If you haven’t heard by now, CPMstar has added new pop-in editorials to their games’ pre-roll ads. These ads try to make it look like they are part of the actual game to induce clicks to advertiser’s sites. This decreased the value of the “more games” link for sponsors and drops the value of a sponsorship. If you are a sponsor that sponsors with CPMstar ads, please tell your developers to turn this feature off. If you are a developer, I encourage you to turn these off in your dashboard also as they will annoy players. CPMSTAR plans to have ways to let developers integrate editorials more efficiently but hopefully they will be turned off on pre-rolls as the default.
Many of you know evil Chinese sites like 7k7k and 4399, as well as a bunch of smaller sites in China block links coming out of flash games, making it worthwhile to lock your games out of such sites. These sites have absolutely no excuse to do this and should be dealt with harshly.
However, sites outside of China are actually not loosing much from this. After being in China for a few weeks, I have realized that even though China does not have an official policy of barring out Non-Chinese sites from their internet, it effectively protects their own internet businesses by making sites from non-chinese servers load extremely slowly. A 4mb game that should take only 20 seconds to load on my site anywhere outside of China would take perhaps 10 minutes to load in China. This is the main reason for the super-high bounce rate from China. Its not the language, flash games are easy enough to figure out. No one wants to wait that long just to play a flash game. This is basically government endorsed protectionism for their own country’s internet business.
The other reason you are not loosing much is because Chinese traffic is essentially worthless anyways. Many advertising offers just have pitiful rates in China or just won’t pay for chinese traffic, resulting in small eCPMs. Alot of financial transactions are for some reason just hard to do in China. While a click from a US visitor may net 7 cents, a click from a Chinese visitor will hardly net a penny and the ad rates may not even make up for server and bandwidth costs.
Until the US can push China to open up its internet to foreign markets, there’s really not much for us to gain by dealing with Chinese sites. Just make sure to site-lock and encrypt your games.