Advertising your MUD with TinTin++
 

Looking to supplement my income I figured to give the MUD advertisement business a try. I've been developing TinTin++ (a powerful multi-platform MUD client) since 2004, and popularity has steadily increased with currently 1400 to 1800 downloads a month, with the user base being roughly comprised of 40% Windows, 40% Linux, and 20% Mac OS X users.

Given TinTin++ is a console client I was thinking that the best way to promote MUDs would be to randomly pick a MUD from the list of advertisers and display a brief description of the MUD (less than 9 lines wrapped at 80 columns) on tintin's opening screen, with the connection info displayed at the bottom. The price for the advertisement would be $100 for a 12 month period.

Email me at if interested, and if there are enough advertisers I'll get back to you in a month or so.

Re: Advertising your MUD with TinTin++
 

I assume this splash screen happens each time someone opens tin tin?

Re: Advertising your MUD with TinTin++
 

Will this be pushed down stream to all existing users of the client, no matter what version they use, or will it be limited to users of the most current version only. Also, what type of Dollars $$.

Re: Advertising your MUD with TinTin++
 

Yup.

Many people use startup scripts however and their MUD's greeting screen is likely to scroll the advertisement off of the screen. On the bright side, if their MUD is down they'll be staring at tintin's opening screen for half a minute until the connection times out. Experienced users are likely to start tintin manually from time to time as well.

It won't be pushed downstream since tintin doesn't phone home, then again, it won't be pushed downstream when the 12 months period ends, so I think it will even out. And American dollars.

Re: Advertising your MUD with TinTin++
 

The price is very reasonable and certainly within the reach of many people, my only concern would be knowing just how many unique users would be seeing the advertising. Maybe in future version of TinTin you could have it phone home a little like ET wanted to so that you had such figures such as number of users per year verses client downloads per year, and then push the adverts down stream from your server to have a number of views per year etc. The power of web based advertising is that the sites can data mine and say things like X page views per month, X number of unique visitors etc, having those numbers yourself would certainly add a lot of value to your product. I wish you the best of luck with this Scandium, you have a great free client that a lot of people know about and use and I do not see this detracting from it at all.

Re: Advertising your MUD with TinTin++
 

I'm not sure if these numbers will relate well to each other, but in comparison:



CMud had 33236 downloads from Oct 30 2008 till today, which is roughly a 1 year period.




TinTin++ had 18122 downloads on sourceforge from Nov 2008 till Oct 2009, and 3151 downloads on google code, which adds up to 21273 downloads for a 1 year period. Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu offers tintin packages, no idea how many of those are downloaded on a yearly bases.

Re: Advertising your MUD with TinTin++
 

Just to chime in and offer some data, I'm running Ubuntu and I downloaded TinTin++ through Ubuntu's package manager and use it with much satisfaction. This post is just to let you know that TinTin++ is indeed being downloaded through various Linux package managers, so your download numbers should be a bit higher! :)

Re: Advertising your MUD with TinTin++
 

Not sure if there's any real value in this information, but I know a few Aardwolf players that use TinTin++ to MUD from their Blackberry - midpssh into a shell then tt++ as the client.

There's also a couple of extremely masochistic players doing the same with TF.

Re: Advertising your MUD with TinTin++
 

I've lately noticed quite a few people using tintin++ over at WoTMUD, where I used to think I was the only one!

Re: Advertising your MUD with TinTin++
 

Thanks for the friendly words guys.

Still looking for more advertisers.

Re: Advertising your MUD with TinTin++
 

This is a really great opportunity. TinTin++ continues to be one of the most respected mud clients out there, and the fact that it runs on just about any platform is huge.

Re: Advertising your MUD with TinTin++
 

I find TinTin to be one of the most versitile clients around, and the ability to customize all messages is a plus! It's one of the preferred clients for Threshold.

Re: Advertising your MUD with TinTin++
 

Thanks again for the kind words guys. :)

I'll be out of town for the next couple of days, but am planning to release an advertisement enabled tintin++ before the 31st. For anyone who's interested I need the following information, preferably before the 24th.

1) Name of the mud
2) Website url, if you want it included.
3) An 8 line description (can be shorter), wrapped at 80 columns.
4) Address and port