Privacy vs. Ad Monetization with Google's Ross Brockman and Kwalee's John Wright

hey folks and welcome to the deconstructor of fun podcast I'm your host Mish katkov and in this episode we'll be talking about talking more about ad monetization because uh just a while back we had Felix braberg um an overall great ad monetization consultant and a great human being so he was on the podcast talking about branded ads and games talking about Amazon and apple entering the ads business the efficacy of different ad formats how a game can double its ad Revenue privacy changes and what the ad monetization will be like in 2024 that podcast is in this podcast flow whatever app you're using just scroll back and there's ad Apocalypse episode so that's yours if you want to get into really understanding kind of like the uh the fundamentals in this one we're going to go a little bit in a more relevant and insightful information about ad monetization so Google ads has been making and will be making a lot of changes and I wanted to discuss these Chang es that affect ad monetization uh

by bringing a person from Google Google ads uh and a person from a big publisher that is known for their excellence in in among other AD monetization that is uh quali uh so uh I hope you enjoy this podcast I I really suggest that you check out also the uh the podcast episode with Felix Brer if you haven't done that and both Google and quali will be at Istanbul event and next week so hope to see you there and if you can't be there make sure you sign up and you can actually stream the uh the event so thank you and without further Ado ladies and gentlemen do enjoy the [Music] podcast welcome to the deconstructor of fun podcast uh today we're discussing Advanced ad monetization Trends with Google and quali and my guests are uh Ross Brockman head of emia mobile apps

Partnerships at Google with over 10 years of experience at Forefront of online advertising firstly in Search and subsequently in Mobile Ross is currently responsible for Google's app developer partnership Ross welcome to the podcast John right then uh head of publishing at quali I hope I'm right with with the title uh vice vice president vice presid vice vice president of publishing a UK based developer and publisher founded by game industry Legends it has quite become a dominant player in the hyper and hybrid casual game along with publishing casual and PC games and just based on John's uh LinkedIn presence I wouldn't say that it has quietly become a dominant player I would say quite loudly become a dominant player in the space so John welcome back to the podcast thank you m pleasure as always so uh so we're doing almost like an emergency episode because of um because of the trends in ad monetization and in a way this is kind of Continuum

to the uh the last year end of last year we did an episode with Felix braberg talking about things like branded ads and games Amazon Apple entering the ads business the efficacy of different ad formats how a game can double its ad Revenue the effect of privacy changes and what ad mization will look like and now it's 2024 um we're up and running and boy oh boy uh if it didn't start like the last year ended so I think there's a lot of topics to cover in the ad monetization in front especially the things that have been changing so jumping head first into some of these changes so Ross uh Google ads has been making several announcement last year can you walk us through through these announcements of 23 sure very very happy to but maybe I should do a little explaining first just to kind of say what we're talking about so I mean I don't know John let's let's ask you how many people do you know who work at Google uh a couple of dozen maybe yeah um but this particular period

in time that you're talking about michig is is one of those moments where it does matter who does what inside the the country that is that is Google um because the Google ads teams are quite distinct from our saleside teams who work on on admob and AD manager so just taking a step back those those Google ANS teams are responsible for spending all of the budgets that that Google gets from advertisers uh and they spend that budget across a wide variety of Google properties as well as the publisher Network or the game developers that we we know and love um and they're always optimizing for for Advertiser value in that process the cell sign teams the part of the business that I'm on run our ads platforms and we're here to optimize for sustainable publisher Revenue so while the Google ads teams are our friends and colleagues on one hand uh on the other they are just another buyer and we're a platform facilitating their demand is that distinction helpful does

that does that make sense yeah makes sense okay so then I think the journey we're on started probably back in May last year when the Google ads team announced they would be moving primarily towards realtime bidding um by October 31st and at the same time they expanded access to to additional bidding solutions that they've been building for a while and please do jump in with questions you have as we as we go through um but let me a minute to unpack what that means so ad buying in Mobile as Felix has talked about before is is for a long time has been running through waterfalls uh and waterfalls for those not familiar um effectively mean calling multiple times at different price floors because any publisher always wants to get the highest price for a given ad but the way that they got that highest price was by configuring different price flaws saying I would only accept an ad certain

price and then you'd have to go and see if an ad Network responded at that price uh if a network did respond great you you got that price if no networks responded you would just do it again at a lower price and again and again so finding the point at which your price was maximized could take tens or even hundreds of requests if you really wanted just for for one impression to get that price and I think for those with children this Probably sounds familiar it sounds like someone coming can I have a suite no how about now no how about now no and so on and and the analogy kind of holds in that it's time consuming and it's inefficient uh it makes for apps which used an awful lot more data in that process and took an awful lot longer to deliver an ad which is it's rubbish for the users takes a lot longer and it's not great for developers so that two Andro is inconvenient um but it's also a less efficient way for advertisers to buy so

I'm no kind of trained Economist but in principle when a seller and buyer can't agree on a way to Value something Services Goods whatever where price is the key factor then marketing efficiencies creep in and this process for exploring for prices wasn't anyone coming to an agreement it was kind of a one-sided negotiation um and it created a bit of inefficiency and friends at Google ads were able to make this comparison around the inefficiency quite easily because they've been buying in real time in other places and so they identified that that performance M difference was pretty material and then they decided they they weren't going to participate anymore in being asked 10 times for an ad for one impression and were moving towards a single auce and tools existed to configure this alternative bided form of access had been live in in admob and AD manager for

a while and so in may they did signal that this was eventually going to be the only way to buy um starting at the end of October and and this was a surprise to us right coming back to that separations on the cell side we found out when everyone else did um and that announcement fired the starting gun on a lot of work on our side helping Publishers get ready and manage this this Migration by moving towards towards real time binning um I'll paused there like I don't know how you experienced that bit John or like whether you were superably startled at the same time but um like how how did that go for you yeah I mean from my perspective Ross obviously we've been talking about biders in mobile now for five six plus years um you know traditional waterfall having an instance and then looking at the subsequent CPM and looking at the FI rate right an idea of optimization would be maximizing what fuel rate or the best fuel rate you could get at the highest

ecpm equals the maximum or the most amount of AD Revenue you could get right and the idea was we were always focusing on that um obviously over the last couple of years biders have become um you know much more adopted within the space and we we use various biders within our waterfall structure using our mediation um I think uh you know all of that is moving forward in very logical position as you said there's also a case of multiple calls creates uh lag you know it creates slow down on serving you know there's a lot of negatives that come around that the um I say the one argument or the one sort of con of this is developers sometimes feel like they're losing a lack of control when it comes down to what they're actually going to earn because if you have a bidder and the bidder says this is you're going to get $10 but actually you you would wanted 15 for this even though the fu rate is 100% because it's a bidder this can um in some cases is redu the arpo of the user

because of that so it's I think that's where some of the concern from the developer Community came from it's if Google are forcing this decision and being bidder only is it gonna somehow have a potentially a negative impact rather than a positive one yeah and I I think that's fair right um because as I mentioned before this wasn't the most efficient setup um it's one of those moments where where Advertiser efficiency in public earnings were a little bit in in tension um if I'm honest that inefficiency in Advertiser spend that the this kind of the waterfall setup introduced um it had to go somewhere and it was going to Publishers um and the control they had was was good for Publishers at that point and this was yeah a change that was encouraged away from that that model and there was a little bit of resistance um and so I think that's kind of why the Google ads team realized that they were going to have to work a little bit more

closely with Publishers to to get this across the line um and they did actually provide some more detail towards the end of last year um towards September they were clear as to what they got a little bit clear as to what was going to happen at the end of October um Google talks about enforcing many things and I think people wanted an awful lot more detail to be to be sure what was going to happen and so the the announcement then was that if Publishers wanted to keep receiving bits from Google ads then they did need to at least least configure a bidding ad unit alongside their waterfall and that meant that some of that inefficiency would go away and and the Google ads team could start to see what the the value of this change was um so they were clear about that but which I think everyone was hoping for that if you set up a bidding ad unit you'd still be able to receive uh bits from them uh if you didn't set up a bid bidding ad unit they were going to stop responding

to that waterfall chain and I think that's that second part bearing in mind that many Publishers yourselves included were making three five 10 more calls for a single ad impression um there was a lot of nervousness I think around that change when you looked at your your distribution of Revenue and it was coming from a whole bunch of calls and a whole bunch of price points and suddenly this was that control as you mentioned was was going away so how did you think about it before and after that announcement John it'd be interesting to to hear I mean ultimately I think from our perspective Ross we had like a decision or flexibility in somewhat um to test um so from our perspective we could have the bid in place but the flaw in place also so that it couldn't go below a certain amount right so we had like a fail safe system in place to ensure that yeah the amount of AD Revenue we got you know would stay

into a predictable sort of um level um after the decision was made to make this um you know take this decision away from us and and move forward with only a bidding strategy in place for Google obviously this is something that could potentially impact us quite heavily because Google make up a huge percentage of our ad Revenue business so you know I don't think it was um a very a negative um sort of impact from our perspective it was just more of a case of that we have to understand that there is going to be an impact to our business and we have to understand what the full impact of that is so we can strategize moving forward for the best case scenario of maximizing our ad Revenue with Google as a valid partner yeah and I think that was a feedback we got from a lot of people all of a sudden towards the end of the year when these changes were coming in and you're being asked to submit your budgets and your plans for the next year and a lot of people were kind of shrugging and being like well I I don't know because this change could be dramatic or it could be could be minimal

but I think what was clear there was that being able to have bidding alongside waterfall allowed for the smoothest transition and so we spent a I think I spent most of last year talking to most of our our publisher Partners encouraging them if that was their setup to definitely move to that hybrid um view of having bidding and waterf and I think that that really helped so that bit I think was was kind of relatively smooth uh it did get a little more focused again towards the end of the year um when the Google ads team made some different announcements about evading kind of multicore detection in in waterfalls and I think you we've been very simplistic I think about the the level of optimization that is possible inside that old waterfall setup I know Felix went into an awful lot more depth about this before Christmas um but there was one Behavior which was was was quite clear in the market that Publishers had

found that uh if you kind of sticking with my analogy from beforehand if you sent a different person almost to ask uh for the price that's kind of the equivalent of changing the the ad unit um that uh request was labeled with then there was an advantage to to kind of changing your ad units and and asking repeatedly um so in December there was another update which I think people reacted to quite strongly as well um from Google ads that that approach of changing and using different ad units every time you asked for uh for an ad was was not acceptable um and I think the the change we talked about before the the need to add a bidding call um I think that was probably I would characterize that as a strong preference from Google ads that that was that needed to be set up um but they and they reserved the right to respond to ad calls however they please but I think in

in this case the announcement Before Christmas was clear that this was not an acceptable practice um and that if you were trying to move these arguments around in a way that that obfuscated the plan this was going to be considered as abuse um and kind of slipping back into Google speak like abuse is is not uh a word that's taken lightly when we we talk about our our ads teams um and in this case they communicated fairly clearly that they would be prepared to stop responding and and stop uh stop purchasing inventory from apps which were carrying out this this practice and that would mean no Google ads demand at all to your app for between a week to a month they communicated um and so that was that was quite a transition was that something you thought about differently John I it kind of depends of how advantageous this was and with you were using it beforehand and I'm not trying

to to trip you up here by any means I mean from from our perspective I don't believe we were so I don't think we were you know you know using this particular practice um I would have to speak to my head of monetization who actually is the person that manages the the mediation and the V for and such but yeah I don't believe We Were Us okay so so that's good um but I think it's kind of just trying to kind of Step through this understand why it got to quite such a a period of the end the year I know Felix was Felix loves a good ad apocalypse um and uh we kind of getting towards that but like how well understood do you think everything was at the end of the year M on that from what was the mood when you recorded that previous podcast um I mean the mood is always in the sense that everybody's a little bit cautious of the platforms and the platform changes that are happening uh it's kind of hard to be proactive so these things come and then you have to react and so actually as you as you guys were talking about so you were talking about waterfall and I just want to take it back to the concept so most of the

people understand what we're talking about instead of only the app monetization people but with with waterfall very understandable so you're calling multiple different price floors you have hundreds of requests to find the proper price it took a long time and wasn't efficient so it's now a single call Aka realtime bidding but there's two other Concepts that you raised that I think need a little bit of an explanation for the folks that are not at my ad monetization experts one is what is a bidding ad unit in practice and the second one is multi call detection so Ross if you will yeah yes sure sure sorry for kind of get rushing ahead on on those things so I think that the bidding ad unit is the easiest one to to discuss um previously as I said the the way in a waterfall that you would request an ad is you would set a price floor and you would ask if someone could beat it uh and if that was the case then someone would return like your ad Network would return an ad you know it was above that price and and you be able to serve it you wouldn't know

exactly what price it was um a bidding ad unit Works slightly differently um The real- Time Auctions are where everyone effectively would put a price on the table at the same time and the highest bid would win so it's a differently configured ad unit within our systems and within other network systems that competes differently in a third party auction as opposed to just returning an ad if you can if you can re eat a price explore does does that help makes makes a lot of sense sounds like a Google search almost yes yes a little bit clearer um and then the the multi aspect of it so as I said the the way these waterfalls were set up you can you can tell generally um if that is what's being done um that someone is asking multiple times to try and get the the best price um that I think is is something that as I said the Google ad team wants to remove the inefficiency from and they're able to do that when

they can look at kind of bidding ad units alongside water ball um there were occasions where you could try and make it look like that wasn't what was happening um and one of the ways of of doing that as I said was instead of asking for different prices using the same ad units you would just change the IDS associated with them every single time um and that seems to be it's a Behavior there that doesn't really serve a purpose other than trying to hide um multile from from obviously and so that's why the the stance on that was a lot stronger um versus the recommendation that uh that people should add a bidding ad unit it was a much stronger request framed as as abuse that um that people should not be trying to dodge and and hide these things Ross I mean I've got a question because I haven't heard of this this is quite interesting like how would they change

the ID uh to to basically to do the be itself like how how would it work I mean maybe you don't actually say that but I'm curious to understand it a bit more it's it's relatively simple I think any AD unit in almost any network has uh has a specific ID associated with it and and that identifies it on the the kind of host networks systems and you could have something where you set an ad unit up that's got a $10 floor and it's got this ID and then you could set up a different ad unit that has a $10 floor with a different ID and just swap between them for example that's very simplist example and another thing Ross that you mentioned or asked John or either way I forgot but was discussion was reduction of arpu which is the uh the main point and if the companies are seeing reduction arpo in ad arpo then especially with a portfolio like let's say quality that has a significant portion of their revenue coming from

adoniz that has a profound impact on not only the financials but also their uh ability to acquire users and how much they are actually paying for users so kind of like directing this question to uh to John is like um how big of a change would it be if this would decrease the arpo that you're seeing from that monetization to the uh operations of a of a hybrid casual or casual publisher the major concern from our perspective is again if if this changes from a hybrid solution to a pure bidder will it have a negative inut input on arpu or will it have a positive one it could be either either and ultimately when you had the um the ability to have instances and flaws you knew that it wouldn't go below a certain level right and again there's this calculation around fill rates different flaws is the bidder the bidder the idea with the bidder is to find the maximum potential ecpm that you can without having a fixed position right so instead

of 20 to 15 you could have $116.99 so the idea is that you know before biders you could you would only have 20 to 15 or most people's water for S would have like 20 19 18 Etc but the bidder should be able to um provide you with higher CPM in theory um however in reality you know taking away the ability to do the hybrid there is an element of risk which which it could be negative at the moment I think a lot of people just don't know if that is going to you know how that's going to play out and after the announcement at the end of last year people then have that option taken away from them and that's why I think there's been you know a lot of you know discussion in the industry people because again it's uh until it happens we're not going to really know uh or not know fully so I think uh yeah you know what what we're hoping is that the arpus go up Mishka yeah of course if they do

drop you know if they do drop is it going to be by 10% 15% who knows but 10% to us is millions of dollars so you know that is that is the the general concern for all sort of AD Revenue based games business I think yeah I think most of those changes have happened John so like is this the case that that you haven't noticed like that prob the best possible outcome right yeah I mean I think at least from um an industry perspective R Us right now generally our C and our Dows are lower but I don't think it's probably because of this right so maybe some of the sort of economical changes and some of the headwinds in games is actually detracted from the positivity that this perhaps has brought because other factors have reduced so for us we're not looking at it as Google changing a bidder is as improved or detracted we're looking at all of the other components that make the impact to the game performance right but so if we were to

we wouldn't go into that that granular element we would just say Okay cpms are down RPS are down um no that's bad for us you know Google G is you know enforcing a bidder is that going to you know positively or negatively impact is it going to be masked by other Decisions by other factors you know that I think that's what most studios are we're trying to figure out right now H uh there there's other things happening at the same time as well so uh there was a new content consent requirement uh launching I think I believe this quarter if it's hasn't launched already which affects both Google publisher products and Google ads uh demand adding even more volatility to the whole situation so Ross can you talk about this uh this content requirement yeah yeah it never it never rains but it Paws we had a a busy last year in terms of these these changes coming down the pipe and yeah kind of to John's point about how sometimes how hard it can be to disentangle these these shifts uh

we're right in the middle of of this one as well um this is probably an easier discussion to to understand um than the the waterfall dynamics that we were going through before um I mean users expectations for for privacy are changing and we're seeing this reflected in a lot of worldwide regulation um and every platform publisher and Advertiser has to take this seriously they don't have a choice as a result because it's it's regulatory requirements um and user consent in particular is increasingly necessary for data processing purposes um and it's probably a hard principle to argue with if you uh if you really want to pin someone down um but it's especially important in the European Union because the the user rights are very strongly protected here and and given that that means there will be stronger forms of consent needed this year um so if you have users in in the EA or the UK I expect most developers will um then you will need to explain to

those users that there is data collection which takes place in order for ads to be served in your games um or your apps and you will need to ask their consent for that uh that data collection and that consent necessary for for Google ads to serve personalized ads which everyone agrees is better than unpersonalized um and that's true regardless of of platform um it's across across any of the platforms that people might be using um and for our platforms it's it's also necessary that we we track that consent on on ADM and AD manager to make sure that we're not sharing user data to Providers where users have not consented to to their data being shared with those entities um and so the important thing from our side uh on the sales side has been that all developers need to have a way to collect this consent um our products have added a free feature to help Publishers collect it because frankly this scale there has to be a free solution available um but to be

clear there are plenty of certified consent management platforms uh that use this standard in the marketplace that's administered by the IAB uh called TCF U and any platform that's configured to comply with that is absolutely fine um my teams do support the Google solution for this but uh we're not selling it in any sense of the word um the important thing is that users are presented with choice and that that choice is then captured and that that choice is then respected um but as we saw with with ATT and any other kind of dialogue along those lines anything like that introduces the chance that users won't consent um and that that that choice then has to be respected and so that again is another impact that could affect the the competition for any given add impression um there are still non-personalized ads

and other things that will be shown but it's it kind of feeds into that point I made towards the end of last year when if you were asking your ad monetization teams for their forecast for 2024 they probably gave you a wider envelope than they ever had done before um and I yeah I think that's yeah the combination of these two things is a big factor in that yeah I I definitely agree Ross I think like Google soundbox you know everyone is is sort of like still talking about this and we understand what the impact of idfa deprecation had on iOS traffic um M and I were talking about this recently and you know from a company perspective we used to spend 70% on on Apple and and 30% on Google in terms of our user acquisition and then it after idfa deprication it went to 50/50 so Google ended up winning a lot of the you know the user acquisition spent um and I think there is a General concern that with the Privacy updates on Google that

you know the the sort of wins that we had with Google subsequently after the Apple changes will be lost um because of privacy um and I think this is something that a lot of people are being very careful and conservative with their projections for this year just to understand again what the impacts on both the monetization and the user acquisition side would be so I I I do think Google by the way are going to execute this better because Google being ads business I think you'll have more um a more intricate way of deploying this to not affect as many Publishers and developers like what happened with at but I think it's going to be a big talking point of this year basically and how are you responding to it because and to my mind it's coming from the sales side not from the the user acquisition side but this feels like a a point in time where you might hold fire on your budget or something if you're Break Even point for acquiring a user

Falls in March and as per what we've communicated our enforcement on these things happens in March then do you do you just wait and see and keep your powder dry until afterwards what's the what's the rationale there it's a really good point Ross um if I'm honest I think a lot of developers are actually not doing that if to be frank I think if I think um budgets are remaining the same I think obviously it's harder to spend the money these days profitably which means that you're spending less overall right as a company we are spending Less on your acquisition than we did a couple of years ago because you have to be more targeted you know in the sense of like going after the the correct sources in the right ways to to make money um but from a projection standpoint we have an understanding that we expect you know cpms on the monetization started to drop a little bit and and cpis you know might get a bit more or cpis might saying we'll get a bit more expensive but you

know we'll have to try and acquire users more effectively because the arpu and the ARs will drop um but from a long-term like pltv so projective lifetime value analysis and modeling perspective we haven't made any Mass um decisions on you know retracting that so we're continuing to move forward and you know we won't know until after the changes are finalized if there is going to be our models might need to be updated so an interesting year basically true but that's it's encouraging that like you don't seem to be kind of running scared of it in the extent that you're pulling budgets and things like this it's kind of a wait and see and maybe there's just more confidence this time round versus the larger and and frankly Global changes that ATT caused um maybe a European based consent change a smaller smaller adjustment most of our business like is done in the US anyway so I think you

know there is an element of that Ross right like a European Revenue generation us acquisition is is 20 to 30% Global so there is that but I also think that you know you can't run scared you know we we need to continue to do what we're doing and Trust in the abilities of the team and the product and everything we built and if we end up you know in a couple of months finding out that again our models are you know underpredicting or or you know things are off then ultimately yeah we've lost some money but we've also leared a lot and we learned from that that failure and move forward um I definitely wouldn't stop spending right I think that would be stupid because you need to keep people coming into the app right so yeah I I think look charge forward that's interesting yeah because we we're seeing maybe a little more questioning of that on the the publisher side of things because with all of these changes as I said so many of the the kind of tips and tricks that that were

previously possible being shifted around by the Google ads side of things we're I'm hearing a little bit more from Publishers of people acknowledging that their historical data about what performance would be and kind of what the the platforms to capable of is is a little out of date um and I think it's probably the right question to ask um and so I think there's there's quite a few people outside who are beginning to say okay well maybe this is the right time to see what's changed on all of the platforms that are out there and see if that actually makes a material difference to the ltvs and and so on that you are obtaining through that because a lot of the things that were previously there were were not there so I mean sales hat on for a second I would love to hear from any developers who are in that situation and want help Gathering that data point um it feels like this re-evaluation theme is is real um and we'd very much like to to help everybody wants to who wants to make that reevaluation and and collect that

data point and and just you know Ross since you're a spokesperson for Google now and I know in the beginning you tried to explain that Google is a gigantic organization that you there's no possibility to know what happens on on on the different size of the business units but nevertheless like what do you think is the impetus and and the goal of these changes because they are quite significant like we we're now trying to analyze how they affect uh given all the other changes but but it is a significant significant change in the uh in ad monetization so what what is the goal here I think if I were to summon up I think it's it's sustainability um I I definitely don't think and I understand some of the the concerns that were had of time that like money is going to be taken away or like it's it's Google ads trying to spend less I mean I don't think that's the objective at all no one's here trying to say that money should come out of the mobile game games ecosystem because it's bad there was

just inefficiency in there and if we want to keep it as a sustainable Channel where revenue is being spent and coming into everyone's games um in a sustainable fashion then this is a change that makes the inventory more valuable to advertisers because it's bought more fairly and I think that's good for the long-term health of the business when other changes and so on are coming through um and I think that the philosophical Point around the consent side of things as I said it's it's very hard to sit here and and argue with a straight face that user privacy is not important and we shouldn't be making changes that are that are positive to that kind of goal of collecting consent and respecting consent so I think in both of those cases we should end up with a more efficient ad buying um ecosystem um and it's freeing up I think and again please keep me honest on this John I think it's it's freeing up a bit of resource that we're to see Publishers kind of deploy in other kind

of more optimistic and kind of value creating ways right there are people who spent a long time organizing and optimizing waterfalls day in day out um that's less possible now as as John pointed out but then we're beginning to see people invest in more sophisticated customization of either pricing on a per user basis or the experience of the game on a per user user basis um setting different uh offers and and kind of different propositions in front of your users and if you can't if you have to kind of acquire in a less targeted fashion which is what I've heard people say has happened on iOS um then you have to tailor The Experience more to kind of drive more exec uh more engagement and more monetization so that's a shift that I'm beginning to see and it's something where as a platform we're in investing quite quite heavily in allowing for more

customization and optimization on a different axis than just the waterfall that's that's called um I don't know as I said please keep me honest on that John is that the kind of the way that you're thinking about things completely Ross I Think I mean you know from a live Ops perspective from a Persona targeting perspective you know from serving different sort of uh I'm talking more about the inap purchase side rather than the ad side here but you know giving customized offers to individuals that have certain personas that we're tracking that you know what they are within the data giving them you limited time offers and discounts on certain price points of of you know um values in the shop and yeah all of that stuff I think is is super interesting and where the business is going and we used to be at predominantly 95% ad business and now we're becoming a you know 70 30 60 40 as to in our purchase business so you know it's making us think a lot more smartly

about our monetization strategy and as you said like yeah you know I was one of those people that sat in front of a mediation optimizing waterfalls and adding instances I was one of those people there's not that role isn't going to exist in the future like in my opinion because what the way the biders have set up so how people then you know Advance their monetization strategies by becoming more inventive and um and this is exactly how I think people are going to continue to add value with with this particular job and role within within the team you're always going to need someone manag monetization but they'll find new ways and new inventive ways to to actually deliver on that rather than spending hours looking at different instances and putting things up and down right like it was it really was not the greatest uh you know this was a long time ago but it wasn't the funniest part of my role the problem it wasn't that long ago which is why this does actually come across as progress I think once you you kind of take a step back from the volatility and I hope everybody does

feel does feel that way and I think you rais an interesting point around like finding different ways to optimize as a result I think one of the the areas where aside from creating this flexibility to to kind of move things around on the platform just the concept of publisher kind of what we call first party data um which you understand your users pretty well you've got a lot of analytics in your games about who does what about who buys what about um the patterns that people follow through the games um and over the years I've had I plenty of people say to me that they assume that data must be worth something um but no one really knows how to get more out of it and I think we are now shifting into a phase where understanding your users and using that data to customize experiences to customize pricing to customize offers is actually just a different phase of of value creation there that's actually something I I'm optimistic that over the

next year or so with some of the tools that we're we're building Google pretty good at data um that we should be able to sit down and and I want our clients to be able to go back to their sea levels go back to their boards this time next year and be like well Google helped me make tangible amounts of money like things we can definitely prove like valuable chunks of change from our user date in a privacy first way and I think that's one of the things that we're really kind of trying to tack towards as a platform there is being able to create that value and also meet the very very high standards of privacy that that everyone's moving towards um and so yeah I I hope that people will be going back and saying Google helped us realize tangible value from our first party data in the next 12 months because it's a big investment on our side uh John something I wanted to ask you because as we were discussing with Ross about doing this episode uh he you know painted a pretty

Doom and Gloom picture he was saying that uh you know what could happen is that the uh is essentially that the uh the way we're modeling right now at mization goes kind of out of the window and you would have to kind of go through again through all of your partners and build new LTV models and that of course would affect significantly your user acquisition and and and through that we would see almost a decline in the market for the uh the couple of first quarters do you feel do first of all Ross do you still feel it's that way and secondly you know John like is this the case or not I I think that's stronger than than kind of we discussed before that's how I hear I'm I only I'm I'm I live in hyper hyperboles so no no it's true but I mean yes I say Ad apocalypses are everywhere if you if you want to look for them um I'm not trying to underestimate the scale of the changes is I like I spent all of last year running to ensure that the risk to

like any risk from these changes was minimized by helping people understand what Google ads were saying helping our partners migrate to ways that minimized um the the scale of any shift that are coming through and frankly if if a bunch of these changes have happened and and John hasn't come on here to like to say that it's been a material shift then then I'm quite pleased with the the outcome of that um it was more to acknowledge the scale of the potential shifts and and the nervousness in the market and I think now is a good time to come back on and discuss it a little bit more to understand how much of that nervousness materialized um and then if there is behavior that's that's changing and it sounds like UA behavior is relatively consistent um and as I said on the the platform side of the business we're seeing people re-evaluate um after the changes but not not not panic I don't think yeah and from my perspective guys

as I alluded to earlier you know these changes either have or do we do not believe will have the same impact that ATT had right and we don't we expect there to be you know some decline but I don't think the decline you know is going to be super drastic like we're not going to see 50% drops it like maybe we'll see 10 20% but you know for you know what Ross was saying about going into a more privacy Centric and and people first you know setup that's good for for everyone right in terms of you as a user yes the ad companies and the Publishers lose a little bit but it's the right thing to do so I think yeah we are going to see you know probably a little bit more of a decline throughout the year however again I don't think we we're you know some business will be heavily affected I'm not going to lie some business might go under because of this but but I think at least from our perspective the effect has been you know

um not as as bad as it could have been we're still surviving we're still generating money we're still growing so that's that's that's the the most important and now since we're kind of going from the the Doom and Gloom and and the scary scenarios to to like even talking about growth and then positive incomes uh outcomes then um could we end up this this podcast episode about um you know sort of a positive view of of what you are optimistic about in in the ad ad mization Trends in 2024 so John if we would start with you like put a smile on everybody's face regarding ad monetization yeah I mean I mean look I'm going to go back to to the beginning of the conversation and say like I think uh biders will get better they'll get stronger they will have a bigger part of of the waterfalls a few companies will will do what Google has done and elect to only have you know biders as part of

that and hopefully you know that in turn that competition that auction will generate more revenue and RPS will go up so that is the idea of why these Technologies were built and the update the industry was done so I'm hoping that that hypothesis comes true and all of us are better off and we we save time and resources from not having to spend you know countless hours in in waterfalls doing optimization so resource cost goes down a little bit little bit how about Ras yeah I know a huge departure from from what I said beforehand I I think there's there's a lot of optimization efficiency that should come through this um and I would love to see that realized um I mean personally I'm I'm looking forward to a year where we're not kind of making sure that everybody is ready for change I'm looking forward to really getting back to sitting down with our partners and building new value rather

than making sure that everything is safe um which I think is probably been the the theme from the last 12 months and I think really from our side customization like building the ability to optimize in different ways other than just a waterfall is a big investment from our our platform side of things um and the the ability as I said to really use the data that Publishers do have privacy first way to generate material value those are the the the admob and AD manager conversations that I want to be having next year not um kind of trying to interpret changes in the landscape and and minimize risk I want us to get get back to uh to really Positive Growth with all of our partners and I feel we're coming at the end of that tunnel all right sounds amazing and Ross how can people listening to this get in touch with you and your team to discuss these matters further hopefully anyone can find any of

the the cide teams if they need to as I said we um people know where to find me uh I hope in in Europe and we have colleagues all over the world in in local offices um if anyone wants to talk about what we we can do we've been building for for customization for first party data and everything we have going forward to streamline the the bidding optimizations and the the revenue per user we can generate for people then please do reach out to the teams in any of your local markets um to discuss that and if anyone doesn't doesn't know where to find their team globally they're more than welcome to reach out to me and I can I can help root nothing well they can Google it yeah waiting to say I was saving that joke the whole session there is another Ross Brockman somewhere and I believe he runs quite a successful side of it business somewhere in the southwest of of the UK um he is

not me please don't ask him uh please come find me because he will be very confused all right so Link in the description to talk to Ross Brockman if you if you're not talking currently to your own uh Google partner and don't ask JN about ammonization contact John if you want to publish games on qual platform right so thank you yeah we always have to end up with a sh thank you Ross and thank you John for for coming in and discussing the advanced ad monetization Trends this is something that I have to probably listen three times cuz I'm so stupid but for those who understand this topic I think this was a very enlightening and for others probably learned a lot of new things so thank you gentlemen thank you guys thanks everybody for listening