New ways of monetization with Bright SDK

This is a no gaming show where we talk about games and their revenue in great detail powered by our ad monetization game design and user acquisition triple threat expertise. Welcome to the two and a half gamers the unfiltered truth served with a side of giggles.

Let's not forget this is a 4:00 a.m. conference discussion vibe. So let's not take it too seriously. Tune in now and stay two and a half steps ahead of the gaming industry. Hello and hello and welcome everybody to a special episode of two and a half gamers. I don't have Jakub or Matej with me today because they don't really know that much about monetization. Well, maybe Jakub does but today we're going to have a very special episode. We're joined by Ofir from bright data and we're going to have a discussion on a completely new method of monetizing your user base. Welcome to the show Ofir. Hello. Hello. Thanks for having me. Of course. Yeah, do you want to just give a brief introduction about yourself and then we can kind of get started? Sure. Yeah. So my name is Ofir. I'm 44. Born and raised in Israel. Happily married, three kids.

I love to play the drums and cook. Um, and professionally speaking, so in the last 10 years or so I've been leading teams uh, who work with partners. In the first few years it was in a big cybersecurity enterprise here in Israel. And in the last three years or so here in at Bright Data. Uh, where I brought my experience of working with partnerships into this dynamic world of application publishing and gaming in particular. Cool. Well, I I I guess the kind of reason for the show and everything is basically we covered Bright Data a little bit. I was wrong, I guess, when we did the episode with Pizza Ready and Super Sense. And I guess that's the basis of this. But do you just want to tell me a bit about Bright Data and the Bright Data SDK, what it is? Yeah, so we'll start with Bright SDK and then we'll broaden it a bit and talk about Bright Data. So Bright SDK is about uh, empowering game developers uh, to maximize the revenue

uh, without sacrificing uh, sacrificing anything in the player experience. Uh, what we provide is a monetization tool. A quite quite a unique monetization tool that integrates seamlessly with games or any other apps for that matter. Um, offering user the option to share small amount of their bandwidth in exchange for in-app rewards or any sort of value that the publisher is willing to to offer them. Uh, as I said, it's a unique monetization tool and I really hope that by the end of this uh, call uh, things will be a bit more clear and you'll be you and and the viewers will be able to understand what sets us apart from other monetization options and models. Yeah, so it's it's it's not ads, it's not offer wall, it's something completely new, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, it it it's pretty much related to data scraping, right? So, can you tell me about about how data scraping works and why it's valuable to your customers and also who are your customers? Right. So, let's So, this is where we can start talking a little bit about

Bright Data and I'll put some slides to make it easier for us to go through it. Okay. So, Bright Data is a case part of Bright Data um which is a leading web data company worldwide. We are about a 400 employees company with revenue well above the $100 million a year. Supporting some 20,000 customers across many different industries, many Fortune 500 companies. Um many of the websites that all of us go through every day for shopping, travel, etc. are actually Bright Data customers. And what they all have in common is that they need web data on a regular daily basis in order to make decisions or even, you know, to exist and function properly. Uh let's take the most common use case as an example, e-commerce. As a consumer, if you want to buy a new pair of Nike shoes, for example, you you go to Google and say "Where can I buy black Nike shoes?" and you always get the right answer, the best prices, whatever you're looking for. As a

business, if you're selling, say, Adidas shoes, uh and you want to understand how Nike shoes are being priced at a certain region, you can't just Google it. It's much more complicated. And the only way to answer this business question in order to be able to compete is to uh collect lots and lots of web data, clean it, analyze it, and then you can start um running your business. Now, all these companies uh need our help for three main reasons. And this is to to answer your question about what's what scraping is about. Scraping is a is a is a nice uh way of saying just collecting web data, Uh so, three main reasons and I'm going to simplify it for you here, okay? Three main reasons for why these companies need our help in order to collect this uh simple data. Number one, the web was built for humans. So, HTML pages are great for human eyes. We understand what we see, but they're practically unusable for machines who try to process this this

data. We have to to turn this unstructured data HTML into an organized table. Number two, the web is incredibly segmented. So, if I share a link to any of these product pages and I'm here in Israel, where are you right now, Felix? I'm in uh Portugal. Portugal. So, probably you and I will see different things. Even if we click the same exact link, we might see different prices, different stock, maybe it's available for you, it's not available for me, etc. Um so, we have to find a way in order to for this, let's say, Adidas shoe seller to compete, they have to see the uh the data from different geolocations. Number three, the web is not really transparent. So, when some automated program is trying to collect public information from the web, uh the website will most probably try and maybe succeed to block it because it will identify it as a uh some sort of a bot collecting public data, even though this is only public data. This bot is not trying to reach any

sensitive or personal information, still they will try to block them. Um so, what we see here, that would be like the the consumer point of view, that would be the the business point of view and the the way that they need to get this uh data from us. Um so, how how does it work? These customers define for us, let's say, they're interested in collecting information about headsets from an Amazon page. They will define for us what kind of information they're interested in us collecting for them. For example, the number of reviews, the product availability, the prices, and we'll uh collect this information, turn it into a structured table, provide it to them. That's how we work with our uh customers. And this is just one example of one use case that is e-commerce. Another very common use case would be travel. All of us are using uh sites like Kayak or Skyscanner, etc. I don't know if you ever thought about how does it work? How are are these websites able to provide us always the best price?

That's because they run these requests of the flight ticket that you're interested in through our servers and we're able to show them the best prices from the cheapest geolocation. Um And just just to end this this answer, just to put some numbers behind it. The amount of data that that is going through our our our uh servers are almost hard to even even grasp. You look at this number, okay? 1.5 billion gigabyte of data last year. That's 33,000 times the data used to train ChatGPT. And I can also mention that it's far more than the number of Google queries that are run every day. That's the amount of data that's This is just to show that almost every practically every company in the world need public data collection every day. Like how you tied in AI there. That's, you know, good buzzword term right now

to compare against. We have to We have to say something about AI, right? Yeah, yeah, 100%. But like how do how does the the the business model work exactly? Like I understand this is valuable, but like why are the publisher IP addresses valuable for you? Like maybe you can use an example even, but like yeah. Yeah, so we'll we'll we'll we'll have some examples uh in a few minutes, but uh to answer your question, so the model the business model is quite simple. Our customers across 30 different use cases and I just mentioned two of them, right? E-commerce and travel. Uh they pay for the public web data they collect using our products. They pay us. And again, it's not user data, it's public web data. I have to mention it again and again because it can be confusing sometimes, all right? Yeah. Uh and this is how we can pay our partners, Bright SDK partners, who are the publishers. So, publishers who integrate our SDK into their apps or into their games, we pay them for that. That's the monetization part of it. Um from the same revenue that we get from our

customers, the ones who are interested in the public web data. Um as for the end users, the ones who actually use those games, they should always receive some sort of value in exchange for allowing us to use part, small part of their bandwidth uh to collect the data. So, everybody wins, all right? The users get some value from the app. We can show some examples later. Yeah. The publishers monetize and we'll show some real uh dollar examples uh in few minutes. Uh and our customers are are getting the data they need in order to function. So, that's kind of the business model here. Okay. So, let's say I have an app and I have a lot of users and they're spread across the world. I I sign up to use Bright SDK, uh what happens? What do I do? Okay. So, for first of all, it can be really a self-service all the way. Uh once you sign up, um you'll see the full instructions and examples in order to go live very, very fast. Um but of course, we are here to help. We have a quite a big team of

partnership managers. Um you'll be contacted by one of by one of them and they'll give you the welcome tour, uh accept you officially to our partner program. Uh we'll talk about the program also later if you want. Um and you'll start usually by an authorized part authorized partner and go up the tiers as you as you grow with us. And from that point, all you need to do technically is to integrate the SDK into your app. Um again, we have all the guides, FAQs, videos, everything you need in order in order to do that. and just go live with the app. Um from our experience the first integration usually takes a few days, then it's it's it's much faster with the with the next apps um you'll integrate to. Then once you're done and you have the app ready, you'll send it to us for a compliance review. We have a compliance team that go through every integration just to make sure that everything was done according to the guidelines. Everything is 100% transparent to the user. Nothing is ever done behind the user's back. The user will have to see

the offer, accept it. Um they also have always have the option to opt out if they're not interested in sharing their bandwidth with anymore. So we review, we approve, and the app goes live and you start monetizing immediately. So So when you say compliance, just to make sure uh I'm understanding that correctly. That compliance with iOS and like Android regulations or compliance with something else? Well, both. First of all, yeah, the the the basic uh the basic compliance is um is um relative to the relevant operating system guidelines like the the two that you mentioned, but on top of that we have our own guidelines. For example, um the user will never start sharing their bandwidth before they saw and explicitly gave their their consent to that. This is our guidelines. Nobody Nobody asked us to to to check that. Just out of curiosity, are you allowed to also incentivize users to kind of opt into that or does it have to be unincentivized? We don't Again, we'll we'll show some examples, but it's not Remember, it's

not us who incentivize, right? It's our partners. It's between them and their end users, but we still define some guidelines and even if even if the publisher will tell us, "Listen, listen, I don't care about compliance. I'm I'm okay with my end users sharing their their bandwidth from the first moment they install the app." It will never happen. We'll never allow it. Yeah. So so basically the partner program, like what what's in it for the partners? Yeah. So let's uh show this. Uh so, that's just one of the pages on our website, the partner program page. And uh you know, we consider the part our our partner program to be kind of a loyalty program. And as the partner grows the business with us, uh and has higher number of bright points, which bright bright points uh are mainly based on the number of DAU this uh this partner has with us. So, the higher they are ranked in our program, and you can see some of the benefits here on the screen.

The benefits are quite quite significant and include attractive payment terms, like net seven, um quite unique in this industry, I guess. Uh dedicated account manager, there is a real person, it's not an AI tool, it's a real partnership manager, one of my team members who is looking after each and every partner, um um to ensure they grow and optimize their business with us. Uh and also some some attractive funds that we offer our partners, they can be marketing funds um invested in in user acquisition campaigns that we run together with our partners, or R&D funds, for example, uh funding developers, or buying whatever devices they need in order in order to uh develop more apps, etc. So, that's a quick overview of overview of the uh partner program. So, i- i- if I can talk a bit more about this because I I'm assuming like size here is king, like everything in ad monetization or everything kind of in monetization, right? Like the bigger and more users you have, the more valuable it is to you, correct?

Yeah. And I saw there's like net seven payouts. Like what what what kind of levels do you need to get to that? Because uh you know, in the West, not in China so much, but yeah. Uh it happens very very fast. Um yes, size is king, but I'm just running some some real names of partners uh in top of my head, and it can happen within a month or two. Again, even even even the initial payment terms that are net 30 are quite good. Right? It doesn't take two or three months for you to get paid. Yeah. It's literally the following month, but very quickly you'll get to the net seven model. But you'd like to say kind of what size you should expect that or is it not by size or DAU? It's by something else? Yeah, so let me let me pop up the screen again and you can see the numbers that are actually there. It's not a secret. So you'll see that it's it's right here. Sorry, I didn't show you before, but it's see it starts from the 50,000 DAU.

Oh, okay. huge number. It's definitely reachable. Yeah. Attainable for sure. So I I just had a curiosity, right? So is it iOS and Android that's supported or do you also do this like for web games or anything like that? Yeah, so the list of supported platforms is quite long actually. Definitely it's including iOS, but also smart TVs, LG TVs, Samsung TVs, Amazon tablets or Fire TV, Huawei mobile devices, and of course Windows apps. So the The options are there. It's Yeah, we have we have partners all over those. Yeah. Yeah. And we keep looking for new, you know, it's a dynamic world and we keep adding more and more operating systems as they become relevant for us. And how does the integration look from the end users' perspective? I I really want to see some examples. We covered one on Pizza Ready, right? But I'm sure you have some other ones that you can maybe can share. We have some examples. They're all on our website, but I'll share some with you here. And and first of all, partners

are are free to present the Brightest SDK offer screen at any point in their app flow. It's really 100% up to them. We can only share advices based on best practices and what we see that works the best, but ultimately it's up for them to decide. It can be for example right on app launch. It can be at the at the end of the level. It can be after playing few minutes, after seeing an ad, whatever. The the the list of ideas is is is quite long. And also, they're they're free to choose which value they want to offer the user in exchange. So, it can be uh to see less ads. Okay, it doesn't have to be replacing ads, but it can be to see less ads. Uh it can be to unlock a level, unlock a character. It can be to add a premium feature to the game, uh provide coins. Again, endless uh uh ideas that you can just choose from, whatever works for you. And they can always run AB tests and optimize. That's what we do with our partners on a daily basis. Super curious also to get your advice, what you think kind of works better than others. But yeah, let's have

some look at some examples. We we analyze it on a daily basis. We we we actually have a product manager that this is literally what he does most of his day is analyzing, checking what works the best, sharing this knowledge with our partners, and and optimizing again. And because it's good for them, it's good for us. Everyone wins. Um all right. So, we can see Let's run this video. So, these are some some examples, and this this video, maybe later we can share the link for it. But in any case, it's on our YouTube channel, and it's on our website. And these are two two or three examples of live iOS uh applications, games that have our SDK. Uh you'll see that the offer is presented here. So, that's the offer screen. The the partner designed it. It has the UI, the look and feel, the colors of the app. It shows exactly what we ask the user to accept. User can agree or disagree. And And this writing, is that what you

guys write, or is that the developer that needs to come up with we dictate the uh part of the text that is mandatory in order to um again, to be in compliance with our with our transparency guidelines, the partner is free to add whatever they want to it. Uh so, you saw that once the user accepted, usually there's some visual confirmation. You'll see maybe the coins or you'll see something being unlocked, etc. Depends on the flow that the partner chose. And you also saw that there is always a way for the user to opt out. It's usually part of the setting screen. You can always go there and turn this off and on again. It's up to the user to decide. So, here in Pizza Ready, they're giving out Yeah, they're giving out a a free ticket, which is a skip ad ticket, I believe. We'll go back a second. You saw that what they chose to do is after playing about 3 minutes in into the game, the player saw this free ticket. If they chose to get it, then they saw the

the offer screen. Very cool. So, basically for those of you just listening, uh it's a pop-up that covers up about 70% of the screen. Um basically, you can either agree or disagree, and you get a free skip it rewarded ticket if you actually opt in. And then Parking Jam? that's that's a third example. And here here the partner chose to just show uh this option as an alternative to a rewarded ad. So, the user can choose which one of them they want to go through. Uh again, three different implementations, and all of them were entirely up to the partner to to decide and and implement how they chose. And which ones do you see here working a bit better than others? Is there one of these three that you say like, "Oh, this actually has higher opt-in than the other ones?" So, these three work work uh very well. It's really hard to say. It's it's not a one-size-fits-all. It's up for the type of the game. Remember, we're we're not only talking about games, right? We have different types of

apps that integrate our SDK, but if we talk about games, so all the examples that I mentioned before are working very well. Uh but you'll you'll you'll you'll find that for example our rewarded ads value works great for one app but doesn't work just as great for another app. So we'll we can always optimize and run AB tests, which is probably the best answer. Just run AB test and optimize. You can you can do it in in a week or two, find what works best for you and forget about it and just keep counting the money every day. All right, counting the money. Okay, I'm actually super curious, right? Because I have quite a lot of questions on like publisher potential earnings, uh if that's okay. Uh first question, right? Like so what dictates your payout and how does like everything work? Are are all IP addresses created equal? Like in ads, right? USA is king cuz it's high CCPMs and then of course in tier three or tier four, it's a lot lower. Is it the same for uh your IP addresses? Yeah, so it's similar and I'll I'll I'll

explain and then show some real examples with real uh with real numbers. So first of all, we pay partners on a monthly basis based on actual DAU numbers, uh which means users who opted in to the Brightest SDK offer. A device is counted as active once it's online for for a minimum number of minutes and this number is it depends on the operating system. There is a number for iPhone iOS and there's a different number for Smart TV. What is it What is it for Android and iOS? Just out of curiosity, like most of our listeners It's usually Yeah, it's usually around the 5 minutes uh minimum time. Okay. But again, it can it can it can differ, depends on the app, the app size. You know, we we have our negotiations with with each partner, but that's the standard and minimum minutes. And it's important to also emphasize that it doesn't matter if we actually sent traffic through this uh through this device or not. As long as they are active, the publisher will monetize from them. Doesn't matter if you use them or not. Um in most platforms, even even better

than that. In most platforms, not in iOS unfortunately because there is no background services in iOS allowed. Uh, but in most in in all the other platforms actually, besides iOS, um, it doesn't even matter if the app is being used or not. So, imagine the user installed an app, opted in, never used it again. The publisher is still monetizing every day from this app. As long as the device is online, of course. Okay. Right? Does that offer any like challenges in terms of like privacy perspective or anything like that? Um, yes, I'll answer you and then I'll I still owe you an example, right? So, I owe you an example, we won't we won't forget about it, don't worry. So, in terms of privacy, which is a great great question and and it makes sense to ask it. Uh, let let's put it this way, if if the user is not concerned about the privacy when they see an ad inside an app, then absolutely not. And and and and seriously, when collecting web data through the end user, uh, device, the only information

we know is the IP address, which is something most apps know anyway. The IP address of this device. We don't collect or even know anything about the user. We don't care. All right? It doesn't Remember what what we do this for? To collect public web information, not the users' information. So, we don't know anything about the user besides the IP address. So, that that's for the privacy part and Right. Yeah. Sorry. I have a question about the revenue paying uh paying and pricing is more interesting, I think. No problem. Let's let's look at the an example just to illustrate the the revenue, uh, potential. All right. So, here is a real example. Obviously, we won't be able to mention the partner name, but this is a real real scenario, okay? So, we're talking about an iOS application. As we said, the minimum session time for the device to be considered as active would be 5 minutes. The rates, uh, are 3 cents. This is per day, right? Per day, per device. 3 cents for the US, as you mentioned yourself, the US is always has the higher rates. Uh,

Uh for selected list of countries and these are just examples. That's not the full list. It would be 1.5 cents and for all the rest of the world, uh it would be quite a low number. Um now this app has 50k 50k DAU. 40% of them are from the US, 30% are from this this list of selected countries and the rest uh of 30% uh are spread across the rest of the world. The potential daily earnings, if we multiply this number of active devices with these rates that you see, we're talking about around $720 per day, which means 21,600 per month. For one app uh from these numbers, which are very let's say average number of DAU. That's not one of our biggest partners' app. I mean, so basically, if I'm doing the calculations here as an AdMob manager, uh in the states, 3 cents

depending on the genre of game, uh this is about anywhere between two to four or five rewarded ad impressions in the states. So, it's quite big. And and also remember that the user doesn't have to see anything again. So, they unlike ads, this is a huge difference. Ads you need to see again and again in order to to get to get paid for them, right? Here they saw the offer screen once. They accepted it. That's it. You keep monetizing from them. You don't interrupt the user ever again. on retention. Yeah. Yeah. Um and then I can I can also show maybe a snapshot like a live snapshot from our dashboard just just to illustrate how our partners see these these numbers live and um kind of a, the report the reports that we have available for them. Revenue just is just one of them.

Okay, so this here is the dashboard that is available for you as a partner once you sign up and you're accepted to the partner program, you have this. And now here I'm showing again, without showing the partner name, but these are real numbers of a real partner that partner that we have. Um, so they can log in on a daily basis, see the number of active devices they have, see the revenue that comes from from these devices every day. Um, I'm not going through the the entire thing. Okay, just just some important points here. Under the reports, they go to the revenue report and for every for every one of those months, for every day, they can see with full transparency all the details that build this revenue, even as far as how many devices per country multiply by the rates that were defined for this country and how much they're worth for this day. And eventually the summary of that month. Okay, so this is again an average partner that we have and that's the kind of revenue that they have. Um, you can

see that they have apps in different operating system. This one would be web web OS is LG TV and Amazon. Tizen is Samsung TV, so this is a partner that has apps in different platforms. Uh, they also have a way you remember I mentioned optimization before, so we have um, uh, quite a lot of tools that we offer our partners for them to be able to to um, measure their apps performance and and optimize even without our help, okay? So, two two very useful reports that we offer them. One is funnel analysis. On a daily basis, they can see per app, each one of them is an app name, okay? How many installations, how many users saw the offer, how many accepted the offer. That's that's an that's an optimization tool we have for them. And to complete that, we also have retention analysis tool. So, I'll just go back in time, let's say 3 months ago, and they can actually see from those users who opted in in August, how many

of them uh stay active over time. After, you know, week, month, 2 months, etc. So, that's just small part of our dashboard just to show that we um We have ways to work with our partners optimize their revenue. if I'm a game developer, game publisher listening to this, basically, what you're looking for on I'm going to keep it to Android and iOS cuz that's most of our listeners. But, basically, on iOS, since you can't run in the background, you're looking for Yeah. preferably large user base in the States and multiple session lengths and long user long session lengths and multiple session lengths per day. So, that's the ideal thing. So, I guess kind of like the puzzle genre or idle arcade is perfect for that. And then on Android, really, what you're looking for is just a large user base on Android, period. Ideally, with the States. And then, you would have the potential to earn like revenue. I just out of curiosity, like what what percentage, if you look at it from like ad revenue or overall

revenue, like does usually uh do you guys usually add like on top? So, it it's usually a um sensitive partners' information. I can't again, obviously, I can't share names or exact numbers. We We except for some some partners who actually published their use case on our website, and I'll be happy to share some links for them. Then, you can really see real partners, real companies' names, and they were They They They accept They They They agreed to share their the numbers, and these two that I'm thinking about now reported multiplying the revenue eight and 10 times since they started working with us a few years ago. Uh but, generally speaking, in the US, we we hear um from partners that they increase their ARPDAU by approximately 15%. So, 15%. So, it's How much How much exactly? Again, it's really up to the partners because if you think about it it it it depends how they chose to implement. If you show the For

example, if you show the offer to a small portion of your users, obviously you'll you'll monetize less than someone else who chose to show it to 100% of the user. And also, when in the game did you choose to show the offer? If you show it after 10 minutes, Yeah. probably some of the users will never even see it. Yeah. show it right at the beginning, you'll you'll make more money. So, again, it's really up to the partners. They can choose The power is in their hands. They can really influence how much they'll they'll they'll make out of this implementation. So, it sounds exactly like about the same as adding an offer wall into like an app, right? So, about the same type of money. So, that's Yeah, similar. That's super interesting. Uh we're kind of running out of time, but basically, if you just wanted to finish off like how how is Brightest SDK different from other methods of making money? If you just want to summarize it so people just one go-to sentence. So, it's a it's a good way to summarize the call, and hopefully I I was able to make things a bit clearer after I don't know how many minutes we've been talking

to uh about it. So, first of all, I think um it's important to remember that anything we talked about is not instead of any other revenue option. It's always on top of it. It's on top. Yeah. It's on top. It's an additional revenue uh vehicle. In terms of the differences, remember no interruptions to the user except this one-time offer screen that we don't interrupt them again. Fixed rates. There are no fluctuation like like ad CPMs that we are familiar with. Uh 100% fill rate. Again, because it's the publisher who controls it. It's not someone else who controls if the user will see an ad or not. Payment terms are good. We talked about net 7 or or even net 30. No chargebacks, no surprises. Personal touch. To me, it's really important that I have a real person to talk to. Even if you go to our websites, go to the about page, you'll see the faces. Okay, you'll see the team. These are real people. It's not AI-generated

faces, right? I think that's That's a summary, yeah. Yeah. So, basically, if I also summarize it up summarize it as well, right? The only real pain point for publishers, I guess, is the integration of the SDK and actually in development work for the in-game stuff. And then, after that is done, then and optimized, then essentially you're off to the races. Yeah, and I wouldn't even call it a pain point. I don't know how how painful it would be. I guess not too much. And I think on that note, let's just finish off. We'll include your email at the bottom, and then anyone can reach out to you and have a chat with you if they have any other questions. Really interesting new monetization method. It's nothing new has really happened in the mobile space for quite a while. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me again. Bye-bye.