NOTE: This policy has been deprecated. You may find the current policy here.

This message is primarily for tournament organizers. It is public for transparency purposes.

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First off, a heartfelt thanks to everyone who sees TETR.IO as the home for their tournaments, and regards the game as the place to be for competitive stacking! I'm very glad the competitive community has accepted TETR.IO as major game within the community, and of course I will continue to support tournaments that take place on the platform.

2021 has been an amazing year for competitive stacking, and I hope to collaborate with tournament organizers again in 2022 to bring amazing tournaments to the platform and help them thrive. To keep this sustainable and fair, I do want to lay out a few basic rules regarding the promotional kits I make available to tournament organizers, though.

What "promotional kits"?

The TETR.IO promotional kits generally consist of a few elements:

• The homebanner — a customized ad slot deeply integrated into the game, right at the top of the home menu.
  • You can either use a simple creative in IAB Leaderboard or similar sizes, or let me hand-craft a banner that intertwines your tournament's branding with TETR.IO's.
  • Over 250,000 impressions daily
  • Click-through rate between 10‰ and 20‰ (that's 2,5K to 5K clicks)
  • Not blocked by any adblocker (but adblock users aren't tracked, so you get their impressions&clicks for free!)
• Ingame call-to-action notifications — a customized notification that engages anyone online (e.g. to watch the tournament on your Twitch).
• Profile badges — customized, permanent icons on the profiles of tournament champions.

You've most likely seen all of these in action at some point — don't worry too much about the details.

Policy

To make more obvious who is eligible for what kits, and the procedures for requesting one, here is a quick explanation of my policy. This policy goes in effect Jan 1st, 2022.

PRICING

Let's start with the elephant in the room. This advertising kit is incredibly powerful. Anyone would call me an utter fool for giving it away for free. I'm doing it anyway. The competitive TETR.IO community is very important to me, and I absolutely want to keep supporting it where possible. However, to keep this fair, I cannot give out free or discounted kits to everyone. There are requirements to getting these kits for free.

The main dividing line is the nature of the use of the kit. That is, whether the kit is used to inform about particularly notable community events, or as promotional/marketing tool. If the notability of your tournament hinges on being able to advertise with TETR.IO's toolkit, it's generally a no-go. To be clear, exceptions are always possible (most notably, Underdogs Cup was such an exception; it has since grown to be a major, trend-setting community event of insane proportions).

Secondly, please keep in mind the promotional/sponsored nature of a tournament. Having sponsors isn't immediately a problem, but if your tournament is a vehicle for their promotion, I cannot accept it. For example, mentioning your sponsors or showing their logo onscreen is OK (especially if they have ties with the community), but actively advertising for them significantly is not. This rule is somewhat vague on purpose, as it is difficult to draw a concrete line in this space. Please understand that this is handled on a case-by-case basis.

Finally, there should be a clear connection between you and the stacker community as a whole.

If you are eligible:

In general, if you are eligible, the kit is entirely free. I do request that any amount of your choosing (be it €1 or 50%) of tournament proceeds are remitted to TETR.IO. This can be through PayPal/bank wire/Bitcoin invoice, but it could be far more fun to give out Supporter gifts to players or spectators. Events with proceeds below €100 do not need to even consider doing this. In cases where a lot of work is requested (high-fidelity banners, banners with complex popups, work outside of my office hours, etc.), or your given flight times clash with other events, I may request a minimum amount for my time. If this is the case, I will let you know in time, at which point you can change plans to something simpler, or accept and go with the complex request.

If you are not eligible:

The price for the kit is generally dynamic based on amount of sponsorship, promotional nature of the advertised event, amount of audience overlap, etc. Additionally, advertising prices change with the seasons. In general, advertising increases in price as the year progresses, with Q4 being the most expensive. Advertising around events like Black Friday will bump up prices considerably. The same goes for TETR.IO events. Having a lot of banners at once, or very large banners causes the third-party ad slots to be pushed below the fold for a greater amount of users, lowering revenue from these ads significantly.

Due to the ever-changing nature of these things, I cannot give any price estimates on a non-changing blogpost like this one. For any estimate or offer, please contact me. However, please expect to pay quite a bit into the four digits on a daily basis. In certain extreme cases, this may even tip into five digits. If this sounds insane, please be reminded that digital advertising is incredibly expensive. The usual price for a single Google Search ad click ranges between $1 and $2, and can even go into double digits for particularly expensive keywords. TETR.IO's advertising kit gives you thousands of such clicks daily, from a highly engaged, specialized audience who will be very interested in your content, as well as the positive effect of linking your brand and TETR.IO's brand together.

Many payment models are available (per click, CPM, per day...). Please get in contact if you are interested in directly reaching over 600,000 monthly active players of one of the largest stacker games (if not the largest!) in the industry.

FURTHER REQUIREMENTS

This is probably the most important part of this post, as especially the first point here seems to be troublesome.

• ALL INFORMATION (ASSETS, FLIGHT DATES, ETC.) MUST BE HANDED IN TWO WEEKS (14 DAYS) BEFORE THE FLIGHT DATE.
  • This means, if you want the banner for the tournament to appear Jan 18th (the starting "flight date"), I must have received everything I need by Jan 5th, regardless of the tournament's actual start date.
  • Any major changes after this period are prohibited. Small edits are OK (or corrections to mistakes on my side).
  • Please also let me know of any scheduled changes (e.g. if you want the banner to link to a Twitch when the tournament starts).
  • If you are too late, you may be rejected or requested to pay a premium to have the changes made, for my time.
  • For non-eligible paying advertisers, this does not apply, but please be cautious as I am not always available (I will try my best to have any changes made within 24 hours).
• Any advertisements of sexual or suggestive nature, any advertisements involving gambling (including social gambling), any advertisements of offensive nature, and any advertisements connected to any of the foregoing (or anything of that nature) will be rejected.
• Any advertisements for, organized by, or connected to users, corporations, events or other instances banned from the community, silenced/restricted ingame, in a bad standing with their account, or otherwise problematic within the community may be rejected.
• Any advertisements for, organized by, or connected to users, corporations, events or other instances who are breaking any TETR.IO TOS or other osk service TOS, or any advertisements promoting, condoning, or in any other way connected to any of the foregoing will be rejected.
• Please do not paint TETR.IO in an unnecessarily bad light in any of your connected materials, or by any of your connected users throughout the event and its surrounding media, releases, etc.
• Advertisements that do not follow the osk branding guidelines will be rejected. In particular, please ensure to write TETR.IO as such, not as "Tetrio", "Tetr.IO" or any other mess.
• Please ensure the presentability of the TETR.IO visual design. While using extensions to change the background, add additional effects, etc. or using overlays to create a rich experience is commended, please request permission before changing the core TETR.IO design (e.g. the blockskin, the fonts used, etc.). Additionally, please take care to use a presentable graphics setting. Avoid the minimal and low graphics options.

Finally, please understand that I may reject or remove any element of the promotional kit at any time, for any or no reason. Similarly, please understand that eligibility for free promotional kits is at my sole discretion.

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I hope this lengthy post sheds some light on the procedure and policy regarding TETR.IO's advertising kits, and the changes made to them. If you have any more questions, feel free to comment below this post.