One of the low hanging fruit for generating revenue from your application is introducing an advertising model to your existing game. You can easily display an ad in the main menu or in the loading screen of your application and not adversely impact the user experience of your customers, yet generate a reasonable amount of revenue.
As Unity itself doesn't provide functionality for adding iAds to an application, we will illustrate how to acquire this functionality using the Prime31 plugin. While it is certainly possible to also implement custom plugins, this is outside the scope of the book. More importantly, it is a better use of our time to build the application:
- Visit the website http://www.prime31.com and download the iAds plugin:
While the plugin itself isn't free, you should make more than the cost of the plugin in ads to justify its purchase.
- Import the purchased unitypackage by importing a custom package through the Assets | Import Package | Custom Package menu command:
- Select the unitypackage on your machine so that Unity can begin importing its assets:
- Unity will now begin importing the plugin and display a dialog confirming that you wish to import all of the assets from the package into the project:
Make sure you have all of the items selected and press the Import button. When the import process is completed you should have two new nodes in the Hierarchy view:
- The iAds system comes with a ready-to-use Prefab for displaying ads, so let's drag that into our scene.
Now that this is added, our application is ready to display ads.
- Open the application in iTunes Connect and select the Set Up iAd Network:
- Enable the iAd advertising network for your application by selecting the Enable iAds button:
We have just added the iAd network to our application. When running our game, we will now see an iAd advertisement appear in the main scene of our application – purely driven by Apple's demographics and advertising engine. As people interact with the ads in our game you will get a check from Apple.