Well, I took a little assessment of what I have going here, and it's pretty hard to make ends meet. It's no surprise, but making money from ad-revenue is just a non-starter. While it might make some beer-money now and then, it simply will never pull its own weight. While the folks at Kongregate might insist that the quality of the games will drive the hits and the bucks, using the per-view dollars tht I'm getting, I don't think the most popular game on the site has broken a hundred dollars in revenue yet.

Of course, if you could make a game that could pull in a little bit (let's say $5 a day), and then you could make another game and another and another, you could conceivably eventually have a reasonable revenue stream, but that's working under the assumption that you could make a steady stream of outstanding hits, and even the big guys in the casual gaming industry can't make a stream like that.

In short, the money's never gonna be in the ads but in the upsell. The money's in making the cute little Bejeweled that plays for a little bit, then promising a much better Bejeweled if you'll part with a few bucks. And I already know that because my games are doing the same. That is to say that BULLDOZER is doing it. At least it's taking the large majority of the upsell dollars.

I've got an idea for a "game portal with a difference" that borrows from a couple of successful ideas. It might be a success, but it might not. And it's a pretty big investment for a pretty big "if", especially given the number of Flash game portals out there. Seems like there are a million "1002 Flash Games" sites that are more than happy to host your game and share some revenue with you (with your consent or without), and while I have a couple of ideas that would make it a portal-with-a-difference, I don't think there's enough of an "if you build it they will come" attitude, what with this being a cynical fool-me-once 2007 and not a stupid can-I-write-you-a-check-for-any-idea-you-have-no-matter-how-halfbaked 1998.

And I did get this from a guy who wanted me to upload one of my games to his little revenue-sharing game portal. In the past couple of days I'd taken one of my original contract games, removed the trademarked graphics, and put it on my site (here), so I figured I'd make it the test-case for the site.

And in the past 24 hours, it's gotten about 40 plays, which is fewer than if I'd just linked to the site from the front page of thecodezone.com. Mind you, the site is in its infancy, but if a site can't grab more than 40 eyeballs from games on the front page, then just a site's existence, even if it is something new, isn't a guarantee of eyeballs.

But you knew that. And so do I.

There are two things that make money for The Code Zone.

(1) Bulldozer
(2) Doing stuff for gamedev

So I think I'm gonna have to work towards those arenas, even if being the mogul of my own little gaming empire seems more fun.

That is all for now.