Roku Developer Program

[SolveLLC]

I was having a discussion with a developer today and we were speaking of how difficult it is to promote small developer channels. We would like to propose something to the developer community, a banner exchange. You submit a banner to be displayed, and you agree to display other peoples banners. As simple as that. This way, people that may have never been exposed to your channel get some sort of marketing other than the occasional rotating banner on the Roku home screen. There will be no charge and we expect people to not cheat.

I know we are all sort of "competing" against each other here for eyeballs, but as long as it stays fair it would be a good thing.

Flickstream is willing to set the whole thing up, manage it, provide bandwidth, and help other developers get set up to rotate banners.

Anyone interested?

[YungBlood]

What about a paid version? I just submitted a premium version of my channel. I might be willing to pay a small amount for each person that clicked on an ad for my premium channel. But I wouldn't want to display ads. I would imagine that part of that payment would go to whoever owned the channel that displayed my ad. And part would go to whoever is managing the ad system. Would that be possible? I'm sure other people with premium channels would be willing to pay for advertising. And people with free channels would likely go for showing advertizements if there was the possibility of getting paid for it.

Karma is nice... but money speaks to people more...

[SolveLLC]

"YungBlood" wrote:
What about a paid version? I just submitted a premium version of my channel. I might be willing to pay a small amount for each person that clicked on an ad for my premium channel. But I wouldn't want to display ads. I would imagine that part of that payment would go to whoever owned the channel that displayed my ad. And part would go to whoever is managing the ad system. Would that be possible? I'm sure other people with premium channels would be willing to pay for advertising. And people with free channels would likely go for showing advertizements if there was the possibility of getting paid for it.

Karma is nice... but money speaks to people more...

That would be fine if someone wants to do that, but once money is involved it becomes something else. I don't think it would be worth the effort for "pay", but if someone else wants to set something like that up, more power to them.

It's not about Karma, its barter.

Regardless, it doesn't appear that anyone is interested.

[kbenson]

Are you referring to banners within channels, or on web sites (or both)?

FYI, it doesn't have to be entirely honor based. Require developers developers append a variable to their requests to flag their channels. Access logs will make it pretty obvious if someone isn't participating (although distinguishing between a channel with few view and someone purposefully reducing their banner displays might be harder).

P.S. Wow, it's been a while since I've checked in here.

[SolveLLC]

"kbenson" wrote:
Are you referring to banners within channels, or on web sites (or both)?

FYI, it doesn't have to be entirely honor based. Require developers developers append a variable to their requests to flag their channels. Access logs will make it pretty obvious if someone isn't participating (although distinguishing between a channel with few view and someone purposefully reducing their banner displays might be harder).

P.S. Wow, it's been a while since I've checked in here.

Yea, we've thought about that. I'm going to spend a few hours this weekend building it.

[SolveLLC]

"SolveLLC" wrote:

"kbenson" wrote:
Are you referring to banners within channels, or on web sites (or both)?

FYI, it doesn't have to be entirely honor based. Require developers developers append a variable to their requests to flag their channels. Access logs will make it pretty obvious if someone isn't participating (although distinguishing between a channel with few view and someone purposefully reducing their banner displays might be harder).

P.S. Wow, it's been a while since I've checked in here.

Yea, we've thought about that. I'm going to spend a few hours this weekend building it.

Ok, so we have it built. Email the banners to michael@flickstream.com and we will reply with your provider ID and the required Brightscript code (very simple). We will have clickable banners as soon as Roku fixes the bugs associated with that function. In addition, we've written some failover code so that you can pull your own banner if needed (just for your own piece of mind and so you don't have to resubmit code if we ever flake.).

A little background on why we're setting this up. We believe that most Roku users don't visit the channel store on a regular basis. They mostly use Netflix and don't pay much attention to anything else. Roku does a poor job of cross marketing with it's small developers. Some users have a few channels installed, but don't want to have to wade through the 300+ that are there now. Your channel may or may not be one of the few that they have installed. That's the plus for a service like this, drive people to the channel store to install yours or someone else's channel.

We'll start running it on Flickstream channels after submitting code updates to Roku after the first of the year.

The way it works....

1. For each banner you serve you get a credit for one ad to be served via a different provider.
2. It is possible to serve your own ad, but you don't get a credit.
3. We've built in some anti-cheating code so you can't just refresh a browser and create credits.
4. We'll set up a dashboard so you can see how many credits you have and how many of your ads have been served.
5. All banners will be checked for questionable content (although I don't think that's going to be an issue).

[biztale]

I may have a solution within the problem. I created filler feed within my videos to make them longer. I call it "The Unknown Ad Network" I did for fun but now I see potential it can be used. I have a series I created called Timeline and Plotagon Delayed News, both take breaks by my control. I will prempt and say. Will be right back after a word from "The UNKNOWN ad Network" here I have edited one of the created videos promoting a product. I did this with Alexa, Spectrum and SeaWorld to name a few. To see the ads on channel subscribe to "Scrambled Bliss" or "Biztales" .. you can also follow me on TikTok.com/@johnhilla select any video and reply Ad Me : Roku Channel - provide your channel or vanity code. This will allow me to capture the channel and allow my Plotagon characters to use my Droid to navigate the TV and search to subscribe. or Join Episode. As long as your channel does not break TOS I can enter you into my network. I have near 4,000 users on Biztales and closing in 1,000 users on Scrambled Bliss.