How AppHarbr Puts A Stop To Bad Ads Before Your Users See Them

Hello world. Welcome to the Pocket Gamer podcast with your hosts, me Brian Baglow, and our heroine of hyper-casual, Peggy Anne Salts. Hello Peggy. How are you today? it, Brian. Heroine of hyper-casual, that is a new one. I, of course, was traveling, brought back some great ideas, and some great guests. So, we look at the bad ads, but we look at the smart solutions as well from the perspective of a publisher and a company focused on elevating ad quality. So, two guests and maybe you, you know, raise your hand when I refer to you. So, we have Vincent Faravier. He is chief marketing officer at TapNation. You know the company, Brian, and we'll have them on a special segment. Vincent and his colleagues will be back. A fast-moving games publisher that has crossed a billion downloads and marked other milestones as I said we'll cover later

on in July, but we won't give it all away now. Welcome. Thank you, Peggy. Thank you, Brian. It was super exciting to be I think it's my first podcast with you, Peggy, in Pocket Gamer. We had a couple of interview, but really excited to be on show. Just back from the Cannes Lions talking about creativity and ads. Very good experience. A lot of creativity, a lot of gaming at the center of attention of of brand. We're going to be there. I'm going to be there next year in any case, Brian, cuz it's all coming together in games, which is why we're so focused on the quality of the game but the quality of the ad experience. And to talk about that, we have Alex Yarukimovich, head of AppHarbor, which is the world's leading in-app ad quality and security tool. So, he has experience in ad tech and gaming, a very sharp focus on ad quality and monetization, and he's got a sharp mind as well because he's balanced between speaking five languages, raising three kids, and being a husband to a woman who is a

cat lady. Uh something that I love. You're a You're You're a puppy man. I know that, Brian. Indeed. And I was just thinking that that's a great segue because that's something our dear friend CodeSlut Workaday can relate to. So, if you're listening, Workaday, we will have you on the PocketGamer podcast as well very soon. So, great to have you, Alex. Where are you coming to us from? Uh I'm in Tel Aviv, Israel. Thank you very much for having me, Peggy, Brian, Gibson. I'm thrilled to join you all. Indeed, I I was in the past also a dog person myself, such as Brian, but when I moved in together with my wife, we were debating whether to get a cat like she wanted or a dog like I wanted. In the end, we had to compromise. We got three cats. And you know, it didn't go either way. Uh yeah, I've I've been traveling a lot recently as well, seeing Peggy everywhere. Uh of course, that's a delight. Participated in quite a few

ad quality panels recently. It's definitely a very hot topic in the industry right now. So, we're very excited about the ability to educate the market and talk about it and hopefully deliver a valuable solution to solutions to the industry around this. We're delighted that you're here. Um and we know that this is something that our audience are going to respond to. So, Alex, uh let's come to you first. So, the company's focused on ad quality. So, can you help our our audience understand these types of bad ads that they're going to have to detect and perhaps with your help Absolutely. So, to keep it simple and concise and clear, we group all the issues out there into three main groups. The first group would be the content, meaning I just don't like the creative or the landing page itself. It could be a competitor, something inappropriate, and something that I've been hearing a lot recently from different app studios is then that when sometimes the ad is what violates your app's age gate, once

you submit it to the app stores for review for a version update, if you're unlucky and the guy from Google and Apple ran into the wrong ad into your app, your app will be rejected in the submission, not because of the content of the app itself, but because of the ad content, which is of course very frustrating. Uh the second thing other than content would be the behavior of the app, meaning not what you see, but what it does. Annoying ads could be playing sound, automatically downloading a heavy file to your device. And I think the the most common issue right now that I think everyone who are showing interstitials or rewarded video are are hurt by it badly is the unskippable full-screen ad. An ad where an X never comes. Basically in a deadlock and can't close it. Or they're just a bunch of like five, six end cards hiding one behind the other. So if you'd wait for all the cool down periods for each X and click them one by one, you can spend a

minute or two minutes in inside this journey of closing ads, which of course most of us won't last through. And number three, which is less a bit less common, but for some publishers the most painful, is the straight-up malicious stuff. That includes ads that try to to deceive the user into thinking there's something else to get their click, like, "Hey, click here to read your Facebook message." Or, "You have a virus. Click here to install it." Or, "Congrats, you did so well in our game that you deserve a reward." And click here, but it's just an ad for downloading a competitor app. And probably the worst things out there that directly hit the users and and their pocket and their well-beings are different scams, such as, you know, "You won an iPhone? Just insert your credit card number to pay for its delivery and you know, and you get scammed. So, to conclude, content, behavior and malicious security threats pretty much summarize the the variety of issues that we see.

And and I think we can all we can all appreciate that. It's I'm the father of a 7-year-old. He plays a lot of games on his iPad and I have come across each and every single one of those multiple times. But what are you seeing most commonly? I would say the most common problem is probably the content because there's such a variety of of different content out there and each app has its unique needs and considerations and strategy, their stance towards competitor ads, their stance towards the level of brand safety and how clean they want the experience to be. And the reality is that right now most ad networks, unfortunately, are limited in their capacity to honor the block list. So, they'll allow you to tell which categories, advertisers you don't want to see, but their capacity to actually pinpoint all of them and keep them outside of your app is very limited mainly because they're very much restricted to the categorization of the DSPs. That they're the ones where the

campaign set up by the advertiser. So, if someone, whether if it's with male intent or by human error, categorized real money gambling game as as just general games or as a casual game, blocking gambling won't help you avoiding that ad. So, that's that's what makes it more common than the other issues. And then the lack of skipability. Hear that right now from almost any client and prospect. Yeah, everyone I heard are hurt by that right now. We know they're bad for the experience and and that can't be good for business. But what is the most harmful here for you, for example, Vincent? You know, is it about the content or or the crashes or just the pure frustration? So as a quick introduction and remind us that mission has been in the business in 2019 where casual and hyper casual publishers that was in 90% of our revenue is based on ad monetization and we serve like 20 billion impression per

month. So that's a lot to scan. That's a lot of work. Of course there's there's two things. There's the content and there's the format. So it's really two things to tackle and that we need people like Alex and his team to help us out. Today there are two three main ad mediation platform out there. They give you a kind of basic or minimal scanning tool. You can review some of your creative or you can review all of your creative. So the content is one first thing for sure. Since we're a hyper casual casual publisher, all of our games are large audience from 8 10 years old and above. So first of all, you don't want anything related to violence, harmful content, sexist content, something we really want to be careful as you mentioned Brian. You have kids sometimes playing with your with your iPhone. So categorization of your game allows you first of all to pass a message to the network and the mediation. I don't want this type of content and then the second

one is obviously the experience of users with those ads. Ad network we know are getting more and more innovative or malicious in a way to compete with each other to get the last click and we know it's all about the click the last click impression and the last click tracker that's going to allocate an install to a certain advertiser and publisher. So the less you can exit the ad, the more you click on the ad willing to exit the ad, the more they're going to be able to attribute themselves the last click and end that install. So we have seen an increase of aggressive very aggressive ad template and it's something that is you really need to fight for. If you want to improve that, you really need to be harsh with your partners a bit under under the radar behavior because it's a very hidden parameter for you and setting for you to change the timing the close button.

So, a lot of people don't know how to do that. A lot of people don't track those kind of behavior, but you really need to go deep there deep dive and ask your account manager that you want to reduce. They will ask you many condition. They will ask you for all networks to be aligned, but that's an important step. I was talking with publishers. I was also talking with a few DSPs who told me sort of off the record that they're pretty upset sometimes about some of the ads that are coming through and they don't really have any way to control that. You have very very violent ads around women. You know, where where it's practically attacking a woman, but it's it's selling a game at the same time. Again, to get that last click. That's very very aggressive. As you mentioned, you said DSP out there of the market that have some more cleaner template friendly user experience and versus very aggressive ad network who will tend to give you three or four clicks because not only you want to close the video.

Afterwards, you want to close the in card. The store kit pop-up will come which you will have to close the store kit and then after that you have again the in card. So, in the end you you end up closing four or five time a simple interstitial with 10 on our side to ask for minimum maximum of two click close button. Just the video and just the in card. No store kit overlay. So, it's very hard to measure as well. Those things will get into the details. Of course, the first argument that all network will tell you is like how if you change that it will decrease your ECPM drastically. Uh you won't get that uh impression now that click attributed to you. Um so it's a it's a fair battle you have to to to estimate uh but if it really becomes at a fair level then the real install the real click will will will will uh encourage the good network. Of course there's some good players out there as well. I would say the big the big uh firms. So Google and Facebook are the one we tend to privilege because their ad

template their ad experience is cleaner is simpler for the user to exit uh is not trying to be a malicious or uh hid uh hide the the close button for example. We instinctively understand that that bad ad quality can have a a negative impact. Um Alex, what are the side effects that you're seeing from this lack of quality? Is what are the publishers um telling you? There are many different mechanisms by which bad ads can hurt uh the bottom line. Some of them are as follows. Uh quite a few of the worst ad formats, they just abruptly cut the session short for the user. They make the game unusable for the user from the moment they come up. Uh that includes ads that just straight up crash the app and or make it freeze. There are all the apps that after the the famous chase uh which uh Vincent mentioned after the click for the attribution, they auto redirect the user to the landing page without them actually clicking the ad. And then you're out. The user may go back to the

previous window and may not but they're out of the game. Same with the unskippable interstitials that effectively put you in a deadlock. So there are quite a few types of ads that immediately abruptly cut the session and you know loses the publisher all the income from the rest of the session of the user. If they keep playing, they'd be accumulating more impressions. Also if that happens frequently and upsets them, they may just uninstall the app altogether. And that leads me to the second point retention. Of course, you want as many people to use your app for as long as possible and good user experience is is the right formula to make it happen and whenever you put a lot of work into making an amazing user experience and a great game with good balancing, good learning curve, you know, you spend all these efforts and then what makes your users churn is just the disruptive and offensive ads that they see. Then of course, it's extremely frustrating that that's that's the reason why they went away after you putting so much effort

into making an amazing product. Another thing which many don't consider is the extra operational cost of publisher that who is hit badly by bad ads. Consider that if a publisher showing many bad ads, users are upset and they're probably going to leave one star reviews on the store which hurt your store rating, hurts your So, discoverability also even if the user didn't complain in the store but they he just he loves the game, he really wants to help you solve the problem. So, he opens a ticket. He contacts the publisher via support, reports about a bad campaign. Usually a user will provide very little information that allows the publisher to actually understand where is this campaign coming from. At best, he'll send you a screenshot. You have no idea where the site is coming from and now as the publisher, you're likely to spend a few good hours trying to fetch the site one way or another and then your next step is to go to whoever served you this ad

asking them to block it if they can. They may not be able to and in any case, you're dependent on them to do it on their side. You have no visibility whether they do it, how well they do it and to make things worse, even if they blocked the bad ad successfully, next day you can get it from the next ad the network and you're back to square one. Uh a very large pain for publishers. They want their ad ops and monetization teams to generate new money and new business. They want them to implement new and innovative ad formats, try new ad networks, improve the game, not put out fires all day trying to, you know, play whack-a-mole with the with the bad uh actors and on the advertising side. And Vincent, I mean, 20 billion ads served as I understood. Um you know, you've seen it. Can you share instances where maybe ad content has caused issues, lost revenue, support is, you know, a meltdown because of game

crashes? How How have you experienced this or seen it firsthand? There are a few ways. Sometimes it's hard to measure the exact impact of loss of revenue, obviously. Uh but one of the first things that impact us directly and that also Alex mentioned is uh when you submit your game to the Apple Store or to the Google Play Store, since a couple of years they've been much more cautious and there are people scanning, playing your game, seeing the first few ads uh they can see inside the game. And we happen to have in the last 6 months, 12 months a lot of uh refusal of uh submission or non-approval was told because either some ads uh made it through, they were like real money gambling or casino ads um that would come into like all age uh category. Um and of course, this is not the the type of category that we want to run into our games. Even though we block them, they might still appear. And secondly, uh

with a less proportion, but sometimes they would say, "Well, this interstitial here uh was not easy to close. The close button is only appearing after 10 or 15 seconds where it's supposed to be an interstitial." Um so, those are kind of the things that can delay, really the work from the monetization side as to chase the network again and can delay up to a a week sometime the submission of a game that that can be important. And then I mentioned the the other behavior, you know, when sometimes the ads is too long to close and now more and more also you have advertisers and network running for example on the rewarded video slot more than 30 seconds, you got up to 60 seconds or one 1 minute to run a rewarded video so and and makes the user sometimes want to turn off or leave the game a bit earlier. Those are the things we want to be a very cautious sound on as well. Sometimes they're forcing the sound on which if the game is not being played on can be a bit bothering if you're playing while you're

on an important meeting at work. We know that for example, so those are kind of the of the things we're trying to to measure, get deeper and get our team hands-on. So we have some scanning tools from our mediation of different ad network. But I think deeper tool with more control on the ad template etc. You have more on your plate, Vincent, and so do all publishers cuz now you have to watch, you have to monitor, you have to control, and you have to stand up. But it's also a bit of a balancing act in another direction because you want to have the business, but you also have I say almost a moral obligation to be true to your game, true to your players. I mean, I've been hearing things I heard things that at the event where I was where it was just really shocking. Shock value will deliver what the advertiser wants, you know, and what the network wants, which is that last click, that attribution. So it is going to get worse before it gets better. What is it that you have to then

think about or do differently? We'll talk about the tools, but it's also the team. It's true at the moment we are at the age where we hope AI will help us monitor more closely at scale all of our ads, and we're looking at a couple of platforms that can help do that scanning. Alex Apabo is part of one of those as well that can help you like really save time from your team, but in the meantime, for sure, the job of monetization manager is extending, blocking the certain type of advertiser or certain type of ads, spending more time negotiating, and defending ourselves with the mediation with the ad network for them to improve their template, improve their ad methodology. So, it requires a lot of more time indeed. Sometimes, more aggressive template will bring you short-term money because higher CPM, because higher ad down, but then you have to get

the bigger picture. What is the long-term and long-term strategy of the company, you know? We don't want to get this image of having our games that parents don't want to play those games or their kids to play those games anymore because of those ad behaviors. So, we have to compromise a little bit the very short-term benefit and revenue of high CPM for the long-term profitability, sustainability, and image image of your company. Alex, let's come back to you. What what controls do developers and publishers actually have? And and how is it that you help them to police and kind of take ownership and control of these bad ads? So, right now, basically, most ad ops and monetization teams, if they don't use any external help like App Harbor to handle their ad quality, they have basically two options. And both were already mentioned in our conversation today with explanations why they're ineffective. One is the dashboards of the ad networks themselves, which we we all agree that it's right now they

have a very limited capacity to honor the set of rules that they allow you to set. And for many very critical topics, they don't even give you the controls. Uh for example, the the skip-ability guideline is something that that Vincent touched on. So, yeah, you can maybe by setting some block list, blocking some bad advertisers, some competitor app categories, you can maybe decrease the volumes of such ads that you get by maybe I don't know, 50% in a good scenario, but 20 billion monthly impressions in the case of of TapNation, uh you know, a lower than 50% we still talk about probably millions or tens of millions of bad ads that hurt your business on a daily basis, and that's uh not good enough. And the other option that they have is the whack-a-mole game that we talked about earlier of of just uh you know, following on user complaints or just even sampling yourself. But again, if you have tens of billions of uh ads served daily, we're

talking about billions or at least hundreds of millions of unique ad creatives. So, there's no really good way to tackle this right now uh uh unfortunately, and we we um we're happy about the opportunity to be able to provide solutions for these issues that that aren't addressed otherwise right now due to lack of of uh um of means. What are the tools that that we provide? So, what we do, we just allow uh the publisher to very accurately understand in real time exactly what's the ad that they're getting on all aspects, on the content, on the behavior, whether there's malicious intent, whether there's some impersonation, or or attempt for for deception, and give you a very accurate verdict on real time whether this ad violates your policy or not. And by doing so, allow you real time to elect to not display the ad that violates your

policy, which you really weren't supposed to get to begin with because it already violates your configurations on the ad network dashboard. It's just that they're unable to to enforce it. So, what we're trying to do, we're not trying to actively interfere or decide what's good or bad. We just want to give control. We want you to be able to say, "This is what I don't want, and if I'm getting what I don't what I don't want, I want you to tell me so I avoid it to begin with." And this is, by the way, probably the most revolutionary part of our solution that we changed the approach from reactive, "Let's help you find all these millions of bad ads to help you to now try and go blocking them while your users keep seeing them this very moment." Uh we try to change that to let's avoid you showing all the bad ads from the get-go. Let's prevent the users from seeing them to begin with to save you the user churn, the crashes, the complaints, and everything. Uh once

you're in a position where you're in control, you you know what's coming and you can stop it, then uh you you'll probably be able to find the best uh the best setup for your business balancing revenue and user experience. And with your permission, I want to elaborate on this point uh for one more minute. This is something that Vincent touched on earlier. Sometimes, you don't know what would be the impact if you'd stop this campaign because you can't stop this campaign. So, you're saying, "Okay, I don't really like this creative. It pays a lot. I don't know what happens if I deposit, whether someone else would bid just as much for my ad request, and I can, you know, with complete peace of mind pause these guys that make me feel uncomfortable without it impacting my revenues. Or maybe this advertiser really likes me, and because their ads are a bit sketchy, they bid so high on me that if I block them, my my revenues in their geo will will completely dip. And actually, the data suggests that I might as well keep them, you know, it's

the lesser evil. I can live with these semi-sketchy ads, but at least cash in these big revenues. When you have the control and the ability to run a clear a clear test, an effective test, with one group which indeed does not see this campaign, and one group that sees this campaign, this is where you can, you know, uh make your decisions very safe and data-driven, and keep tweaking all the way all the time to always remain this balance and remain in this sweet spot of the right balance between ad revenues and user experience and retention. So, it's about control, and also using the data for that informed decision-making. Um so, you know, not just making a decision hoping for the best. Cuz we know hope is not a strategy here, you know, oh, I hope that this sketchy ad isn't going to be as bad as I think it is, or I hope it's not going to impact my audience, and I hope it's not going to impact my bottom line. But, what we're hearing here, when you listen to this, is how complex the problem is,

because there are stakeholders involved who have no interest in solving the problem, you know? Why would I solve it if I'm making money on it? Not the publishers I'm talking about, the ad partners and the advertisers. So, it's very, very complex. They make it hard for us to AB test because they don't want us to AB test and see if we can remove them or not. So, by not being able to measure, we're more cautious in being a bit less aggressive in removing some advertisers because it's also in their interest as well to serve as many ads as possible, to serve all the advertisers, increase the competition. So, that's also a bit of a black box sometimes we have. It all comes down to transparency when it comes to working with partners to help remove ads in the first place, and also being very, very frank, as you said so and alluded to earlier, and I'd like to hear more about how you make a case for this as a publisher is like saying, "Hey guys, you know what? This is a non-negotiable. You have crossed the line and this is the way we're going to

go forward. This These are the rules of engagement with me." But, how do you get that across? So, as I mentioned, it first of all, they make it hard to test because the ad template is very much at the app or the account level. You cannot have a specific ad template or specific blocking category into two ad units. They don't allow you to have multiple ad units and one would have a specific template and I would block specific advertiser where you could AB test this ad unit versus the ad unit placement with all new set of network IDs. Of course, it becomes more complex to do. That's a limitation, but otherwise, sometimes, you know, it's a little bit have to go the hard way and play the bad cop and be a bit menacing like, you know, we had this issue. It happens that we told you already to change this ad template or block these advertisers and you have to give them a a two or three chance scenario, you know, it happens once, if it happens another time, we'll have to cut you for like 2 weeks or a month's time and then that's how by the money, by the wallet, those ad networks

will kind of behave or kind of change, unfortunately. So, it might impact a bit in the short term your ad revenue, but if it allows to clean a bit the whole ad experience, the market and and I know there are a couple of DSPs out there advocating for cleaner user experience, click attribution that they want to make it more fair between the network and for the publishers to be able to get that that good that good user journey, you know. So, yeah, so creating a strong ties with your account manager from each network, keeping the open discussion. Not all publishers have an account manager for each network, but most of the big ones, large publishers, medium, you have this connection, so being transparent, being upward and and honest with them that this is part of your strategy that you want them to remove make them clarify the setup that you have some platforms also they have some I would say different dashboards for

different publishers you know out there on the mediation ad network fronts they won't unlock in their UI all categories by default so you have to kind of know the person know the market or be a very big publisher to be able to ask for some categories some filters some setting to be unlocked and it goes down to creatives it comes down to crashes SDK error latency there's a lot of deep dive metrics or tabs that that that are not available to everyone because they don't want everybody to look into the nitty-gritty to look into the small details and really have to come from us and I think publisher association publisher group unfortunately we don't have yet that kind of strong gaming publisher association where we all speak from one strong voice solidifying those ties creating those communication group will allow people to act as one voice and and and that's what will make the change in the future but it's for the goods the good of the

industry and and the publisher group that I think this should happen and continue in in that direction now and that's just it to band together in a way if it's dealing with a couple Indies of course you'll never get into that dashboard but if it's dealing with the industry then you're going to have that visibility I just want to quick follow up with you Alex as well because we're hearing that it's very much about the visibility it's very much about the control but when I work with you I also need to know that you're giving me that control that you have done some analysis to ensure that the ads are appropriate and non-offensive according to my own guidelines how do you work with someone like Vincent to ensure that. I just want to completely understand Yeah, this is a great question and the answer, the short answer unsurprisingly is we don't trust anyone else. We just make sure by ourselves exactly what's in that app. And that's done by

various different methodologies which we combine as type of a of a layer of filters or screens. And you know, if one screen lets in 10% and the other one lets in 5% and the other lets only 2% in you know, in terms of their rate of accuracy, then once you combine all of them and the campaign goes through this, you know, layered screen, we want to believe that that virtually nothing goes through. More specifically, on the content side, this is the easier part because in the end, what's content? It's images and sound and and text. And today's technology allows to identify this very accurately. With our tools, with AI, machine learning, what we're able is for each creative, analyze it upside down and understand if there's a text with on whichever language, we can read all the text in real time, analyze it. We analyze the imagery itself. It doesn't matter whether it's from a video or an image. We can analyze

all the objects in the image and the text so we can see if there's nudity in the image, if there's weapons, if there's anything gory, if there's some of the landing page. We analyze all the images and videos, the text, even the metadata of the page all the stuff in the source code that's for SEO, which is also telling about the advertiser. On top of all of that, what we do is historical analysis. We already know which URLs, advertiser IDs and the other thing clearly sees that combination of certain clues in the attributes of the ad response uh is very much correlated with fraudulent activity and and bad actors. So, we can act on that. Alex, you you mentioned a couple of times, you know, developers, publishers need an ad policy. Um and on behalf of the developers and game game creators out there who maybe haven't done this yet, how do you go about creating one of those? Is it on a

game-by-game basis? Is there a template? Or, you know, if they were working with you, is it going through a kind of series of checklists? And how would you go about it if you if you've not yet started to think, "Okay, this is acceptable for me and this is not."? Yeah, this is a wonderful question, Brian. So, so we do go firstly through also checklist of many things to support that some things they didn't consider or never thought that you could even battle. And another funny thing is that when whenever we run a trial with with a new customer before finalizing the the deal and officially kicking off the the relationship and and and ramping up to their entire portfolio, we'll run some tests in one of their apps or several apps if they have different groups of apps. Let's say, you know, the mid-core versus the hyper-casual. So, it will be a representative sample of the value we can bring across different verticals. Many times in these trials, when they look at all the stuff we caught with some filters that we set just for seeing what they'll catch. You know, you may not be compliant about it,

but obviously, if you'll be aware that that you have many complaints that they already direct users to the landing page, obviously, you will be happy to to stop it. And many times in the trial, people are surprised of the statistics of what are the violations that are found. Maybe the things that they thought it's their biggest problem really represents 20 or 30% of the violation and something else that they would love to get rid of represented 40% but went under their radar. But to be safe, it's always good to A, go over kind of a checklist of what's out there and worth checking whether you're experiencing, and then actually run the test and find out. And almost always we're able to bring value in more ways than what the client imagined or for what they came to us for originally. Is Is that I'm just curious. Is that audit because in the case of many companies, particularly for indie audiences, is that

sort of just exploratory? Is that something you do as a as a as a service? Maybe not even charging depending. Yeah, we're we're happy to to offer this type of of trial or audit for free because we're very confident in our ability to know to map the issues very clearly and also to deliver by solving the issues that the publisher wants to. And this is really our, you know, our our opportunity to get the retentions and shine and show value. And of course, if you show someone that you bring them value and and in some cases even there's immediate positive ROI also on the cost by direct input on the bottom line by solving some of the issues we mentioned that directly negatively impact our doubt or or retention, then of course it's a no-brainer. There you go. Nothing better than free and some help, Brian, cuz this sounds like a problem we're going to be talking about a lot.

A lot in the coming months and year. Indeed. Indeed, Peggy. It's one of these It's one of these issues is we keep talking on the podcast about all of the challenges facing game developers that are not game development and and this is, you know, one of the one of the big big ones. And it's a very very complex problem, you know, because there are so many players involved from Apple and Google to the ad partners down to the you know, the individual content creators. Alex, is there any way to kind of simplify this beyond just getting on the phone and giving you guys a call? Um yeah, honestly, uh my my opinion is that you mentioned a very important uh point, Brian. Game studios are great in making great games, and that's what they want to do. They don't want to mess with that quality, just like they don't most of them don't go and directly offer their inventory to advertisers and want to completely rely on an in-house team to sell all the ads. That's why they have the ad networks. They want to focus on what they're doing best and what they what they're passionate about, which is

making games. So, I think my message here to to the publishers just like you don't build an in-house ad network to to for your ad monetization, and you go to the ad mediation solutions with all of their many many pros, but also with some cons, also probably you'll find it counterproductive to do the same with ad quality and build a huge team of moderators, and and you know, and and be on the and try to build a very strict policy and police the network and threaten them with sanctions. It's it's probably easier to take something ready, proven that works, and let it do what it does so you can have your peace of mind and and focus on your strengths and on doubling down on the areas where you are in in the driver's seat and where you have control and the ability to single-handedly increase value and and improve the bottom line. So, I want to end on a similar note with you, Vincent. What's your piece of advice, or even if you want to just, you

know, stand up, you know, on your soapbox and say something to the ecosystem? Publishers need to chat, discuss to each other to agree on a kind of standard and and increase their practicing their practice of asking the network to change, putting a kind of a better standard of a template out there, Um, being a bit more um, as a new unit as a one voice, Um um, that will definitely help. And and Alex touched base on the point. Uh, we're also growing, um, on our side the direct sold and the brand demand. That means like we have we're not relying on a big team but on a small team and working in agency and direct advertisers to run branding campaign. I think that's that's the point where, uh, we we briefly passed but the churn rate like of course you're showing a lot of gaming ads into your gaming inventory. That will create churn. Uh, they won't click and and install so they're going to be very aggressive with some play. On the other hand, if you succeed to increase your share of brand

demand, uh, non-gaming advertisers, uh, it will allows you to have a much cleaner template. Some, uh, you also want to be careful on which kind of product you want to show when if you have a young audience. But generally brand are very brand safe. They're embracing gaming now so you you can increase that that share as well. That will, uh, balance the the more aggressive gaming advertisers. brands are coming. We'll talk about that, I think, also when we have you back, Vincent, as well. We look at TapNation in a special episode just about you because you're also, I believe, one of the top companies in the, uh, Financial Times top list as well. So you have had had a good year. You've had a good year. It's good year but we're keeping up you know the fight is always up. Also, crossed if I remember correctly, crossed a impressive milestone of over a billion, uh, installs this year. So congrats on that. Absolutely. Same to you, Alex. Yeah, yeah, it was, uh, last September, actually. So nearly a year ago. So we we're targeting the

1.5 now in the next month. Growth financial. Very impressive. Mhm. Thank you, guys. Great work. But before we let you go, we have two questions we ask all of our guests that kind of brings it right back into the heart of games. The first is, what is it you're playing right now? What's the game that's obsessing you on any platform? And the second, more profound one, what's your favorite game of all time? We recently embodied, as you know, that that mission has been hyper-casual, which we suddenly embodied a new game, which is a more casual word game. So, Word Bling is entering our portfolio. It's the classic word link type of game where you have to guess. So, I admit that this one is getting me into the daily mindset of finding the words, and that's that's been quite interesting. I've always been a FPS player, so I would say Counter-Strike or Call of Duty are the games where I spend most of my time uh in my younger age and and adulthood as well.

Love it. Yeah, some very solid choices there. And and big shoutout for for plugging your own game. It's uh it's totally acceptable and underrated. So, we'll we'll have to check it out. Um and how about you, Alex? So, to me, the the games that I actually played the most right now, but involuntarily, is the the games that my daughter plays and keep calling me for help. So, for the most part, if I'm playing something, it's like dressing up Barbie dolls or something like that. But, in the in the little spare time where I actually have time to play, since I rely on short sessions, I can't count too much on continuity. So, I I mainly play shooting games where you can shoot a little bit and and you know, and without remembering where you stopped and stuff like that. The Far Cry is is a uh is a a franchise that I play mostly thing nowadays. Looking back through history, I think the game that I spent the most in historically is probably by far Football Manager, which is at the day it was still Championship Manager when I was into it. Uh

A funny anecdote about it is that in one of the versions, I don't remember which year, it would give you anytime you log in, like this humorous message about the amount of time you spent in the game. So, at some point it gave me the tip that if I'll just flip my underwear upside down, I can save the time on showering, so I can keep playing for for longer. Yeah, we we hear a lot of people coming back with Football Manager as their as their favorite of all time. So, um you're not alone. Um I suspect there's going to be a lot of flipped on out there. Um I want to see that meme, Brian. and obviously that may not be a good in my mind. It's It's It It sounds like the sort of thing if it pops up in an advert, you would ban it. You would you would not want that, but that's that's a topic for the next time. Um so, sadly, that that brings us to an end. So, Vincent, Alex, thank you so much for your time. Um some really incredible learning in there, and I

think we're going to get an awful lot of people coming back to us with questions and looking for more information. So, And we always want to give our audience a way forward. So, thanks so much for giving us that direction, and and also sharing some great anecdotes. Thank you so much, guys. Same here. Thank you for having us, guys. It's been a pleasure. This show is all about how to do your job better, how to make an amazing game, how to market it. And you have a say. So, if you have a story or know someone we need to shine a light on, then we would love to hear from you. We want to hear from you. We want to reflect the reality of the mobile games market in all its wonderful complexity and strangeness. So, if you have any suggestions for us, if you have any feedback for us, you can always get in touch. You can email us at [email protected]. You can find us on Twitter @pgbiz, and you can reach out to us through the pocketgamer.biz website. If you're interested in listening to all of our

podcasts, you can find them at pocketgamer.biz/podcast, and we would love to hear your thoughts on future shows. And we've got you covered on all the major platforms. So, subscribe to the audio podcast, as Brian said. Look for us on YouTube. If you want to read it, hey, you can do that, too, because we have a companion post for you, as well, on the PocketGamer.biz website. Tune in again for the next edition of the PocketGamer.biz podcast, and we look forward to speaking to you in the near future. Until then, I'm Brian Baglow. I'm Peggy Anne Salts, and that's a wrap until next week.