FunKlicks is well known as the best arcade banner exchange service out there. Their CTR is unmatched. I also highly recommend purchasing impressions from them. The problem is, that it’s become literally impossible lately to buy impressions there.

Waiting several days to buy has been common for quite some time but for the past few days there was not even an estimate for the number of days left till impressions are available. Now finally tonight it says “We anticipate that packages will be available in roughly 4 days”. Four days is usually about the max # of days that they’ll estimate. It will probably be 4 days or 3.something for at least 48 more hours.

I’m not griping about the service because I realize that Mark is one of the few exchange owners that doesn’t screw us out of our money when he can’t provide the impressions. Some other exchanges would gladly accept your paypal payment and then either fudge the stats or send you some uber cheap-foreign-proxied-garbage traffic that they buy off a 3rd party.

From where I stand, this appears to be a symptom of an industry in which the market is totally saturated. The ONLY way an arcade site can make money is by focusing on obtaining affordable traffic. When such sources of traffic become limited, the new/small arcades aren’t making as much money and are having a harder time improving their traffic. Sure there are alternatives for traffic that aren’t as affordable; and that still affects the bottom line.

More evidence of a suffering market would be, a couple of webmasters that own above-average arcades, starting to post more in the webmaster forums. (looking for exchanges, buying out sites, etc) BootyArcade and gameserpent.

Arcades are a crazy niche. If one reads the popular forums, they’ll witness that so many sites these days are created, only to be sold a few days/weeks later. Now if we could just get every single arcade website that is created (probably about 5-20 right this second) to add funklicks banners, maybe we’d be able to purchase impressions again. Nahh, they don’t have enough traffic. Oh well, we’ll figure out something…