Over the past few days I have been working on an Adobe AIR application that I would like to put some ads it to monetize it. Before you start complaining about advertising in applications, just remember that advertising is put in so that big brand companies can pay the bills instead of you.
As I was researching solutions for this, I visited the sites of the usual suspects: AdSense, AdBrite, AdMob (hmm, do I see a pattern here) etc. I kept running into a brick wall though. None of these platforms support desktop applications or even some kind of branded application. I wouldn’t mind putting a small banner, or a footer that says ‘This app sponsored by Big Name Company’ all in return for a modest monthly payment or CPC/CPM.
So, I guess my question is, do you know of any solutions that would meet my needs? Or maybe I should just charge users $5 for the application and be done with it. Of course that means I will have to build my own payment infrastructure. Why is it so hard for me to take people’s money!
Daniel Dura 
It’s not just Adobe AIR. Widgets and even social networks have this same issue as well.
If someone can figure out how to monetize all of these different platforms, they will be very rich.
I do know that http://www.gripwire.com/ is trying to monetize social networks and iPhone applications. I bet AIR applications might be on their roadmap.
I have seen AdSense displaying on an Air application named: Bookmash.
You could try MochiAds – the Flash Games Ad network. It’s pretty low EPCM, so you’d need a quite successful app to see much return, and it wouldn’t display ads if the user was offline or blocked the app’s internet access. Maybe not the best option – but an option none-the-less.
http://www.mochiads.com/community/forum/topic/adobe-air/19051
How about displaying the page in HTML (using the AIR HTMLControl) and then showing Google AdSense adverts beside it?
My understanding is that so long as this page is also visible from a conventional browser then it is within Google T&Cs.
Yeah, I think it is technically possible using AdSense, the big problem there is that it is against their TOS. The MochiAds idea is interesting as well, maybe I will look into that.
What perfect timing! I just released a product into private beta which aims to make it really easy for AIR developers to monitize their applications by releasing them as shareware.
Check it out:
http://www.shair.it/
Feedback is very welcome 🙂
The problem with using traditional web advertising in a desktop application is that content can’t be indexed in order to target the ads. We need a platform that can accept meta data from the application so that ads will be relevant.
But I would probably just charge the $5 if I were you. I’d rather pay once than pay over and over by having to see ads.
Christian
Please could you explain how displaying AdSense against their terms of service. Do you have a reference for the clause it violates?
Just to be clear, what I am suggesting is that at the point you wish to dislay adverts, you go off to the server and generate an HTML page which is then blended with Adsense. This page is then displayed by the client using an HTMLControl. The key thing, as I understand it, is that a user with an ordinary browser should be able to go to the server and generate the same page as the client sees. Hence the ONLY difference betwen the two processes is that i)a client application is requesting the web page ii)the web page is viewed in a browser contained within your application.
Daniel, I’d appreciate your help with this as our business model for our AIR app assumed this approach was OK…
Hi Philip,
Disclaimer, this is my interpretation of their TOS. You should probably first contact Google before you do it, they may have a different answer.
In the Google AdSense Program Policies document (found here: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=48182) it says “No AdSense code may be integrated into a software application.” The context appears to be that it cannot be included in any desktop application, only web pages.