Panel: What Do You Do in the Inevitable Decline of Ad Revenue? PG Connects Digital #2

this is again the monetize our tracks sponsored by unity and the next panel coming up is what do you do in the inevitable decline of ad revenue it's gonna happen so what are you gonna do about it our moderator will be with Crowley from Pocket Gamer des I'm happy to see you again and he would go ahead and introduce his fine list of panelists we'll just need to get him on Chappell's so the panelists that you'll be introducing today themselves first of all just say hello yes my name

is Rick Carelli I'm the editor of bokkeum Adobe's and I will be moderating this panel discussing the what do you do in the inevitable decline of ad revenue I think everyone's in their video homes now so let's get started with introducing the panel let's go first with Ilya hi everyone my name is Ilya obviously I work at the unity and a month ization team and I'm responsible for helping our publishers get set up with the moderation product and basically I'm the client partner cool Michele Michele you're muted hi everybody right I work with developers and publishers helping them get funding for the games developer games overall and just make fun content for multiple all platforms really awesome Marty hey my name is Martina Spence I'm a mobile game publisher of

free-to-play casual games we focus on a hidden-object match three-time managements typically games for women 30 plus one more times heavily by ads awesome um so yeah we're gonna be talking about the decline of ad revenue and what that means and and all that kind of thing first of all I always like to start with a big general question I kind of want to ask what's the current state of ads and advertising and revenues in general are we seeing high revenues we seeing lower revenues like what's going on without at the moment anyone feel free to jump in on them yeah I can start yeah so here at the unity what we see is that after the whole common situation of course a lot of people started playing games more spending time at home in a bigger extent so yeah we see a growth but we believe it's it's a temporary growth which will come back to a decline but again the plateau that we expect will be higher than it was before

comment because more people got introduced to gaming okay I can share some thoughts of it also yeah yeah also over the last few months I guess what we saw is we saw that the downloads of the games you know that went up but then the yes kind of drops because a lot of advertisers were like very very hesitant to spend our budgets so you see peons went down a little bit so it was basically you know uptrend being and down for any kind of canceling each other out so Indians you know when you look at the result of our games it's you're hearing the same from our developers across the board from on mobile on console and on PC so one of the things I was kind of wondering because I kind of want to attack like the the topic in general that we're

talking about in sort of this inevitable decline thing and one of the things I was kind of wondering is like are we going to is a decline in evitable for every game no matter what the situation is are we are you always expecting to see growth and decline I mean I guess this is all a roller coaster sort of type thing and it fluctuates but do you always expect to see revenues decline at some point I think it really much depends on the genre and the refresh rate of the audience in the game so if we take like a basic look at how algorithms work it's like placing a billboard in a specific section of the airport where know that this wing travels to like really expensive destination and this wing travels the cheaper destinations and when you have the same people going through the same wing you kind of understand that okay this place this place don't specific Billboard has to be more expensive or this one has to be more cheap so when when a publisher or

game developer does not invest a lot into updating their audience or like increasing increasing them factors in the game that affect their retention rate which algorithms then pick up then the ad revenues are especially eCPMs will go down if you start increasing your game sorry improving your game then once a gir them see that you provide users that have really good retention rates or like have some spending behavior or in general really loyal to the brand or the game then the eCPMs will naturally go up so I wouldn't say that ad revenue decline is inevitable there are ways to avoid it for sure I think it depends - and how long how far out you plant your game as well so if your game has a for example a 10 year tail which is which is a lot but if you always keep your players engaged I don't

think I mean eventually yeah for sure yeah they'll be a decline in ad revenue but it'll take a lot longer to get that series messaging it once so yeah yeah I'm also like you know is the decline really inevitable you know as I said in my introduction we monetize heavily by the ads and mostly by rewards videos so you people will get something in return for watching ads and as long as we make sure that's the content is worth it and that there's still enough interesting content in the game then you know we see that our players are happy to like keep you know watching engaging with ads in in exchange for that so you know is it's only as sort of inevitable as the inevitable sort of you know decline of the game itself you know if someone's been in a casual game for two or three years then you know at some points they're gonna let go and say goodbye to

the game and start something new and then you know obviously the the ad revenue from that specific user is going to go down but in the meantime we've had two three years to amass new users you know with new address opportunities so in that sense I'm not sure if it's completely I so yeah so that that's just a general thing and then obviously as Ilya mentioned we were seeing the effects of I've covered 19 impacting ad revenues and seeing a growth because people are at home they're staying in playing games and watch more ads and then we're kind of I guess there's a there's a bigger problem now where we're seeing economic decline across the world because of businesses not going and all that kind of thing and now there's predictions of maybe we're gonna see how the revenues decline as people start going back to work as people have less money well I guess right abra news and effects by people having money spend but you know what I'm sort of getting at is now the time to sort of start preparing

for that should should developers start being more cautious about this decline like coming imminently or is there maybe still a bit of time left where developers can sort of not have to worry about it too much I don't know um for me I'm happy to comment a little bit on this one you know at the start of the epidemic when a lot of sort of you know not really sure what to do we feared that there would be a massive decline in a CPM because of a lot of companies are like you know withdrawing their budget and it was a little bit of that as I said before but it wasn't as bad as we thought actually last month we had one of our best months ever chose eCPMs where we saw for rewards video ads placements that had up to $40 these pions and you know we you know you hit that you know it's not gonna be like like that forever but that we enjoyed

that right for as long as it lasted and will it be I mean you see like a lot of speculations for example also here in the news they they do a lot of speculation that's the housing market boom what's wrong because of the situation but there's also been speculation that the spark drop and if you read back the news of three months ago that should have already happened but it's not there yet so you know it's also the question like will it happen now and it's also of course good to to keep in mind and to you know prepare for a scenario like that but but then again you know I wouldn't sort of could put all the eggs in that basket and you know I wouldn't sort of take it as as a given that that there will be a decline in that you know I'm sort of doing the previous economic recession like was that ten years ago or something forgot the exact timing on that everything was everything inside twelve years ago

already but anyway I was already also working in the game industry back then and there then we also in you know within the gaming ecosystem we didn't really sort of have much of an impact whereas other industries were hit much much harder because there's you know there's always a need for for entertainments and especially relatively cheap entertainments like a game on your mobile phone so I guess in that sense as weird as it sounds you know and I told my mom and to pursue a career in the gaming industry she thought that this was going to be a very very uncertain future but I think in a strange sense the gaming business is just much more stable than we the credit for I really want to support more teens a point here about people looking for entertainment or source of entertainment in dark times and when I studied the credit crunch of 2007 and 2008 I noticed that there was a huge surge of music industry and back

then music industry was at its peak without having all the streaming services of concerts and like spend on the songs and albums was really high and people were finding the retreat and music what do we have nowadays is what back then we didn't have which is mobile gaming which is really accessible and I believe that this is where people will go to kind of get away from the troubles at least for some time although well we can't expect that there will be no troubles but we can imply that assume that there will be some recession looking at the numbers nowadays and yes I surely believe that gaming will be this well I like calling it a retreat but a way or a means of relaxing and getting back to norms and we see it with people going to gaming while being locked down and once the lockdown is lifted they kind of got already accustomed to the whole big concept of being a gamer of a casual gamer or they

at least spending five minutes a day and over time the would grow into bigger game is get more professional and I think in the end this will kind of balance out the negative economical impact on the industry by increasing this the sample size or the number of users so yeah I believe there will either be a growth or kind of balanced out situation I really truly don't believe there will be a huge decline on the market I agree with Ilya as well because trends have changed a lot more people that have never really gotten the games before are and there's people that may need only play mobile but play now or play others and then into if with that comes you know maybe maybe eSports will be even bigger I don't know and with that comes more ad opportunities so we'll see what happens but it's definitely changed in the past six months I do want to move on sort of from

the from the general thing but I do have a question in the Q&A I think is interesting on that this sort of topic of covering 19 anonymous attendee asks many players have started playing the first game due to cope at 19 and would add network's value games which bring players into the general gaming ecosystem I guess more than other games but yeah do is anyone have any thoughts on that I would say one thing that at least from a unity perspective that our network is heavily unbiased so whenever there's a new source we don't really prioritize it so we learn on it and then once we once we see that so it depends on what the question is about isn't about how the algorithm works or is it about whether we will focus on working with new games so no we're a purely agnostic company so we would not prioritize a game or a developer just because their needs in the market it's all about quality and equal equal market fair market there is actually another

question I think it's from the same person but it's still anonymized I'm asking what parameters do I'd know at Network algorithms look hats in a game that's a corporate secret which goes [Laughter] well it was the most basic ones are of course the retention rate and engagement and legitimacy so our biggest enemies fraud and was luckily we have fine ways to fight it but yeah if you look like a real human being and if you act in games this is what's respected by ad networks cool I think probably it's we'll move on from there and so actually thinking about what the the steps to take are for if you do see a decline in ad revenue what are some common mistakes that developers make when they see that ad revenues decline that they should avoid sort of instantly doing my teen if you have any

ideas on that I do yeah working with loads of different teams I kind of see that most of them have when you see that growth news decline you're sort of the panic reactions they're like oh that doesn't work anymore let's throw it overboard and then you know it is kind of rip out like Oh laughs placements you know and then of course like drop that revenue completely whereas what they probably should do is look at why dad please placements are not working anymore you know is it because people click less on certain offers isn't because certain game points are not interesting anymore and certain rewards are less interesting because of that or is it because you know for example if you have an interstitial level interstitial ad between every level and in the beginning levels are really shorts and then they see like relatively a lot of interstitial ads but then later as they progress through the game the levels become like progressively harder and longer and of course they're you

know they're gonna see less interstitials so you know it could be because of things like that so yeah that's you know I always try to sort of calm developers down until them like well you know it's not so much that ads are just like suddenly not working anymore it could be like your placements are just not interesting anymore and then of course there's also like seasonal things that come into play you know like for example Christmas and yet these games go a little bit up for in January to go a little bit down so you know just there's there's usually quite a logical explanation for it and at a reasonable solution one of the mistake I've seen was spamming your game with placements like creating as many as possible and trying to increase the impression amount but well normally it doesn't work and algorithms are quite smart so they see that you're trying to increase the amount of impressions but not by not increasing their engagement

rates so backing up Martin's point yes you should look at engagement rates for sure and the biggest mistake is when you think that having more will bring you more success no don't spam your game without placements most importantly find a balance and try to integrate this into your gameplay so if we talk about rewarded video ads they should be very natural they should feel organic and actually users you want to make sure that users want to see an ad in your game they they actually wait for it they wait for this timer to finish so that they can see it again and I've seen many good idol games that implemented it well specifically Kodi games like they've done a great job and I know people that play their idols like tycoon games like oh I'm actually skipping those ad placements because I know that the next one is more beneficial for me so when you have players that are that smart and that they have see this distinction I think you're on the right path so try to

make this whole ad watching game actually a game inside the game I think yeah I would just say yeah I just the same thing where they either they add more ads in or they take them out and I think the key to making your game successful with ads is to add more customized as the players want to see and feel volume like the whole segmentation topic like yeah that's that that's the next level of right way of doing ad monetization for sure well yeah that sort of brings me onto like I don't know if it does so you know you've got you've got a specific kind of as you've seen them working would you diversify the kinds of ads that your you've got in your game like you've got saying about interstitials and increasing them or or lowering them

would you start introducing like new kinds of ads like rewarded video ads like latina knows a lot about I know or yeah you're in a routine we're gonna go I think it's specific or as a player specific as is possible whatever they may be if you're using Google Big Data or whatever whatever platform you use as long as it appeals to the players that you're trying to target it doesn't matter I think but I think other people have had experience using different things yeah of course we see that eCPM zone regardeth video are higher than on interstitials that's why it makes sense to videos in but you know mistake also commonly made is then just to disregard interstitials like they're worth the thing but that's not true because we're still getting like $10 ESPN's on those as well and people can click them away after five seconds so you know it's like

when you we just want to level you have that moment of like food you know before you know that for those five seconds is already over you can naturally sort of progress so you know it's it's still sort of you know a good addition to to the money stream and yeah I mean talking to - you know diversify the kinds of ads yeah I guess that's also like something I said in my previous points you know we're just testing out a lot of placements and see what sticks and see what works and we typically try to aim for a certain amount of ads for a Playstation for example a game where we see that's the you know play players average play for about 20 minutes per game play session we think it's fair to then serve the like three to four ads because it's like you know an ad every few minutes and it's it's kind of it's not too intrusive you know compared to other media like TV or radio where you have to like lots more ads per minute on average and you know it doesn't sort of

get to that to the annoyance level but it still makes a profit of profitable revenue stream for us and I truly agree again it depends on the genre having diversified kinds of ad placements is very important but not but in addition there was this case study we did before where we tested if adding interstitial ads into like a casual between mid core game it has an impact at the retention rate or engagement in a negative way and no actually didn't increased overall increase the number of players in the game while it hasn't heavily impacted their attention so it depends on where you place the ads you don't want you don't want to make insert interstitial ads too intrusive and too much interrupting the gameplay but having both is not necessarily damaging to the gameplay having them both very badly implemented yet but again a be

testing a be testing everything from the plate and from the places in the game where you put ads to the length of them like I from my experience I know some publishers that are going really deep and deciding where let's do five second or six second interstitials and they see big difference in their retention rates so test a given such smooth well I wouldn't say minor things but they're quite important from our ad network perspective but from most of the publishers perspective it's like a small difference so they don't pay attention to it but it affects it's all the psychology so testing everything will lead you to the right path got quite a few questions coming in on the Q&A section thank you for everybody contributing one which I think would jump on real quick somebody would like to know Michele if you give some more details what you mean by customizing ads and then custom ad specific for certain players I guess so

for example let's say you have a cooking game right and this game just the person that's playing this game obviously things cooking is fun so maybe you have an ad for you this is just the US or williams-sonoma or some just something that makes make sense to them something that you'd be interested in is what I would think cuz it's like if you're playing a cooking game I mean you may be interested in soccer slash football but I'm I don't know but you are playing a cooking game so you probably are into cooking that's what I would say in regards to making it more player specific we've got Don Creek who is very curious to hear about people's opinions on audio ads I don't know if this is audio specific or if it ad can aw do I get my my sort of feeling and experience would be the audio ads what wouldn't do particularly well because I mean a lot of people as far as I know play mobile games on mute if anyone has

any opinions about audio Illya you seem to be nodding quite vigorously on this one I quite recently actually read I actually listened to a podcast and there was this transcript and there was discussion on having actual audio ads in the game I think there was a startup I don't remember the name that tries to implement that and it sounds interesting but I don't believe it's gonna bring a lot of engagement because I think audio ads in general is the thing of the past the radio stations and it doesn't really let you engage with the kaneki don't see it with I don't know well when I first heard this idea it sounded interesting especially from for like I don't know advertising playlists or artists and Spotify or any other music streaming service but in games that's true I know that a lot of developer so a lot of publishers are concerned for example when they want the ads to be muted but for some reason they're not because they

know that let's imagine that I don't know a student in the class who well for some reason decides to play a game while the teacher is explaining something which is its hat it happens a lot and then suddenly there's like ooh download this game now and the whole class is like what's happening so you want to avoid situations like that that's why a lot of people indeed play games without sound so yeah sound and ads is is dangerous yeah I would say how many people browse the social media with the sound or not I don't know very many mmm that's why they even do those you know squared format videos with all the text written because they know that you're not listening to it so yeah it makes them Martyna any thoughts on on audio in that I mean since like mobile gaming is such a visual medium I'm kind of wondering how how that should work see I think

interestingly enough of me set up this week true-true to meet in that system with someone who knows a lot more about audio ads and kind of curious with Bill tell me the only kind of example that I can think of is you know it's not a mobile game but I think it was in the last or the second-to-last like Fallout game where it was like also a radio station available and I think through you you could select turn it on and off whenever you wanted and through that radio station are all stiff legs for fake ads I think it wasn't GTA as well and there's like really really funny ones and you'd say about the monstrosity truck for example it's like a classic one but you know it is for fake ass but I could imagine that in a game like that it could also work for real ass perhaps but yeah I'm not sure if that would have the same experience yeah one of the follow-up questions from Don he

was curious to hear if you think the message of an ad will stick if it's an audio or if it's better suited to text I suppose so I guess that nots you know I guess like if you're just hearing it in a radio thing is that all is that actually gonna stick in your head afterwards or is it better to have that visual medium as long as the jingle is annoying enough yes sure it's all about it just like that sort of repeating thing if you hear something for like 10 times in a day it's gonna stick yeah there's just lots of questions I'm just sorting through some of these Thank You Don for your interest in this topic of audio ads I'm gonna move on to something a little bit different we do have a question and could banner add eCPMs increased because of covert 19 if companies increase their ad spend on it to achieve low CPI's and CPCs i think

the opposite to be honest because a lot of banner ads are brand at their retail companies that are getting most order of revenues from I don't know outside of game revenues so because those industries are heavily impacted I I don't think they have that's again my opinion and not specifically in his opinion but the big like travel companies everything that relies on text and just clicking or seeing the brand name because the consumer spend will may go down I assume that the revenues sir eCPMs will go down on banners but if games go deeper into banner advertising then this may change so again it's a yes/no question and I don't think there is an answer either yes or no we'll see time will tell got another question here that someone's very keen on us answering and we'll

in-app bidding help mitigate ad revenue decline does that refer to header bidding it just says in a bit if anonymous attendee would like to to clarify in the chat then please do let's assume so Ilya so from what I heard again for publishers is if they have a team that's really experienced in managing their waterfalls and mediation ad monetization general then in-app bidding doesn't really help them in in increasing the yield from ads it helps people that don't have experience and don't have the resources to manage ad monetization but if we look at the market overall I think it will increase overall yeah it will increase a CPM market because yeah more games will start making more money on ads eventually increasing their market eCPM not as game specific but the market is

yeah yeah cool I'm gonna stick with some audience questions because there's quite a few of them so I'd like to get through as many as those as possible we've got one here in your experience have you found that incentivizing users to view ads in order to multiply say in collected in game currently slash the world's sorry it didn't take a breath and I'll try I'll try that one again in your experience have you found that incentivize incentivizing users to view ads in order to multiply collected in game Kirk or is this old news so I guess this is at the end that you vet you played a game you've got your rewards and then it comes up saying times two if you get if you watch a video short answer yes um as long as you make sure that the reward is worth it you know first of all the user needs to know what what it is you made for if they just like fresh come into the gameplay level one get ten coin so like well great what do I do with this coins I don't know you know then the user doesn't know the

value of what they're getting it won't work but if they know the value of its if they know they're gonna need like a hundred coins to unlock the next building in your game or something and at that point like you know they have 80 80 coins and they just earned ten they know they're gonna get ten more by multiplying by watching that ad that yeah they're gonna go for it so you know as long as you make sure that you use most of value and it's it's really worth the to does something to them you know that's why I said ten points instead of one cuz progressing which like just one coin at the time they're like oh I need a hundred one is nothing so you know just make sure you keep that in balance and then yes people who go for it yeah I think if you make it easy and make it make sense so it looks like frosting on top of the cake they'll go for it for sure cool yes uh all good to keep doing that in your games I've got to go back to some of my questions now please do keep throwing in your questions the Q&A it's great to

have so many people engaged one thing I was kind of wondering about we're talking a lot about ad revenue because obviously that's kind of what we're looking at here and this topic of the talk but should developers with an ad only approach also diversify into other types of monetization so in-app purchases and we're seeing subscriptions become starts of rise should if you have only got ads should you also be using these kinds of meditations as well say as long as it makes sense for the game it's you know Brazil diversifying is always good if you haven't like you know purchases in your game then you know even if you're just gonna found like one find one in a thousand players is willing to spend that money and it's it's still I mean you know if they just buy something for eight dollars just that one person just like calculates how many thousands add few she needs to get the same amount of revenue so yeah it's always worth it's to to diversify and to you know basically spread spread your

chances but you know like I said it needs to make sense for your game if you have a hyper casual game then you know purchase is probably gonna make a lot less sense than when you have a full-blown RPG so you know just see what fits but again using ads is a great way to encourage people to spend so having a balanced monetization strategy is very important that's for sure and I agree I agree as well cuz but diversify and you definitely reach more players and some players respond better than different types of ads and others so some people want they would rather buy something from you than to watch ad so bless we should always remember the three percent the average of paying user audience what about the other 97 and I think it also helps do you see let people see the value of ads if they see they can buy your coin pack of 100 coins for five

dollars but they can see that it can get five coins for free they're watching in ads they're like well if I do that if I do that so anytime so watch twenty years I saved myself five bucks I will go back to the Q&A questions thank you that was very interesting and so I was very keen to know and sort of a general sort of just to ground this whole discussion by inevitable ad revenue decline do does the panel mean low our ma RP use eCPMs or both so in your mind what are we all actually talking about in my mind there's not much decline you know that's in my mind it's not it's not inevitable but it's always good to discuss the possible scenarios of what might happen to to add you know what's sort of the trends what if it goes down what if it goes up and I guess anything anything that we can share to sort of

prepare for that yeah I guess it's the specific sort of like what metrics are you measuring and and considering like which one of those is a decline that is worth addressing as opposed sorry ilya i I think I once again I agreed that I don't see any decline that that's the thing but Martina in the beginning said there is a decline of me CPM because of higher volume and that's true I think what we're talking about here is an actual eCPM decline at the moment there's no significant decline on or whatever visible decline on our doubt it may happen in the future and again that's all speculation but it's very difficult to judge it now very difficult yeah I would say if there's gonna be any decline it's eCPM because people aren't at home as much

that's that's the only one I could see is a possibility but I mean you go to the you go to the restaurant and when you're waiting for your food what do you do you stare at each other and you take out your phone I see people take out their phone a lot more often nobody talks anymore don't be ridiculous and the question from the audience I think this one is probably going straight to you Illya will gaming based ad networks such as unity ads and that living etc offer high eCPMs because marketing budgets of gaming companies is stable or increase unlike other brand based ad networks where ad spend has decreased Wow that's straight in the face hmm let me read that one again so mm-hmm the that's that's a very difficult question but we've already seen a similar shift

when the whole pandemic just started when a lot of brands they just instantly cut off their spend so our network well gaming networks and from the interest perspective I can say that our performance was just like over the over the clouds or whatever you call it and you see it's not us who determined the eCPM it's the audience and a lot of different factors so if this question doesn't really have an answer fair enough yeah well that's that sort of answered someone's asked about non-intrusive ad formats I guess this is sort of a similar thing that we've been saying is like if it makes sense for your game then you should do it but do do do we have te blings about unintrusive ads I guess this is stuff like posters with an

add-on in game or that kind of thing it was effective in the in the ad market for mostly well from what we've tried over the years is that the actual efforts to implement them in sort of the you know seamless experience and seamless way that's so much work that it's actually not not worth for what those ads bring us you know thinking for example off like a banner you know like a big banner placements in the background of the game or something or Brandon's furniture rename it and yeah I mean for us maybe it's because you know we don't we're not you don't have a game that has like a multi-million audience you know I think our kids game currently has you know if you a few hundred thousand daily active users and and with that it's it's not yeah it's just not worth it you do to like spend so much time implementing that one specific placement for that one specific brands

but you know for like the top ten grossing games or something for him might be worth it on this one I can only speak to what my experience with console games and putting on advertisements on Billboard's in the game and we didn't really see a lot I don't to say kick back but uh direct revenue from it which is about but that was then made me a changed I don't know but that was several years ago cool and final question from the Q&A if you do have any more please do throw them in there but nearly flipped through the list alright and it's a very specific one this one and apparently it's important for Indies for scaling you a efforts in order to test if my ad ARPU is greater than CPI could you let me know the minimum number of installs da use and/or ad impression volume I need to achieve which is significantly statistically significant

I guess you don't need to be here exact numbers but if anyone has any sort of ballpark figures that they can share I'd be helpful for this participant um well on our team I'm not the numbers person though what I do know is that when we start like you know running marketing campaigns we do like very small campaigns to kind of you know test and see if it's worth it and also to kind of test what those users are worth and how long it takes to basically get a positive return on that spins so just like going by from what we see we can already do experiments with just you know let's say a thousand users or something and and get you know reliable results from that yeah anybody else nope okay that's fine another question has just dropped in which handily lets

me steer away from that and anonymous attendee would also like to know any tips for Indies to achieve ideal ad frequency I can jump in here so it's important to measure the number of sessions the length of the sessions and you don't want to make ad watching time larger or longer than actual play time and again if we consider your game genre is it hyper casuals at casual mid core the more casual to genre for some reason the more ads you're kind of allowed in an unwritten law to place in your game like we see it with hyper casuals of course and then the more core hardcore mid core game becomes you don't want to spam much because that audience is more sensitive so if we talk about indie games again which chandram always look at your player feedback it's very important

getting feedback and listening to what they write your no reviews if they're not happy with the amount try to reduce the frequency and implement actually implementing add frequency in terms of like limits how much you can how many as you can see within an hour it's very important because you know well we as humans our attention span decreases the more information we consume so when you see five or ten ads in a row the likelihood of you engaging with like this tenth ad is very low algorithm must know that so the eCPM will be most likely very low on this ad so if you have this like two-sided go preserving the retention and engagement and blare happiness and having their revenues at normal levels so finding the balance is important and do that through again a be testing thank you all for your questions if you do have any more still got a

couple of minutes I am just going to turn to something that I was wondering as well cuz it just mentioned testing and you have a sort of briefly touched on like the kinds of tests are there any other specific sort of like really granular tests that people can do on their ads to try and increase ad revenue beyond you know testing how long they are and that kind of thing yeah sure what I noticed is for example the further in the game an ad placement is the more eCPM it brings because this is like the source where most loyal players see ads then second thing you can start segment what Michelle mentioned before segmenting showing more personalized ads it's very important creating segments based on KPIs or like player interests for example I've done a speech on this before let's let's take an example I don't know thanks a lot bye boom bit right so there are players that

can be super competitive that are min max ours or their players that are that have a sole goal of collecting all the parts in the game so like offering an ad placement that oh you can get a random new part will be very appealing to them or theirs for example very competitive players that are like losing a couple of trophies is like deadly to me so when they finish a level or a match and they lose offering them an ad placement to reduce the number of lost trophies will be as well appealing because they really care about them their rating so going with this approach and doing those like personalized placements is very important and segmenting all goes through KPIs like how much time users spend in this section in the game how many times day I don't know click on this button and yeah all the basic metrics and that's how you segment them cool any other thoughts I'm sorry

I was any ad that you're gonna overall for any ad you're gonna present to your player because you're taking time away from the game make sure it has a click through an option because like we're time with the static ads before in games so for example in a ps4 game there's like a billboard ad of you know cookies or chips or a drink or something but there's no follow through it you only see it see like oh I like those chips and then Oh back to the game dude I mean so make sure your ad makes sense do you have another question from the audience what innovations have you seen in the ad monetization space from ad networks and publishers due to the ongoing curve in nineteen and emic num says much I would say a lot of publishers are trying to push more value

to players to get their attention away from other games that's about all I've seen yeah fair enough yeah cool I do we're coming up on time and see Mike is showing his face so I do just have one question that I would like to quickly throw out there and up one how do you think advertising is going to change and evolve over the next 12 months so even past thinking passcodes think you passed when we go back to normality whatever that may be how do you think the advertising space is going to evolve I think more publishers that are focusing nowadays only on IPs and are heavily against ads will in the end implement ads because they will see that it's not damaging and there are ways to do it correct in a correct way yeah I agree with that statement because you know it's it's it's been sort of this ongoing discussion for at least five years where people say like Oh answer bad that's good etcetera

but you do see slowly also like from from the audience response that you know ads are becoming more and more normal more more acceptance as long as there's like you value attached to it so yeah you know I think that trend is going to continue for a bit I agree to but I would also add that we have a lot more data I would say because people were more I don't to say stingy but they were more likely to test things during this time so I think we're gonna have a lot more data to play with so it would be interesting to see how it changes from that and it's actually good timing for them to join the I don't want to call it a bandwagon but the trend because there are experts that can help you leapfrog whatever all the other publishers have gone through so you come to you come to farm where you just pick up the crops you don't have to do the old job before that so that's a good timing for them excellent right that's everything I have

and everything we have time for really so thank you to the panelists for joining us and thank you to everybody for watching throwing in your questions it's been really good thank you all very much you