Offering Runescape Sites Other Sources of Income

I have already posted about how I feel about Jagex’s announcement in regards to Runescape fan sites removing Runescape gold selling ads from their Google ad inventory. However, from what I have seen, for the average Runescape fan site this would result in around a 40% reduction in the amount earned per click as well as a significant reduction, around 35%, in the number of clicks received as a result of having very unrelated ads now being shown in the absence of the Runescape gold selling ads. So they are effectively asking fan sites to slash their primary revenue source by 60 - 70% without offering any reasonable alternatives.

Now I can honestly say that for the first 18 months I ran my Runescape sites at a small loss, and it would seem that every increase in traffic resulted in a corresponding increase in hosting and associated costs to cater for the increased traffic to the point where I now pay $250/month for a dedicated server (and will need to upgrade again soon), and I also know that a lot of other Runescape sites pay a lot more for their servers. So I don’t think that Jagex has the right to ask fan sites that support and promote their game to slash their primary source of income considering the reasonably high expenses that many of these site owners are already burdened with.

So I obviously think there is a problem, but I haven’t offered too many solutions at this stage. So what do I think Jagex could do?

So from my perspective as a Runescape fan site owner, as well as real life business owner, one of the smartest things Jagex could do in my opinion would be to offer some sort of affiliate program, where fan site owners gets a percentage of the revenue earnt from the user that they encourage to upgrade to the pay to play version of Runescape. I’m certain most fan site owners would want promote something like that. Not only would we have a great source of on going revenue but we’d also be building the game of Runescape for the better.

So why aren’t they doing this? Well it is hard to tell, but I’d imagine that they probably feel that there isn’t a lot of value in it for them in terms of offering an affiliate program, which then splits the revenue earnt with a fan site, which from their perspective really only reduces their profit margins if they feel that someone that has been playing the game for awhile would more likely become a member on their own accord rather than just because a fan site tells them to consider it or because they advertises Runescape membership.

I on the other hand think that Jagex would find that there would be a considerable increase in Runescape subscriptions if fan sites really made a push to encourage visitors to become members. Plus at the end of the day I can’t imagine that Jagex’s business structure has a great deal of variable costs that would be associated with an increase in membership subscriptions. So if this is the case then essentially every additional subscriber’s contribution essentially goes straight to the profit margins.

So from my perspective I guess it comes down to the notion of, if Runescape fan sites were promoting the the P2P version of Runescape would F2P sign up for P2P that otherwise wouldn’t have, and with that in mind, I’d argue that that there are proportionally more F2P players using fan sites than their are P2P players, so offering fan sites incentives to encourage these users to become P2P members would be the perfect target.

The only other reason that I could imagine why they wouldn’t be implementing something like this is because they haven’t worked out a way to do it, or they haven’t thought of it - but I’m certain they would have considered it. Though I can’t see it being any more complicated than any other affiliate programs out there. So I doubt this is the reason they have avoided this advertising model.

So what other alternatives does Jagex have in terms of offering fan sites incentives to not promote Runescape gold ads?

I have already mentioned in a previous article that Jagex should consider going the route of selling Runescape gold themselves, it would definitely allow them to tackle the illegal Runescape gold market on a level that might actually be effective. So if they were take this route then why not also offer some sort of affiliate offer allowing fan sites to again make a percentage of the sale if they encourage people to buy gold from Jagex. I find it hard to believe players wouldn’t buy the gold off Jagex as opposed to buying off some shady gold merchant if it was available at a reasonable price.

Also while we are talking about alternative revenue sources, Jagex might also consider diversifying their income even further by offering to sell Jagex approved Runescape guides/ebooks, tools, features, upgrade etc once again with an attached affiliate program for fan site owners to use to monetize their sites with.

So far I have on talked about ways Jagex can share revenues with fan sites via affiliate programs and the likes for the benefit of fan sites and Runescape alike as an incentive to not show Runescape gold selling ads, but the type of ads shown in Google Ads is only one dimension of fan site earnings. Removing the well paying ads is obviously going to reduce income, but if there is a corresponding increase in traffic then this should be able to negate the loss of income. So how could Jagex help with traffic? Would a link or two to fan sites cost them that much? I know it would make a massive difference to the fan sites.

Before you start thinking that Jagex can’t link to fan sites because they can’t control what appears on the fan sites and they’d be liable for whatever happens to users if they were to visit the sites. Firstly, Jagex wouldn’t be legal liable for anything that happened to users on sites that aren’t under their control, though of course their reputation and trust my be tarnished a bit for linking to dangerous sites. Secondly, of course Jagex wouldn’t link to any old site - Runescape fan sites that they linked to would need to fulfill a number of requirements before being accepted as appropriate for Jagex to link to. Even once these requirements are all fulfilled a simple disclaimer by Jagex saying how they have gone to great lengths to make sure the linked sites are safe, but they don’t have control of the content on it would go to further absolve them of any liability.

I might just be ranting here but I would really like believe that there is a lot more that Jagex could do to both increase their own revenue sources as well as cater for Runescape sites to a point where they would be inclined to feature ads there were in keeping with Jagex’s wishes.

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