If you don't think in-game advertising can generate serious cash, look away now

Despite the growth of sophisticated advertising like interstitials and video ads, there's still a strong feeling that many mobile game developers find the entire concept distasteful.

Of course, as a philosophical notion, that's fine.

But for any developer that wants to be taken seriously - or in the case of King, more seriously - as a business, you'd be foolish not to investigate the situation.

Money for eyeballs

If nothing else consider this graph from Glu Mobile's most recent financial quarter. As you can see the company generated 14 percent of its non-GAAP Q3 revenue ($84 million) from advertising.

In the case of Glu, that's everything from vanilla interstitials and video ads to the sort of incentivised actions offered by Tapjoy.

Sure, Glu is a big operator, which has over 60 million players in its games every month.

But 14 percent of its Q3 revenue is $11.5 million. On any basis, that's a reasonable chunk of change; over $45 million in annualised revenue, for example.