Why do you show ads?

SparkChess could not exist without ads and paying customers. Simply put, they pay the bills.

Developing a game like SparkChess, operating a website with over two million monthly views and maintaining a multiplayer service that needs to be up and responsive 24/7 is not cheap.

For example, we use Cloudflare Business so that the game loads as fast as possible, we use a EV SSL certificate to make sure the connection is secure, DNS with failover so the site never goes down, IP filtering to mitigate attacks, code signing certificates so you can trust downloading the game and so on. We even need to buy mobile phones and tablets to make sure SparkChess runs anywhere. Then there’s development and customer support.

For ads, we’ve been using AdSense exclusively. AdSense has the most strict rules for websites and advertisers and disallow misleading ads, malware or annoying ad types. They don’t pay best, but we feel they are the best for you, the player. We also try not to abuse ads – on any given page you will not find more than 2 ads, even though most sites place far more than that.

We use in-game ads for two main reasons: it’s what Google recommends for games and they allow the game to take up all the screen size. We think it’s a good tradeoff. Currently we show ads when the game starts and then on game over, at least 5 minutes apart.