Selling advertisement space in your game

Has anyone done this?

There is prime advertising space potential in my game, without being too in your face or breaking immersion. It's a sports game so advertising is fairly common. I could sell sponsors on the jersey or boards around the stadium. But has anyone else done anything similar?

How would you begin to calculate how much you should charge for space? I can pull figures out of my head, but is there a method to calculating the value of a certain space?

 

I whipped up something a couple years ago where you build placeholders in your game, then when someone starts the game it grabs the current ads off the server and throws them in the placeholders. Then there was a simple php form on my server where I could edit the current ads being shown.

From there, you can add some callbacks so when someone clicks a button it throws an entry in that user's db record. Then you can simply query the db to show how much traffic each placeholder gets.

To make money you'd have to have the statistics for how much traffic you're getting. The first month or something you might have to offer the free advertising to fill up your ads and get some traffic going, but after that you could simply charge based off the ad's performance and "rent" space.

 

I know, HOW I'm gonna implement the advertising, but it's not gonna be a clickable aspect. It will be just as you'd see at a sports game, boards with ads on them or shirts with ads on them. It is just for the visual element. So I can't judge the "performance" of each ad. It is a means of raising money for the game so the space will be sold before the game is made. How do I calculate what that space might be worth? I know, for example, that my local team gets £1000 a year from their shirt sponsors, and they also charge £500 a year for each ad board around the stadium. I'm not saying that is how much I should be getting but it is the same model. (And my game will potentially be seen by many more people than my local team.) But how do you quantify this value?

 

IGA Worldwide were a company that arranged these kind of deals, and would have been perfect for you to speak to, but their website seems dead now. Apparently arranging such deals is hard because it is difficult to measure their effectiveness to the advertisers.

 

Yes, in my games there are several billboards around the racing arenas. I sold a few of them for $495 a pop.
There are tons of repeats/unsold items so I sold a couple more in less visible places for $99 a pop.

I'll probably be doing some streaming advertising down the line to allow people to advertise on a monthly basis and each time the player starts a race the correct billboard displays what's currently being advertised.