I'm not worthy!

The game has 800,000 subscribers, 4 million free players. It's mostly supported by advertising with big name advertisers like Coke and Sony paying the bills. No, I'm not waking up from a dream about BOTS (though that wouldn't be so bad), it's Runescape.

Adweek covers the game's recent partnership with WildTangent whom Runescape is hoping can help them boost their banner advertising. According to the article, the free players play an average of 30 minutes a day on the game. So let's work the numbers they're not talking about:

4,000,000 free players
Playing on average 30 minutes a day
Equals 120,000,000 played minutes a day

Assuming you can serve 3 ads every minute,
Ad inventory is 360,000,000 ads a day

Let's say they can sell the ads at an average of $1 per thousand ads shown (called $1 CPM in industry lingo)
That means their inventory has the potential to make $360,000 a day!

This is with the assumed $1CPM, which is a low estimate. At over $131 million in potential in a year, you can understand why they would be trying to boost their ad exposure. In all honesty, I hope they hit those figures and more. It proves the model for everyone trying to play in the space and maybe they'll spend some money on making those hideous graphics a little better. (Oh come on, you knew I eventually had to say something salty)