Flash Professional

Over the last few years, Flash animations have been a great source of entertainment on the internet. Until recently, the business of unprofessional flash production was mainly a charity case, with part time job funded web hosting and sometimes illegally obtained copies of software. Some of the more popular sites such as Joe Cartoon and Homestar Runner were funded by banner and pop up advertisements or Merchandise sales, but the average flash artist had to rely on word of mouth and free web hosting accounts to use. Fortunately, some recent changes and developments have made the world of Flash creation a much more profitable one.

Listed here is a brief description of a few ways any one with even basic levels of Flash and Flash’s programming language, ActionScript, can make money doing what many people would do for a hobby.



Since 2001, Newgrounds.com has provided a place for flash artist to upload their creations, removing the artist’s cost of hosting large flash movies. This is a free service, and there is a very large community to see and review your movie or game. Today, Newgrounds has a total of over 340,000 flash creations with one to two hundred new movies submitted every day. They have recently began running monthly contests awarding the top 5 movies and top 5 games $250 each. They also have other occasional contests, such as a currently running Halloween themed contest with prizes up to $1,000.



There are many websites that sponsor games. Websites such as ArmorGames.com or MoFunZone.com to name a few, that will commission flash game makers to make games branded with their website’s logo and URL. These sponsorships can be for any kind of game, big or small with payouts reaching $1,500 and more. These websites are in competition with each other and are eager to talk to any one interested in game creation. ArmorGames also runs Flash Game contests with past prizes reaching over $2,000 plus prizes such as laptops and Video Game Systems.

If you have your own website for your flash movies, there are other ways to make money.



Google has begun an Ad program that lets you put relevant ads on your website. These ads are much less annoying then many other banner advertisements and popups. The Google Ad system looks at the text on your web page and displays ads related to the topics it finds. They pay per click, based on the content of the displayed ad, and even a relatively small website can make over $100 a month. While this isn’t enough to pay for your school tuition, it should be more then enough to pay for the cost of the website hosting and domain name fees.

CafePress.com is a website that lets any one create and sell merchandise. They manage every step of the process except designing the shirt itself. Once you make an account, you upload your logo or any other pictures, decide how you want the shirt to look, with attributes like shirt color, and image positioning, and price, and Cafepress creates the shirts, creates the store website, manages your customers payments, orders and delivery, then sends you the check every month. The down side to cafepress is they set a default price, which you can mark up to however high you want, but they keep that default amount of money. So if a default price of a shirt is $12 and you set the retail price at $14.99, Cafepress gets $12 of ever sale and you only get $3. However, this is still a very good sevice.

With the Google ads and Cafepress, the amount of visitors your website gets is a big factor in how much money you can make, but having your work also featured on Newgrounds and various game sponsoring websites such as Armorgames or MoFunZone will increase traffic a great amount as well.
Fake free iPod ad from i-Mockery.com

These options are all for flash developers who are fairly unprofessional such as students or children, but there is also a great demand for Flash knowledge in the business world. Flash is an exciting tool for webdesign, and many webdesign businesses are looking for people experienced in flash. Flash is also used in advertising. You’ve seen those banner ads that say something like, “Shoot the bulls eye and win a free iPod!” While the offer might not be legitimate, the demand for people who can make such things is. Many Cartoons on TV are also animated in flash. Things like Adult Swim’s Home Movies, Cartoon Network’s Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends, as well as many shorts on Nickelodian and other children’s TV channels are all made in flash. As well, many non-Flash animated cartoon shows have Flash animated counterparts on their websites.In short, a good knowledge of Flash and ActionScript gives anyone in any number of fields a huge boost to their skill level and can make you very valuable, whether your in High School, College or beyond