Crossy Road has been a popular mobile game for smartphones and tablets, and its in-game video advertisements are paying off for developer Hipster Whale.

The company has made more than $1m so far from the ads, which players watch to earn virtual coins to spend on new characters for the game, which involves leaping across roads and rivers without getting squashed or sinking.

Not bad work considering that the iOS version of Crossy Road launched in mid-November 2014, with its version for Amazon devices following just before Christmas, and then Android in early January.

The figure was revealed by games technology company Unity, which provides the video ads, in an interview posted on its official blog with Hipster Whale’s Australian co-founders Andy Sum and Matt Hall.

Crossy Road is free to download and play, but makes its money from the video ads and also for in-app purchases when players buy characters, which range from penguins, cats and pigs to wizards and robots. The characters can also be unlocked by spending coins earned from watching the adverts.

“We wanted it to be free, so that everyone has a chance to play,” said Hall, citing another indie mobile game, Disco Zoo, as inspiration.

“I played Disco Zoo and thought that video ads were a really good way to earn money without getting into people’s faces. We just needed to figure out a fun reason for players to watch them,” he said.

“We didn’t want any consumable purchases, we wanted to do something that everybody could pay a little bit for if they wanted to, but where it wasn’t necessary to keep paying.”

Crossy Road was downloaded more than 10 million times from Apple’s App Store in its first month, then another million downloads in its first weekend on Android’s Google Play store in January.

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