Google on IAPs and monetization - PG Connects Bangalore 2015

there's so much energy and development talent in this country there's one thing missing though right development talent and energy doesn't make a business so hopefully but I'm going to be doing here today for the next 40 minutes and a half i think is to help you guys figure out how to turn that amazing game that you have into a very thriving business let's start with a couple of insights beta paid apps used to be the main monetization method we all know that nowadays the type of business model that is prevalent in mobile games in most countries especially developed countries is in-app purchases right well according to gartner ninety-three percent of all up downloads this year will be free apps and that includes games but in 2017 they calculate there's going to be almost 300 billion downloads of apps now imagine what you can potentially do with 10 times the amount of users wanting to download your games and ten times the amount of downloads for those games

that's a pretty interesting proposal right let's take another let's look at this is different take on the same question but a specific about mobile games this is from a study that we d with park associates last year and we know that this is just a few and of Western countries but this applies globally the owner own on average purchases or in-app purchases actually account for around ninety percent of all money spent on mobile games so in-app purchases is clearly the king in terms of monetization methods let's focus a little bit more on gaming there's a couple of things that have been very disrupting that have happened in the world of Indian a sea of mobile games in the last two or three years and that is the advent of the freemium model right as a consequence of these advent of the freemium model there's a couple of very important things first of all nowadays everyone is a gamer in a couple of previous presenters we're talking about the fact that we all have a smart phones

in our pockets right and they have become the de facto gaming platform for a lot of people that do not necessarily consider themselves gamers it's according to new zoo there's a 1.8 billion gamers globally and includes all types of platforms but mobile of course is the largest growing and becoming very quickly the largest segment the second in fact that the freemium by the way obviously the region with the largest amount of gamers is a pack we sit in right there and it's also the fastest growing region the second in fact that the freemium model has had is that the focus has shifted from the cost of the game when when games but were paid to how people use your game ie the points at which a user plays and therefore pace this is true for many other types of apps not just not just games because abuses have been trained to expect three so the most important thing you can do today is to have an understanding of your users and that's been our approach in building a platform that allows you to I stan.l to

understand them and figure out what are the best ways to monetize those users once you have the users right and this has been reported widely as well retention is a bit of a problem there's a lot of numbers from around I'm sure you all you know most of them the last one I read was that ninety-five percent of apps and that includes games do not survive the first month in a smartphone of a user and also than the typical smartphone user actually uses four to five apps pretty much every day so you start counted by one of them is a messaging platform the other one is a social platform and then the other two or three potentially can be your game but there's a lot of competition out there so let's start by acknowledging that game monetization has become significantly more challenging and sophisticated that at any point in the game industry's history this is our sort of magic formula to help you turn that amazing game that you have into thriving business and it's composed of three

parts the first one is understanding your uses the second is growing your in-app purchase revenues but the last one is ensuring that you're maximizing revenue coming from other sources or from one source which normally tends to be advertising users are actually quite different from each other some users will pay for items in your game will you happy to put money on in-app purchases some users will click on ads and some will engage with certain types of more than others my friend from ant colony previously was talking about engagement video adds a custom monetization strategy for its user means that you are maximizing your revenue and luckily one of the things that we have been doing for a very long time and continue doing is building a platform that allows you to take that magic formula apply to these users and ensure that you're not putting all your eggs in one basket and that you're maximizing your sources of revenue in a very balanced way that platform is called AdMob and currently it is being used by more than 650,000 apps out there it has

900 million monthly mobile devices and it is used by 2 million advertisers globally which means all the big brands in the world are actually available in the network among AdMob alone has paid out more than 1 billion u.s. dollars to up developers like yourselves in the last two years I'm sure that those of you who you already use hard knob know this is true but the last the most impressive thing is that last year in the space of 18 months we saw extremely extremely high performance in every region to the point that returns have grown two hundred percent and those returns keep growing if for whatever reason you don't want to use AdMob but you already are using another network that kind of offers you things that you like you don't you do not necessarily need to sacrifice one for the other in a mock we're already more allowing you to mediate more than 30 networks and you will see some names that you probably recognize in their things names like in

movie flurry odd colony fungal the most important thing is that AdMob is fully cross-platform so you have a game on android a game on iOS you're developing on cocos or unity we are going to offer the possibility of for new games developers to ensure that you have full access at the platform level to our SDKs specifically with unity and cocos2d which I'm sure you will recognize you have full access our platform level to the SDKs from analytics the AdMob SDK itself and in addition the Google Play services but if you happen to have products across additional luffles not just mobile google analytics has a cross-platform unity plug-in to which will release last of us so we happen to be developing a game for additional platforms outside of mobile this is something that you can use in a cross-platform Anna the most important thing for you is that we want to try we want to ensure that we make in your life

easy and that is a what we have done is bringing a number of things together within the same AdMob SDK so now within that SDK you can fully access google analytics and all the AdMob ad network functionalities directly as I say from the same from one sdk i want to talk about a couple of parts that are very exciting for us at the moment the first one is native ads lady part is a popular in the system by now but they have long been part of how Google has helped you guys monetize your games at which feed the form and function of the property that they are native ads actually benefits users the publishers and also the advertisers and we were still running a better program for our partners with native ads and this is format allows you to show us in Europe from over 2 million Google advertisers and customize them too much both the form and function of your app native ads can provide a relevant experience to users that fits within the visual style

of the app to increase user engagement most important thing AdMob is actually is providing different types of native ad templates to choose from including apps app install ads and custom ads when you request a native app from add mo you receive the key elements of the earth and render it in a way that you choose within our creative and policy guidelines we're doing this the right way paying close attention to the user experience so out so clearly identify identify and help you with engagement the second type of odd that we are very excited about and we started very recently is a actually in-app purchase house ads and this format helps you grow your overall in a purchase revenue and can create new revenue streams now let's just imagine you have your one to three percent of users that are actually paying for in-app purchases in your game and these are I'm sure number that you will recognize now you have another ninety-seven percent of users who do not necessarily pay some of those

may actually be in the fence so what these formal allows you to do is incentivize those users with virtual currency to try to encourage them to actually start by in-app purchases now if they don't fall for our in-app purchases they don't got in that direction they remain in 97 95 ninety-four percent of users whatever it is can i still be monetized two different types of Arts that is still integrate with a with your game I'm going to talk briefly about those type of ads so you can know a little bit of the oven and those different formats that you can access in pikesville AdMob one of them is interstitials and a report released a few months ago pointed out the fact that our sinagra gate globally interstitials deliver better results on a CPM basis than in-app purchases you can actually increase monetization rates 10 to 20 times by using by using interstitials compared to you only using banners we have actually massively a scale interstitials in our network over the last couple of years so you're seeing a strong effect driven by

a change in form and mix but in reality our is interstitial CPM has increased has actually more than doubled in the last 12 months video is something that is very exciting as you may have heard from other presentations before and we have actually brought they drew video experience to AdMob to mobile games the view is the type of format that you can see in YouTube that actually allows the user to skip the ad after five seconds and both users and advertisers and brands love this type of format because it allows them for very direct engagement essentially it ensures that there is a line of communication between the brands and the users video app install interstitials also work great and drive excellent revenue this is a full interstitials with a video preview of the app being promoted just as an example one more format I want to discuss with you is a smart bonus this is our traditional workhorse however traditional banners were not a very a

very good monetization method for games due to the intrusiveness of the ad what we have done is ensure that our a smart bunny's actually adapt to the form factor of the phone and therefore they adapt wherever you are playing as a gamer in landscape or in portrait format and finally in terms of different up formats engagement ads run seamlessly across devices and different screen ads these are burners that expand when the user taps diamond enable the advertiser to introduce photos videos and maps this format is actually extremely attractive for brands this is the type of continuous innovation that will enable enables us to attract such a wide variety of advertisers to our network including big glossy consumer brands now i'm going to start wrapping up this explanation and you don't need to trust me when i show you all of these formats and the possibilities that you have in terms of overall monetization for your games you can actually see what other

partners with some partners how do we know they're some developers so these are a couple of quotes both from sega and buckley were based out of the u.s. second for instance are seen consistently higher rpms with AdMob in more than 200 countries and territories but flip a big developer base in the u.s. started a secondary business model based on advertising last year with our help which they have now fully integrated as part of their growth strategy this is 1 i'm pretty excited about as it is possibly the first partner globally that has implemented our ad not needed native ads formats and the game that they have chosen to launch with is roller coaster tycoon for mobile you can see a screenshot with an app install ad for Zagat which is a website very popular in the United States and I have a quote from a Paris chief operating officer Todd shall better I said Atari creates great game experiences for our broad audience we're happy to be partnering with Google and be the first games company to take part

in the native ads beta and help monetize games in a way that enhances our user experience another partner is corporal so this is a Japanese very popular very famous Japanese developer and they have used AdMob to cross-promote kind of all of the games as part of a network of studying their approaching leader last year we held and choose a strategy based on using fifty percent of the arts of the casual games to cross-promote their core games and also use the other fifty percent of their of the traffic of the volume to show paid ads compare combining in-app purchases with us they saw the revenue growth three times in 2014 alone and finally rock you it's actually a company based out of San Francisco that acquires and manages popular mobile games with large user bases a couple of weeks ago or a few weeks ago at mobile games forum in Seattle they share DNA the analytics and monetization is stacked that they are

building and you can see it on this screen so rock you will actually make the most of our systems and solutions to both in-app purchases and adds linking google analytics with AdMob leveraging house hats and using AdMob alongside several mediation partner networks to maximize ad revenues for instance dishes are no biz being set in an optimized position so you can compete against all the man sources things like networks like art colony frame or bribe role etc impression by impression I'm confused that so hopefully you will take with you today our magic formula on how to monetize essentially our suggestion is make sure that you understand your users figure out how to continue increasing in-app purchases and find a partner the help see models monetize the ninety seven percent of users who are not good who are not paying in-app purchases yep we are very conscious that you can also choose any provider for these solutions you have people from your mobile here you have people from at colony bangle

right I'm sure you have met with them we just asking that you keep in mind the premise of the idea because it is still applicable whatever partners you choose but give us a chance to talk to you in more detail about the solutions on the type of partnership that we can develop with you guys the type of partnerships that we have developed with some of our partners before I leave I just want to remind you of a couple of things first of all we have gaining partnerships teams across the world including here in India and I'm just going to ask my colleagues who are sitting over there the back to stand up so all I think there's two more of them right so if make sure that you approach me you talk to them so you can understand in more detail as I say the type of solutions that we can offer you thank you very much guys okay thanks very much tea sir jail for that talk now we've got coming up a some advice about how you can reward your gamers by getting basically monetizing your non paying users through video ads and off

wall from the lovely folks at pocket so if you'd like to come on up and give a round of applause as well over on that'd be fantastic here small correction over here please I'm not the founder and CEO that's Rohit Sharma over there who's the founder and CEO I'm not so okay for okay so 15 minutes I can pretend okay thanks through it okay can I get okay so good evening guys I'm gonna touch on the topic of how do you reward or your gamers and the biggest challenge of how do you monetize the non paying users who are playing your games but are not buying any item inside your game so we're going to talk about that particular thing over here but before that let's talk a little bit about the opportunity of India that we have I'm

sure all of my friends before me would have definitely given lot of information to you guys on what India opportunity is but allow me to couple of slides to also share with you ah the biggest thing that we feel that we believe is we talking about smartphones because that's the business that we want to be a part of and if you look at it the way the things have been moving and the way we've put it over here is how the smartphone sales are happening the shipments and how the smartphone user base which is why the operating systems and clearly you can look at it eighty-four percent is Android obviously with it games we also need to look at the data that needs to be used for playing those games and if you look at it the data usage has also been increasing quarter-by-quarter and this the latest report is from January 2015 where there's been a seventy-four percent year-on-year growth but i'm going to move very fast because i have been told to move very fast but let me try and

just put across some challenges that we think that a game developers face especially obviously we talking about infrastructure and if you look at it the credit card payment that we expect to happen in a nap the only it's only one point seven percent and that's like one of the reason why in-app purchase don't really you know help in the india or southeast asian market but there's also one more thing that it is also the intent of the user as to does he really want to pay so that is something that we gotta touch part in the in the future slides but yes we also want to point out one of the most important thing where there's there's a strong competition for all of us there's lot of new games coming in obviously a indian game developers have started coming into the top chart so that's a very good sign and I'm sure there's going to be more very soon yes and to all my friends are traditional ads is equal to low dollars

and we talking about the banner and interstitial yes this is a work most important thing that we think that we all would agree to is India if you look at it gives lot of downloads to Google Play but when it comes to the revenue part of it India is that that is at one point success at the at the least over there but the whole idea right now is how do you monetize those players who are not actually purchasing inside your games I'm going to jump to monetization a little quicker so a couple of monetization models that we talk about is obviously one is your traditional advertising which is your banner ads obviously in-app items which is the most highest are two that you get from a user is always when in-app but yes free coins that's basically the reward advertising that we talked about and I'm sure with all the old preserve with all things

that have happened during the day we all a little understanding of how the whole reward advertising works but let me tell you couple of more things than what my friends have said the advantages of reward based monetization it's obviously the user who decides when he wants to watch a video so the banner or an interstitial which you are showing it to him where else when it comes to reward he decides when to see the the see the video ad it also increases engagement because obviously you're going to reward him with some coins which is obviously going to make him come back to the game and also engage him with your game economic do you retain players so you're not letting him leave your game he comes back inside the game uses the coins that you have given it to him and obviously monetize your non paying users so the one of the good thing about reward based monetization is you can show this only to the people who are not paying you so there's a clear demarcation that you can do between a paid paid player and a

non-paying player and the eel that you get the revenue that you make out of out of a reward based model is comparatively very high as compared to any other form of advertising a little bit about pocket that I would want to touch about basically as a company we are into reward based mobile advertising platform where we say mr. game developer wherever you are in the world if you have traffic in India Southeast Asia pocket is the company that you should be looked up because we focus very heavily on monetizing non paying users from India and Southeast Asia we we found it as we founded in 2012 we have offices in India Singapore Thailand Indonesia invested by Jeff go jungle and sink tell a little bit about our SDK it's less than 200 kv so there is no thought of you know is the will my game size gonna you know

increase know when you use us it's going to just have a maximum of 200 kb it's a plug-and-play so it's very simple integration that you can do it's a single sdk for video as well as off of all so you don't have to do multiple SDKs we support android/ios with unity cocos2d Adobe AIR corona I think I missed out writing that sorry and obviously we give you real-time developer dashboard and analytics by which you can check how much are you making on a daily basis what have we been doing in the last six months because we have been spending a lot of time with the mobile game developers in india thailand indonesia of Philippines Vietnam and we've been meeting them understanding what the game ecosystem is in those countries trying to educate them on how to monetize their users how to monetize from their games and that is something which personally like in doing it for last six months I have been traveling all across trying to meet all

game developers understand that market and try our level best to monetize that couple of gaming companies that we would want to put over here in which with whom we are talking about integration we have already integrated with lot of them but we also want to i also want to put one of the most important thing because yes we are talking about putting in reward based platform inside your games but the biggest challenges will there be a campaign inside because lot of time there is a problem where you say i have it but there are no campaigns and that is what in the last six months we've done is we've tried and made meet as many brand advertising as possible you've met all of them across Southeast Asia and India we've been meeting them trying to get video campaigns and thankfully we have a lot of demand at this point of time and something that we are working on is on supply so demand is is one of the least challenges that

pocket as a company has at this point of time brand advertisers is what we use for our video campaigns so when you use one of our platform the video platform there is no call to action button so it's a complete brand campaign that you're going to see inside and obviously we have a lot of performance can performance advertisers because we do have our own off a wall so there are a lot of performance advertising that we do we have a delivered almost 8 million installs in the last six months from our of all I'll just go back to one important thing that I missed okay the eCPM that are that we are generating out of our video campaign are for you mr. developer is five dollar and above and that's something which we've done it now we have all the case studies to support the number that i am putting over there and similarly for off a wall also we are delivering above fifteen dollars at this point of time

and that's very high as compared to any kind of traditional advertising that you've been exposed to and why pocket because our we have a local developer supporting we have local guys in India Thailand Philippines Indonesia where we give that local support to them we speak your language those are local guys and what we are also talking about a local ad sales team who basically goes and meet your local branch and get the local campaign so one of the biggest thing that we've we found out is that if you want a higher conversion if you want higher revenue it's very important to put the same language with your player understands the putting up an English advertisement in a tie or a Vietnam or an Indonesian game is not going to help you and that is exactly what we are trying to achieve over here by putting a local sales team who goes gets the local brand local language local celebrity and

that has a bigger impact on the revenue and the conversion and the success factor that is important in your through obviously high ecpm the point that I touched over there a faster payout yes we have you have a proper system where we can make the payouts faster for you of predictive analysis as to how is the game shaping up what is that you need to do inside your game we spend a lot of time with our developer partners where we ask them what is that they need we have a game designing came in bombay whose job is to play your game and suggest you all the touch points that are that are supposed to be played by the players and which is what is going to help you get more revenue out of them I'm now going to just try and show you a couple of video samples that we've done and I think my friend over there we'll just play it for you these are the

integrations that we've already done here I will get three points we are all the options with normal the poor side of it but we also ask you just watch a video and get a frequent that's better good place for something a second it's instant reward for the minute that the video gets to work here get ready go so he doesn't have to leave your game Ava and that's where we say that the user engagement and retention using one of the reward is platform this is the off a wall where when you click

on it this is how you get your points inside the game just download one of the application as a player and you get your points that you can remove this is a very simple integration that we just showed you but we would like to show you a different integration where with the help of tiny mogul games RT we did integration where before you start your okay and if you want to get used you don't want to use the armor or everything where you need to buy coin why are you doing that why don't you just watch a video for 30 seconds and get the complete package that is needed for you to fight inside them inside the game but if you look at it this is an Indian game Indian traffic immune anyone ever chava fire a pepper and this is

what we are exactly talking and this is the same that you are refusing in Indonesia separately in Thailand separately in Vietnam separately in philippine separate now once you start playing the game in this particular game is obviously there is a respawn that happens i'm sure all the prince of persia friends are gonna get connected a theory dies and as a in prince of persia you tap and hold remind yourself the same thing but if you don't want to do it you want to instant revive yourself if you look at this again indian air you are not talking about showing the International Campaign over there with an Indian does not I'm sorry I think it's a good ad buy them at least I can't do that again then you start rental

anyway but again it was it was the decision by the design team in tiny mogul to just show it one so now if he dies inside the game he doesn't have an option of watching the video okay so okay so you see the watch video is no more available for him to you know check hey I just thought that it's better for you guys to see what we do rather than me talking so if you guys have any questions I'm happy to answer or you have my email ID you can always email it to me we have a booth please do come to our booth there are very few people coming over there so please the outside booth no one is around so please please all of you please come over there help all of us over there at the boots to meet you ok any questions please unless

Ellie wants me to just walk them yes sorry it doesn't ok yes it's my food not Sally's so please blame me but if you'd like to ask him any questions please do cuz I was fantastic really interesting to see how you've got an actually interviewed developers from all of these different countries minus what she adapts them off but could we give him a round of applause please thank you well just to add on to his thing I just need to tell you that in the last one month personally I have met more than 130 game developers in Southeast Asia and that is something that I do and so if you guys have anything feel free to come and talk to me i have lot of insights to give you on Southeast Asia I will see your Rohit is here he can give you about India the shan't is here he can talk about India so all your Indians lashonda's yoga and Southeast Asia I'm your guy that's fantastic there we go say thanks very much with that