Is in game advertising effective/not repelling?

So I am planning on building a small mine craft server this summer as a past time and am concerned about how I will pay for it. I HATE making people pay for items to increase their strength. It drives me insane, so I will not drive others insane. I came to the idea of in server advertising and wanted to see if any server owners could tell me if this just pushes players away and will it even create any revenue (I'm aiming at 50% funding at first with a $10 USD server package with Spartan (2 GB)). Of course, donations will be included in that.

Does anyone have any suggestions or previous experience with this? Thanks.

 

If you're going to make a website for the server, I'd put the ads on there.

 

@Tecno_Wizard Granted this may be a little deceitful, but maybe you could have some kind of board (like at the spawn) that lists off the awesome perks, and then you show the price of the rank on the website. So they first get hooked in-game, then they go check it out on the site, and at that point they're more interested than glancing and leaving.

 

@pookeythekid, that's actually brilliant, but I won't be making OP perks for donators besides aesthetics and a few unique items that have more of a wow factor than normal items, but not power. Like some awesome particle effects when players are hit. My other problem is I have NO experience in hosting a website that isn't run by Google sites, which really can't run a forum.

 

@Tecno_Wizard For advertising, you could do a boss bar and they can donate like $2 to remove it.

 

@Tecno_Wizard It sounds like you're running a fairly small server. If that's the case, then plan on funding it solely on your own. If you don't think you can do that, then don't bother making one. If you can fund it all by yourself, then if donations do come it's a nice thing that the players didn't have to do, rather than a disappointment if player's don't donate

 

@AdamQpzm, i have an army of "creative mode only" friends who absolutly adore minecraft. In fact, still have the old server world. We entertained ourselves for a week by building a HUGE hypothetical prison server, and it was actually pretty nice. I plan on doing the same kind of prison thing, but COMPLETELY UNDERWATER! Dungeons of Atlantis. And i was already expecting that i would be paying for 50% of the running costs.

 

@Tecno_Wizard Right, and I think the best reason to open a server is purely for fun or to play with friends or whatever. Unfortunately that means that you'll have to expect to pay 100% of the running costs, not just 50%. And maybe it won't turn out that way, and your players will be willing to pay and you'll end up not paying so much. But in my experience, servers are always better when they're not run by people worrying about whether they'll have enough donators this month to continue the server.

Either way, good luck with your server

 

@AdamQpzm, I was limiting myself to $10 a month so that my job can cover it and still continue my 50% of everything I make goes into the bank routine. It was always for fun though.
, and because I consider myself pretty good at plugin development, I can put a twist on the prison idea to my liking.

 

@Tecno_Wizard Still, the cosmetic perks are good enough to advertise in-game without a price. And if you make the packages affordable (I mean, it's technically 100% profit if you don't count the server bill), not even the website price should drive too many people away.

Also, like the server ideas. Hope you get some good players.

 

@pookeythekid Thanks. I think I'm going to do a combo of in server advertising at first and payments to stop them. (I'll mod the adbolt plugin a bit). Unrelated, but since you seemed interested, I am going to make it so you rank up by giving a gift to a Poseidon statue throwing it into the river of water, having it flow to a hopper, take the gift into the hopper to a chest and rank up the according player. Still working out the details of linking the thrown item to the player though.

 

A little confused with that part, but sounds pretty cool. It will be interesting how that works...

 

@pookeythekid, essentially, you give a sacrifice to Poseidon to rank up by throwing a specific item in a water flow.

 

Hi

I thought I would introduce our network, we are the only company to offer in-game video advertising in Minecraft.

We recently came to Minecraft after operating in the Steam enviroment for 2 years, we have over 2,000 server owners signed up (for ads in Steam games).

Please check out our plugin, see the link on my signature. You can integrate the ads however you like and they pay far better than chat based advertisements some companies on MC offer.

Thanks
Patrick