportedly pay much less than AdSense. And although there are good alternatives to Google ads on Android, those alternatives will probably dry up soon, once Google AdSense for Mobile Apps launches. On iPhone, Apple provides their own advertising network, so that’s a compelling alternative.
2. Use the Flash game portals for advertising. Kongregate and Newgrounds are great businesses that allow you to put advertisements in Flash-based games. We’d have to rewrite ChoiceScript to support Flash, but Adobe’s ActionScript language isn’t too different from JavaScript, so it probably wouldn’t be that much work. These might be better than traditional advertising networks because Kongregate and Newgrounds really know how game advertising works. Unfortunately, they also take a much larger cut than Google AdSense; reportedly they take a ~70% cut (as opposed to Google’s cut which is 32%).
3. Find sponsors. We’ve heard it said that Google AdSense has the best rates of the big ad networks, but you can get a lot more money by directly connecting with individual advertisers. I’m not surprised that this is more lucrative, but it’s also a LOT more work. We’re here to write great games; we don’t have any full-time employees at all, say nothing of people with a background in ad sales.
4. Use a donation button. This is a reasonable suggestion, and we will set one up in the next few days. However, donation buttons make less than 1% what advertising networks provide. (Another multiple-choice game site I know of has made ~$300 a month in advertising, but receives less than one $5 donation each month.)
5. Merchandising. Sell overpriced t-shirts and mugs, or, to put it more nicely, give away t-shirts and mugs in exchange for donations. (This could be tough for us, because we don’t have a professional art designer.)
6. Ransom our apps to the public. This is also sometimes called the “Street Performer Protocol,” and it’s the same model used by Kickstarter.com, whom I adore. The basic idea: set a global amount of money you want to raise, (e.g. $10,000) and then allow people to make donations toward the goal, however small. If/when you raise $10,000, the product becomes available to everyone for free.
7. Sell our apps online. As we described above, it’s certainly working out well for Choice of Romance and Choice of the Vampire on iPhone. But perhaps the iPhone is a unique market; people don’t normally pay for things out there on the web. (Android makes this even worse, because on the Android market, customers have a 24 hour no-questions-asked return policy. On Android, you can play through our games several times in 24 hours and return them for free; players who keep our games longer than 24 hours are basically putting money in our donation box.)
8. Make games in series. Make Episode 1 available for free, but charge for Episode 2.

What do you think? People often say that they would pay money for our games, but they usually say it after they’re done playing. Would you have paid for our games without playing them first?

On the face of it, you’d think I’d be more upset with Google.

Google’s AdSense appeals process seems completely ridiculous on its face, and it is. I’ve heard more than one Googler describe an AdSense appeal as a “kangaroo court.” Where else can you be required to testify in absentia, without access to the evidence against you? Where a single autocratic judge decides whether or not you’ll be banned for life?

But despite how ridiculous this appeals process is, I understand its purpose; if I were in Google’s position, I’d probably do the same thing.

AdSense has done a lot of good for a lot of writers and developers whom I very much respect. But AdSense’s value to writers and developers comes from the advertisers that pay for ads; those advertisers are paying for potential customers. When ordinary people click on ads to “support” webmasters, they undermine the value of AdSense to advertisers. If these supportive clicks went unchecked, AdSense would be basically worthless.

AdSense is a basically good program from which innocent webmasters must be banned, before their overenthusiastic supporters tear down the system. I know that I am innocent, but Google can’t really know that, and they certainly can’t be expected to believe that all of our fans are innocent, too.

Imagine if it were your job to ban suspicious activity, and someone with two AdSense accounts (ding!) with hundreds of supportive fans (ding!) who shares his AdSense revenue with strangers (ding! ding! ding!) says he has done nothing wrong. It doesn’t matter if he’s telling the truth; his story is inherently suspicious. If it were my job to ban suspicious activity, I’d ban Dan Fabulich, too!

So I’m not mad at Google; I’m just hurt. I feel like Google just broke up with me.

Perhaps that seems a little too personal, but Google’s policy is to ban human beings, not just business entities. Both of my AdSense accounts were shut down within 24 hours, and Google has made it clear that I can never participate in the program again.

That means I can never use Google ads on any website I own — for the rest of my life. Furthermore, I can never put Google Feedburner ads in my RSS feeds. I can never use Google DoubleClick for Publishers to install my own private ads on my own site. I can never install Google ads on my Google Android apps. I, Dan Fabulich, am persona non grata at Google.

That really hurts. I’m good friends with a number of people who work at Google (though not with anyone on the AdSense team); I’ve worked closely with Googlers over the years on projects big and small. Whenever I went to visit Google’s Mountain View campus, it felt like a warm, inviting place, brimming with potential. I don’t think it’ll feel like that the next time I visit.

Unfortunately for Google, they’ll never know what they missed out on by banning us, and others like us. For example, this weekend I was planning to speak on a mini-panel on Interactive Fiction at PAX, where I planned to argue that Google AdSense should be the future of interactive fiction.

Instead, I no longer believe that anyone can safely build a business around Google AdSense. AdSense is a fundamentally unsound business partner because Google is forced to ban innocent webmasters (false positives) to keep the project alive; if you depend on Google AdSense for your livelihood, you should be looking for the exits right now.

Like a good breakup, I have a hunch that being banned from AdSense might be the best thing that ever happened to me. We were making money with AdSense, but not a lot of money, and now we’ll have to figure out ways to make money without it. We’ll have to learn how to develop products that people are willing to pay for. We’ll discuss some of those ideas in our next blog post.

While I was surprised that Google banned us, even though we have never violated Google’s Terms of Service, I was not surprised that they denied our appeal. Google’s policy is to ban suspicious websites, regardless of whether the site owners have personally broken the rules, and they would rather ban perfectly innocent websites than miss a single nefarious website.

We probably look suspicious in a few different ways:

1) We share our advertising revenue with our partner authors. If you write a game in ChoiceScript, we offer to host it for you, and share the advertising revenue with you; authors get 75% of the revenue their games make.

Since we’re still in our first year, for now we only have four games and three partner authors on our site. But Google may have decided that our business model posed a risk to advertisers.

(This is especially unfortunate, because Google provides a special AdSense API allowing you to sign up individual authors with separate AdSense accounts and share the revenue, but it requires your website to have 100,000 daily page views first. We were almost there, before Google shut us down.)

2) Our website doesn’t look like an ordinary AdSense site. The AdSense product we were using is called “Google AdSense for Content,” but it might be more appropriate to call it “AdSense for Blogs.”

In “Google AdSense for Content,” Google crawls each web page on your site to decide which ads Google should display on that site. Ideally, Google would compute the perfect ad for every web page on the site, based on the words on that page.

This makes sense for blog posts, which rarely change very much once they’ve been published. But our online games aren’t really like that. Each time a player clicks the “Next” button, we turn to the next page of the story, which looks completely different from the previous page of the story.

Google may have noticed that our average user spends at least fifteen minutes on one page of our site, and thought: “Hey, that looks pretty suspicious.”

3) We encourage our users to support us. At the end of each game, we invite users to support us by sharing our game with friends, using StumbleUpon, Twitter, or Facebook. We never wanted or expected our users to “support” us by clicking on our ads, but perhaps some people got the wrong idea.

(For the record, we have no idea whether anyone actually did give us supportive clicks. If you personally have clicked on our ads to support us, well, in hindsight, that probably didn’t really help us out very much, in the long run.)

4) I have multiple AdSense accounts. I (Dan Fabulich) have multiple Google AdSense accounts: one for Choice of Games and another for a separate business entity. Both of these accounts were shut down within 24 hours of one another. In fact, I don’t even know if they thought there was something suspicious about Choice of Games’s advertising activity–they may have thought there was something suspicious about my other site and banned Choice of Games because it was also one of my accounts.

Because, you see, when Google bans you, they don’t just ban your company. They ban YOU, as a human being. You’re not allowed to just turn around and form a new business entity with a new Employer Identification Number and re-join the AdSense program. (EINs are free in the United States.)

Since Google has banned me personally, there’s an entire business model I can never use again.

As you might expect, this upsets me personally; I’ll discuss my personal feelings on the matter in part 3.

There’s a lot to say here, so I’m going to publish a series of blog posts on the topic. In this first blog post, I’ll explain what Google did. In the second blog post, I’ll give our best guess as to why Google banned us. In the third post, I’ll discuss my personal opinion of what happened, and in the fourth blog post, I’ll talk about what it means for the future of Choice of Games and our business.

Google pays us when people click on ads on our website; typically anywhere from $0.05 to $0.25 on every click. As you can imagine, this provides an opportunity for nefarious people who want to get money from the advertisers that buy Google ads: we could just click on the ads on our own website and get the money for free. This is called “click fraud,” and Google bans website owners who do this or who hire outside services to do this.

It’s surprisingly easy for Google to automatically detect click fraud. How many times have you ever clicked on an ad in the last year? In your entire life? Most people click on ads less than once a year; many people click much less frequently than that. So if Google detects a user clicking on even one ad a month on the same website, that user is already ten times more likely to be committing click fraud than an ordinary user. It’s a little more complicated than that because some people legitimately click on more ads than other people, but with large amounts of data, it’s still pretty easy.

What Google can’t do is tell the difference between malicious click fraud and “supportive clicks.” Supportive clicks come from users like you, people who like our website and click on our advertisements a few times just out of the kindness of your own heart. From Google’s perspective, supportive clicks are no better than click fraud. A site with many supportive users forces Google to pay money without providing the advertiser any benefit.

Therefore, Google’s policy is to aggressively monitor for possible click fraud and to ban account holders who may have invalid AdSense activity.

No one at Choice of Games has ever committed click fraud. Google’s terms of service explicitly forbid inciting users to click on ads; we have never done so. But a lot of people really love our little website, so it wouldn’t be surprising if we had a few “helpful” users who thought they’d help us out by clicking on ads on our behalf.

We’ll never know for sure, because as soon as Google disables your AdSense account for invalid activity, they also deny you access to your AdSense dashboard, so you can no longer see any of the evidence that Google used to identify you as a fraudster.

Google has an appeal process: you can send Google one email, asking to be reinstated. But, without seeing the evidence against you, it’s impossible to say anything meaningful in an AdSense appeal.

In fact, that’s the first question in Google’s Disabled Account FAQ:

Why was my account disabled? Can you tell me more about the invalid click activity you detected?

Because we have a need to protect our proprietary detection system, we’re unable to provide our publishers with any information about their account activity, including any web pages, users, or third-party services that may have been involved.

That has to be everyone’s first question, right? “Can I see the evidence against me?” “No, you may not see the evidence against you.”

We sent in our appeals email last week; a week later, our appeal was denied.

There’s a lot more to say about this, but that’s plenty for now. In part 2, I’ll talk about why (we think) Google banned us from AdSense.

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Dear everyone involved,

I love the Choice-of-Games games you offer, but I’m a little irked at the blatant Catholic bashing in Choice of the Vampire. Please keep in mind that the Catholic clergy did *not* torture natives into conversion. The majority of natives who did suffer torture suffered at the hands of the Conquistadors, the men who came searching for gold and glory, while the Spanish (and French Jesuit) clergy offered protection, reading, writing, medical treatment, etc. to the displaced natives. There have even been visitations to the natives by saints, martyrs, and the Virgin Mary (the Virgin of Guadeloupe [a place in Spain, for the record] visited one native who was named a saint under Pope John Paul II, for example).

(...)
Read the rest of Does Vampire “bash” Catholicism? (855 words)

Begin your two-hundred year journey as a vampire in New Orleans, 1814; choose whether you will seek love, power
or redemption as you negotiate the growing-pains of the young Republic.

We hope you enjoy playing “Choice of the Vampire” and we encourage you to play it, tell your friends, and to recommend it on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our App Store ranking. Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better “Choice of the Vampire” will rank.

As many of you are aware, to date, Choice of Games has published a series of fantasy multiple-choice games. Being a relatively progressive lot, and unconstrained by market research or corporate interests, we’ve been free to be politically progressive (specifically with regards to gender and sexual orientation). Because these games have historical themes, they have had to be situated in fictional realities, realities in which, for example, women crew ships or same-sex couples can produce children.

Yet, when I started thinking about writing this game, the possibility of locating it in a fictional reality never crossed my mind. It is a fictionalized world–I do not believe that vampires exist–but it tries to hew as closely as possible to actual people, places and events. Having decided to make a historical game, then, I found myself confronted immediately with a variety of questions regarding our politics. Specifically, how do I address issues of race, gender and sexual orientation?

(...)
Read the rest of Fantasy vs. History (579 words)

Play as a young aristocrat who comes to court looking for love… and catches the monarch’s eye. Will you find true love? Gain a crown? Lose your head? Choice of Romance is a text-based multiple choice game of romance, deception and court intrigue.

We hope you enjoy playing “Choice of Romance” and we encourage you to play it, tell your friends, and to recommend it on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our App Store ranking. Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better “Choice of Romance” will rank.

Choice of Games is pleased to announce the release of Paranoia, by Kie Brooks! Play it on the web, or download the iPhone version or the Android version.

When you think your doctor may be trying to kill you, life gets complicated. Survive this multiple choice game, if you can.

We hope you enjoy playing “Paranoia” and we encourage you to play it, tell your friends, and to recommend it on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our App Store ranking. Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better “Paranoia” will rank.

Finally, a shameless plug: “Paranoia” is the fourth game available as part of our hosted games plan. If you’d like to write a multiple-choice game of your own, give it a try! If you host our game with us, we’ll share 75% of the revenue your game produces.

In previous posts, I’ve talked about how we plan a ChoiceScript game and how to pick a vignette to start writing.  Today’s installment in our series on game design discusses ways to write an individual vignette.  Unlike the previous two topics, I don’t have any clear choice to advocate as the way that I think is “best.”  But I can describe several different approaches that I’ve seen used, and talk about some of the advantages and disadvantages of each.

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Read the rest of Four Ways to Write a Vignette (1,448 words)