Considering how many people play the game, how much some of those people play it, and how much some seem to complain about ads, it’s astonishing that so few people are willing to pay for it.įor perspective, Online Solitaire earns more than $10.000/month in ad revenue, and the 12 month average for subscription revenue is $8.3/month, which makes subscription-based revenue absolutely minuscule. They aren’t willing to complete a survey to hide the ads for a time, either.īelow is a screenshot from Stripe, where you’ll see that only 3 people have paid for the game in the last 30 days. Few people are willing to pay a fee to get rid of ads. Was the implementation of subscriptions a failure, a success, or somewhere in-between? In short, it was a failure. That leaves the question of how many people actually purchase a subscription or complete a survey. You can see that the number is around 100 people per day who see the purchase popover. The functionality itself worked great, and a good bunch of people clicked “Hide ads” because who doesn’t want to hide ads if it’s an option? Below you can see a screenshot of how many people click “Hide ads” each day. When clicking that, a popover would show where people could pay $4.99/month or complete a 5 min survey to hide ads. The way I did it was through a text-based button above the ads saying “Hide ads”. Most of the users on the site are recurring users, many of whom come back every day to play a game of solitaire and the average session for a user is 20 minutes, so for some of those heavy users, a paid option seemed like a no-brainer. When I first started to think about implementing Stripe as a paid alternative to ads, I thought it would be an excellent supplement to the site’s ad revenue. Which raises the question: how many pay the nominal fee, and how many stick with the ads? Expectations All the games are free to play, but ads are shown on the right side of the playing board, with an option to upgrade to an ad-free version of the game for a nominal fee. I’m the creator of Online Solitaire, a website where more than 1 million people play more than 4 million games of Klondike Solitaire, Spider Solitaire, and FreeCell each month.

Today’s article is written by Holger Sindbæk, Designer and Developer, at Online Solitaire.

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