😱​ Only 14 of the TOP Grossing 100 Games use Ads by Felix Braberg

How many of these games do you think have in-game ads? The answer is actually 14 games. So, only 14 games in the top 100 AP earning category actually have in-game ads.
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Aha. Hello everyone and welcome to a very special episode of the two and two and a half gamers podcast. Today it's only me, the half a gamer of the two and a half. Two and a half lore is either Monty's really short or I'm the half a gamer in the two and a half gamers. So the reason I'm half a gamer is essentially I'm an admon person, right? And that's kind of the joke. But today, I want to talk about something really interesting to me. Yesterday, I came out with a blog post that basically broke down all of the ad placements in Candy Crush. And I got a fan mail that asked me, "Hey, Felix, how many of the top 100 AP earning games have in-game ads and monetize with ads?" Uh, I have no idea, I said to him. But I kind of the question stuck with me. And luckily for you, since I have a broken foot and I haven't really left the house in 3 days, I kind of set out on a little bit of a quest to found find this out. So today,

I want to go through all the top 100 AP games, see what their ad placements are, and see if we can find out any trends from that. So this wouldn't actually be possible without a little help from our friends. We're going to be looking a lot at Sensor Tower and Game Analytics to answer these questions. But let's start. So, let me share a screen here. Good news here is Yakob and Monty are not here to stress me when sharing the screen. So, here we go. Here we have the beautiful list. This is the list of royalty in mobile gaming, right? This is the 100 largest apps or gaming apps in the last 30 days. So, October 22nd to November. So, here we have the list. If you ever find yourself on this list, this is a very coveted list to be on. And it's a very hotly contested list, right? So this hundred list I've been through and before this ask yourself how many of these games do you actually think have in-game ass? The answer is

actually 14 games. So only 14 games in the top 100 AP earning category actually have in-game ads. I might have missed one or two when going through the list, but I definitely haven't missed 10. I can guarantee you that. Right. So the games here, right? So in the top 100 list in the last uh 30 days according to sensor tower here right they have earned about 2.6 billion I think that this number you can probably increase by at least a billion because essentially there's a lot of these companies that are now going direct to consumer with web stores right look up fastpring they're a sponsor of our podcast if you're interested to find out more but essentially I think this number is a lot bigger than 2.6 6 billion. But to break it down even further, right? So out of this, the user base according to Sensor Tower of the top 100 games is 660 million average daily active user base.

So a lot of users and they're not watching a lot of ads, but they're spending a lot of money. So to the actual list we're going to be looking at today. So this is the list of the 14 uh mobile games in the top 100 AP category that monetize with ads. So we have Candy Crush, Coin Master, Gossip Harbor, Tomb Blast, some of these old school titles, right? And collectively the active user base of the games in the 100 AP category that actually monetize with app ads is about 55 million active users every day. Daily active users, right? So, let's start by looking at Candy Crush. So, Candy Crush, 8.5 million downloads in the last 30 days and a whopping 93 million in AP revenue. So, this game has been around forever now. I think it's been out since 200 even here. So, this game I think really personifies what I think is one of the biggest trends we're going to see with a lot of these games that have been out for this long, right?

So the issue is that if you keep optimizing and doing a lot of stuff on the revenue side. So let's just go to the revenue metrics here, right? If we look here at all time, revenue is kind of stagnating, right? It's increased and they're doing a lot of stuff. And I'm sure if we go to the active user base, it's kind of maintaining but decreasing a little bit, right? So the interesting thing here is right I think at some point there was a product manager that basically went like hey you know it'll be a lot easier for us to actually just add in-game ads to monetize the probably 95% of the user base that doesn't actually pay with APS. So these are the ad placements that I wrote about in my blog post. Shameless plug. I think these guys are earning anywhere between $580 to $600,000 per day in ads. But the interesting thing about Candy Crush and what they do extremely well is their segmentation, right? So, what they're trying to optimize for is not scaring away any purchasers because I've worked

in a lot of match three games with their ad placements. And the ad placements that always convert the best is the pre-level booster and the post-level booster, right? And usually that's also one of the main monetization mechanism moments in match three games, right? So, you don't want to scare away the user base. So, it's important to actually do the segmentation. So what I've heard on the grapevine how Candy Crush does their segmentation is that they look at average purchase time windows in tier one geo. So if you've been in a category let's say from the UK and you haven't made a purchase for a year and essentially that's when they start rolling out the rewarded ads. But they also look at this on a geo level, right? So what they also do at the same time is that they look at, hey, if you are based in Indonesia, the historic purchase rate of that country is a lot lower than the UK for example, right? So we roll out ads quicker there because yeah, makes sense, right? Then also what I've heard as a rumor is that actually with some DSP partners, they actually pass some data to them on historic purchase rates if people have actually made purchases.

I heard this late night at a conference. I don't know if it's true. But here, look, let's look at the quick ad placements here. The first ad placement that I think is really cool in Candy Crush, right, is a thematic floating placement right between the levels. So, before you get in the level, this thing just floats like a balloon and you can open it and you can actually watch it for boosters. Very clever placement. I've seen it quite a lot. You have I need to rush these through a little bit cuz I know we have to go through 14 games. We also have the sweet cinema which is a grid where users can watch ad that essentially gets some rewards. You have the fail which remember what I said before is actually one of the main drivers for ad impressions in match three games. Right? So if you fail a level then you can watch an ad to essentially get more moves. Right? So then you also have the level enhancement ad. So this is the one that's before. So the other one that tends to convert extremely well. So you can get an extra booster for the level you're about to start. And it's a good prompt here that it's also super hard level, right? Then if you run out of a life, you can either

purchase that with the gold, which is the hard currency, or you can actually watch an ad to get one more life, magic hat upgrades, then you also have the daily treat machine. And when you're finishing some of the race events, you can also double the payout by watching an ad. So the interesting thing also is that Candy Crush in tier three geos also show interstitials, right? So I've actually seen a lot of videos when Indian players, Indonesian players before they start a level, they see an interstitial and then after a level they also start an interstitial. So I probably would care to wager that Candy Crush might be the single largest standalone gaming application that gets the most money every day from mobile advertisements. Hard to prove these things. Probably only the mediation platforms could tell you and they could only tell you what that is in the little wall garden, but that's just my estimate. So, Candy Crush gets a gold star. They had they didn't have ads before, but they added them. And now probably they're earning anywhere between 200 million to 230 million a

year from ads, which is quite impressive, right? But then still, when you put that next to the billions they're earning from APS, yeah, it's all relative, right? So, next game, we're moving down the list is Coin Master. So Coin Master as well in the last 30 days, we talked about this game so long, they've never pretty much earned under 75 mil a month in AP revenue. So if we look at this on a longer timeline here, you see that [laughter] they've been earning between 70 to 80 million a month for literally five or nearly going on six years. But the interesting thing here is if you look at the active user base, it's kind of the same a bit more drastic looking than you have on Candy Crush, right? It's going down even though revenue is staying flat. Which is why also in another blog post that I wrote, there's rumors that there's currently being AB test for actually rolling out rewarded ads. So the rewarded ads they're rolling out is for potions, purple tokens, and food for pets. I got some messages after I posted

this, but essentially they also got some reports of people telling me that they used to have ads, but they rolled them back, but they are now actually thinking about doing it on the main spin function in Coin Master, which is quite interesting, right? So, here's another example of a game that has a large user base and they're adding ads when they can no longer sustain like growing the DAU, right? So, a logical like choice here is to start monetizing usually that 95% of the user base that otherwise doesn't convert. Two games down. Let's move here. So, now we have Gossip Harbor by Micro Fund, which is also earning 76 mil a month according to Sensor Tower and a whopping 4.4 million downloads every month. So Micro Fun is this really interesting merge dominating [laughter] uh studio from China and kind of their plan is not to have the top performing game in the category but is to have many games and to dominate the category right so looking at the revenue here right

it's pretty much also increasing still and look at the active user base I'm assuming that's increasing as well wow they're really on a tear so I would say this is one of the biggest things about what I see about Chinese studios and western studios, right? So, where western studios, they tar to kind of look down on in-game advertising and look at it as some sort of secondass citizen because they have this illusion, which I don't agree with, that it makes games less premium. And when you go to China and you have a conversation, they go like, I don't know, let's test it and see if the revenue is incremental. And more often than not, if you implement ads in a clever way, you can actually implement them. So they actually add to the revenue in an incremental way. Candy Crush proves this, right? And Gossip Harbor shows this as well. So let's take a look at the ads that they have. So in the merge category, it's all based on timers and energy, right? Those are the biggest conversion points for revenue, right? So here we can see that Gossip Harbor has a skip time. Uh, so either

you have to pay three gems or you can watch an ad to basically cut down a timer and then you have a shop refresh which is kind of a classical placement, right? So you have sales in the shop and these sale the sale always refreshes on a a fixed timer and you can either pay gems here or you can watch an ad to refresh the timer quicker so you get better sales. I really like this placement because it doesn't really give anything away. It just cuts the timer, right? Then you also have a daily gift and by watching an ad. So one time a day or one time every 12 hours. And then you have the biggest one in merch, right? Which is when you run out of energy, you can watch an ad for refill. I have a feeling that most likely they're segmenting this quite a lot because it's the biggest monetization point in merge games. But yeah, well done to them. I think when we ran this game, it was making about 15 to 18% from ads. And I would probably say that it's all incremental. ads, but I think the main benefit from having this type of ads is

that you can run other type of UA campaigns as well. So, probably they're running a lot of adoras and blended rowas, probably more blended rows, which basically means you can spend more. This is a conversation I have a lot with oldtime western developer that have been around and sometimes they don't think about this that actually if you have in-game ads, you can increase the overall UA spend that you have in your game. So then we have another old school giant here, Toon Blast. So out of Turkey. So Peak Games, probably one of the OG game developers that started the whole Turkey wave. So still this game is quite old. Let's say in the last 30 days, they earned $30 million in. Let's look at this trend. For a longer period of time, wow, they're actually coming back. And let's look at the active user base. It's also decreasing, which is probably why when someone went like, hey, you know, instead of having 24 million and we're going down, how can we also increase revenue? So, they're probably doing a lot of stuff on the event side and optimization, but also

they've added in-game ads, which is another trend for I guess the match I guess it's match two, right? But yeah, anyway, so Toon Blast, like I said, they're monetizing the extra move here. So when you're out of moves after a level, you can basically watch an ad to actually get more moves. Makes complete sense. Same as the king placement, right? So Candy Crush placement. Moving forward, we have another merge game by Moon Active, right? So these guys have been, I guess, the de facto leaders in the merge category for quite a while. Not in terms of downloads, but in terms of revenue. This is by Magma. Ah, they've been overtaken by Gossip Harbor. Interesting. So let's look here. here. So, in the last 30 days, 23 million uh in APS. Let's look at what's going on with the game. It's kind of plateauing, which is I'm sure why they've looked at microphone and started to go like, hey, maybe we should add ads as well. How much do you want to bet that it's all going to be energy related placements, right? So, if we go down energy like we

thought and also unlocking items. So, it's not really the same ad strategy as microphone. And this I think also when we analyze this game on the podcast, they only had about 8% of ad revenue. So I guess they're not leaning in as much to ads as in microphone, but still quite interesting to see. Then we have Heyday by Finnish super gaming giant Supercell, right? And Supercell has been one of the studios I guess that historically has been quite against ads. Heyday actually has some ads in it, right? So, in the last 30 days, it's made 12.6 million. Is it growing or is it shrinking? Let's have a little look here. So, it's having a comeback. It started to come back. I guess it's getting a lot of competition from plays. Let's look at the active user base. But here, according to Reddit, you can actually have ads inside of Heyday. You see, I've actually gone through this on a timer reduction. And I know they also have a cinema here,

right? But like most likely here, what's going on is they're probably heavily segmenting these users and not showing ads to everyone. Probably like you're also seeing in Candy Crush. So moving forward, I just need to take a second here to stop and just admire June's Journey by Wugga, right? So I just want to give a massive compliment to this game because I think it's probably one of the more innovative games. So Candy Crush is quite innovative on the segmentation side, right? But June's Journey, I would say, is probably one of the most open-minded and willing to test studios for ads that I've actually worked with or not worked with, but actually talked to, right? And usually I I lived in Germany for 7 years. That's not words that usually you say about Germany or Germans, but here I got to say that the Admon strategy in June's journey is super interesting, right? So, let's just take a look at the topline numbers first. So, 11 million in the last 30 days. How is that trending? I probably think it's down, right? So, the interesting thing here is, right, it's

down because it's an old game. It's kind of accepted, right? Active user base. It's also decreasing. But here, we can talk quite probably a lot about the in-game placement, right? Because June's Journey is the game, the only game, the game that earns the most on the AP side every month that also has implemented skip it. And this is also what I think is one of the trends that I'm starting to see from the kind of hyper or hybrid casual or the casual space and the puzzle space is that some of these ad monetization things that these games are doing is actually moving upstream and being adopted by the large APheavy games and it's actually working in a clever way and I think we're going to see a lot more of this trend actually happening. I actually have another example of that later. But the trend here is started by Voodoo a couple years ago where essentially they have skip it tickets, right? And what do they actually look right? So here we have the ad placements

skip it. Here it is, right? So the skip it tickets. So what is a skip it? A skip it is a ticket that you buy that essentially means you can skip a rewarded ad. And yeah, this was done a lot by the hyper casual companies when they moved to hybrid. Voodoo pioneered this and now it's found its way to Wugo. So, I'm sure what happens on a game like June's Journey is they take a little bit of a hit on the ad revenue, but they make that up massively in the AP sales, right? So, the more tickets that you buy, the less per unit cost is a ticket. But probably what they're also doing here is bundling these tickets, right? So every time, oh you can also give it out as award, but probably what they're doing in the store is also bundling this with high purchases. That's what I've done on some clients and it works super well. So what are the other ad placements that they have? So reduce they have the reduce required energy amounts to enter level for 30 minutes. So yeah, makes a lot of sense because this is an energy based game. Secrets to

watch an ad to help you play more. Then also you have the daily ads progression. So you can actually skip it quicker which makes complete sense and then refresh your help wanted ad. Okay, makes complete sense. So actually having skippets here actually probably increases the immersiveness of the game. And I think this is probably one of the most under utilized ways of actually delivering an adree performance or increasing the appeal of actually even more by actually bundling it with skippetss. And to think about it, right? You're making such good margins on the AP sales here, right? So, why not just bundle it with actually skipping some tickets to make it better. All right. Well done, June Journey. Well done for being open-minded. So, let's look at here. We have another merge game. Oh, so many merge games. So many merge games. Tasty Travels by Century Games. I don't even think these guys have ads. 10 million in the last 30 days. There's no way they have ads. Oh, they do. Century

Game has ads. Well done. Oh, who' have thought it, right? Chinese game studio thinking with first principles thinking instead of looking down on ads. And what do we know? Watch ads to get more energy. So, probably here, oh, only one placement for ads. So, probably here they're earning anywhere between probably 1 to 2 million a month from ads from that one ad placement. So, don't need to talk too much more about merge games. I think we talked that already a lot. But now we move to the Vietnamese darling which is screwed by I came. So this is a Hanoi based studio I visited last year. Very clever people working in this game and these guys have pulled themselves up from making pretty much hyper casual games to their first AP puzzle hit which is screwed. Right. And you can see the numbers here. Yeah. 10 million in APS in the last 30 days and a million downloads. Right. So the interesting thing here is that this has scaled so much in the last year. Right. So from yeah March 2005 to July 2005

they pretty much nearly quadrup no more than like they increased their IEP revenue from 2.5 million to 12.5 1.5 million right and they also managed to do this by still having about 30% coming from ads right the ad placements right inside of scrudum is pretty much just all related to boosters and interstitials between the levels and uh ads between them, right? So you have the booster ones here. Uh you have refilling a life, these things, right? So these are kind of the standard ones that we've been through. We have a actual video going over all this. But here is where I think we're starting to see another trend that I think is super interesting, right? And that is the bundling to remove ads with APS, which started in kind of the hybrid game category, right? So if you take a look here, right? What I came does is that they have a remove ads offer which anchors how much it is

to remove non-intrusive ads, right? And then they also have a remove ads bundle that bundles in coins and boosters for slightly a higher price, right? And this is probably what I think is going to be the next major trend that's making it from the hybrid casual space and puzzle space into the large AP category. So I'm also seeing this happen quite a lot on yeah the Chinese studios right so one of the biggest ones doing this I guess is capibara go where they kind of do a similar thing where you can actually have a subscription that's bundled in with a lot of usability factors which actually gives you access to all the rewarded ads for free. So next we have color block jam which is another one amazing game from rollick and probably the ad placements here. So 10 million in the last 30 days. And here, yeah, what's actually happening with this game? Let's take a little look. So decreasing a little bit on the AP side. That's kind of normal for puzzle games. They're probably already working on the next one. Uh yeah, active user base on DAU.

Let's take a look. Yeah, 2.3 million. So guarantee you the ad placements here are all going to be related to puzzles. So yeah, banner ads, rewarded ads. Yeah, we've actually analyzed this game as well, but is actually doubling the coins after a level and getting extra lives and for boosters, but mainly the boosters are through APS, so we don't need to go through that too much. And we have another match three game, right? So, Project Makeover, 9 million APS in the last 30 days. I guess this is a triple do game now, right? Yeah. So you can see the revenue days, the high revenue days are long gone when they used to be earning uh 30 million a month, but now yeah, they're down to about 10, which is still amazing. So let's look at how much do you want to bet that these are pre-level boosters and post-level boosters that they have. So two ads before a level for boosters, very standard in match 3 and ads after failing a level. What do you know, right? And then a gift in the main menu. Yeah, there we go. Thematic gift option,

which also Candy Crush uses. Then we have another Finnish studio, right? Metacore Games, right? So this is merged in the merge two category, right? Which we've covered also in our epic merge episode on this channel where we've talked about merge games for two hours and went through all the history of it, right? But merge mansion used to rule the roose in this in this category and the revenue is still doing quite good, but it's just been kind of overtaken, I guess, by the micro funds of the world. To combat this, they were also open and minded enough to, hey, let's add some ads. So you can see here they have the shop refresh, they have the energy exactly the same as microphone and some shop items are refreshing as well, right? So getting some shop items. I guess that's the other difference you can do there. So low coin value amounts of offers, right? Which is quite cool. We're almost at the end of our exhaustive list, but now we're moving to France, right? And this is Homa all in hole. So, this is another I guess it's a hyper casual game that got repurposed as a puzzle game and they're making 8 mil a

month in APS and probably another 20 or 30% of that on ad revenue. Right? So, what's going on here? Increasing. They're working super hard. This is their flagship title for Homa games, right? And let's look at the active user base. So, I can already tell you here without even looking at it that it's all for the boosters because we're also reviewing this game on the podcast. But here we can see ads, forced ads after winning or losing levels. And yeah, you can actually bundle it to get rid of it, which is also one of the trends, right? Last game on our 14 games in the top 100 AP games list that actually have ads is Empires and Puzzles. According to game analytics, they don't have any ads. I know they do, which is why my list is longer here, right? So 7 and a half million. I know these guys must have decreased somewhat in the last couple of months cuz I used to work at a game that actually competed with these guys. So, they're down to about 10 mil a month down from about 20 mil a month. And I probably think there's another 15 or 20% of ad revenue on top of this

because they have a lot of ad placements. The ad placements are usually related to what I can find here is just getting benefits, I guess. And here, I guess probably is the game that could probably do the most on ads, right? So generally when looking at empires and puzzles, it's just I don't think they're doing the segmentation as hard as probably a Candy Crush could do, even though they probably could benefit a lot from complete overhaul of segmentation and basically showing more ads. But that concludes the list, right? So the two predictors here that I said is basically that the ad removing ad mechanics on the skipits and the bundling is actually moving more and more upstream. And I have a game here that I just wanted to include as well, which is Merge Prison. And it's a game I've actually been playing cuz I've been working a lot in the merge space. So, just wanted to show here. Right. So, this is one of the things that they do, which I think is super clever. So, they have the energy placements, they have everything, but also what they do here, which is super clever, is that they have a adree subscription, which is also what

we see on like Capibar and Go, right? So you can remove for one day for $2 or remove it for 30 days for $7. But it's also bundled together with more energy and bubble pops and free like yeah boosters. They also have the clever thing with merge prison is that they also have a miniame uh in that game, right? Uh which means that let me stop sharing here. So they also have a mini game that's actually a puzzle game where they actually share uh or actually have a lot of ad placements that they try also to bundle into the main thing. Right? So that was me talking for 30 minutes the [laughter] the 14 games that have ad placements in the top AP category. If you have any questions on how to implement that, you can always message us. And yeah, please like and subscribe if you like a lot of this content. Uh thanks for listening to me going in this rant. Hope to see you next time with Yako and Mate. Have a good day. Bye-bye. Heat.

Hey, heat. Hey, heat.