I'm the OP. If you haven't heard of Facebook Offers, they're like coupons businesses can post on their Facebook page. But, if you're not already a Fan, they can be difficult to discover - so we made Foibly. Appreciate any feedback!
My first question, as a user, would be - "How much?" Maybe create a page for each game you support with examples of quests/costs/the level of "companions" available and their experience...
Showing examples of pricing is tough. The way it works is that the job poster says how much they're willing to pay, and then Companions bid down from there. We decided against influencing the pricing, outside of having a minimum price of 10 gold ($1 USD).
We had great success running Facebook ads to get Companions into the private beta list back when we were still in early development. Now we need to focus on getting paying customers. To that end, we plan to run Google ads for keywords related to buying/selling gold and powerleveling services; while we have no intention of doing these things (in fact, they're very much against our ToS), we feel that customers looking for such services will have a nicer, safer, and more rewarding experience with our site. We also plan to go to the standard gaming bloggers/press when we feel we're at the right point, hopefully within the next month or two.
That sort of bait&switch AdWords stuff rarely works well, unless the bait&switch is of the variety:
+ title: "Is Gold Selling A Scam?"
+ actual business: selling gold
You might consider doing media buys on outlets which refuse gold selling ads, since their ad rates are terrible (because they refuse the best way to monetize MMORPG traffic) and the audience is targeted fairly well. This is especially the case if you can get ones which are too obscure/niche to warrant attention from either the Chinese MMORPG publishers or the brand advertising teams at EA and whatnot. e.g. Curse Gaming currently shows a D3 ad placed directly by Blizzard so they'd be a poor choice. Penny Arcade also probably a poor choice. Popular MMORPG bloggers monetizing through Project Wonderful or something: probably a good choice.
(I'd try buying an ad through Project Wonderful, seeing if it works, than offering to just buy that ad slot directly and cut out the middleman. Bonus: they're probably cheap -- you could anchor it to something like "Hey I'll pay for your WoW subscription and buy you D3 when it comes out if you replace your ad block with this.")
Interesting. So you don't think that something like "Get help in World of Warcraft" or the like would convert well off of keywords like gold or powerleveling?
I believe that the conversions would be abysmal (on the order of ads for e.g. wedding venues on a search which clearly demonstrates immediate intent to consume pornography) and the ad network (Google, etc) will hate it.
You should consider, if you haven't already, doing some SEO work (both onpage and off) to target related keywords. It's usually cheaper and more successful (in my experience) than just buying ads, plus the affects are more long term.
Keywords such as "world of warcraft" + "help, guide, tips, quest help" would be good targets. Start on keywords with lower monthly search #s to get started.
Gl, and please post an update in the future to let us know how it goes.
I also didn't like having to give my email just to see what you're selling, but did it anyway. And then found out that you're "full up", but you'll get back to me when there's room. I'm annoyed that that I'll now get email from you and so far you've provided me nothing.
I hate when that happens. However, with proper SEO, your site could still get a lot of visits. A quick search of Google Keywords shows that tens-of-thousands of people are searching for "court date" related items.
Large images ( > 1 MB or so ) put into a Canvas in Chrome cause Chrome to crash with the frowny face Uh oh. At least it did as of a few months ago, not sure if it's been fixed yet.
Having spent a lot of time looking at/comparing/building Web 1.0-style server-side frameworks, I've since switched to GWT and really like the client-side model. It'd be hard for me to go back to munging HTML/data back/forth from the stateless server.
Of course, GWT is not perfect. DevMode needs to be faster, and they need to integrate scala-gwt. :-)
I wrote a Backbone-like framework to deal with some of the boilerplate (http://www.tessell.org), especially if you're doing MVP. I don't quite have a solid DTO story down yet, but overall I like it.
If I had to use a server-side framework again, I really liked Click (http://click.apache.org), as it is component based, but has source code you can actually read (vs. both Tapestry and Wicket which are too big/magical IMHO).
I don't know about 'best', but I certainly can tell you what we've done for our latest project, Voost. https://www.voo.st/
Google App Engine cause we hate doing sysadmin work. Objectify. Cambridge Template Engine with JEXL. RestEasy/HtmlEasy. Jackson. Guice to bind it all together. Front end is heavily CoffeeScript, Handlebars, Jquery, LabJS, customized bootstrap and various other libraries. We've got a credits page full of links to the above projects... https://www.voo.st/about#credits
Overall, I'm pretty happy with this choice. We've had to do some weird and semi-complicated stuff to integrate it all together, but at this point, it works quite well.
I've never gotten a chance to try out Play, I'm no longer doing any JVM stuff... but back when I was a Java guy, my favorite java web framework was Stripes: http://www.stripesframework.org/display/stripes/Home
I've never really understood why Stripes hasn't "caught on." It's simplicity is wonderful.
Stripes was pretty much subsumed by JAX-RS. There are a few rough edges surrounding html rendering (thus microframeworks like Htmleasy) but for the most part, Stripes is no longer necessary.
Most of the history of Java web frameworks focused on ways to make form processing easier. Nobody (sane) does html form processing anymore. The "framework" needs to be little more than a way to render html templates and an rpc mechanism.
I was doing basically this before moving to Play 2. I just found there was a lot you had to decide for yourself. You had to pick a persistence layer, roll your own xsrf protection, do your own integration of a JS compiler/minifier, etc. I had something pretty good working, but got tired of having to write the code for every new technology integration myself. The thing I like about Play 2 is that I have an entire community helping me out with these things.
Has Wicket changed to not require so much code? I wrote a handful of apps using Wicket 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 before realizing I was writing thousands of lines of code to update UI models and backend models that shouldn't be taxing me so much.
Used Play for a few projects, but don't like that 2.0 is more or less getting rewritten... don't like Spring... not sure what is left (JEE6 and JSF2? God I don't want to use JSF again unless it changed significantly)
Re Wicket: have a look at PropertyModel and CompoundPropertyModel. You'll lose a bit of type safety, but it will seriously cut down on boilerplate code. In particular it helps map wicket:ids to your Java bean hierarchies by following simple conventions.
Somehow I managed to use Wicket for well over a year before realizing the benefit to this approach.
IFF latency isn't an issue, just chop the front-end and expose services from the Java container (where it shines and makes perfect sense) and use a suitable non-Java front-end tech to create the presentation layer.
