Session: Remove Ads Messaging – How To Use Ads To Drive IAPs & Subscriptions - Felix Braberg.

[Music] and now we're moving on to cover some ad Insight sponsored by Audio mob I hope that your food comas have now all gone you're energized and really excited for this final part of the track yes look at your faces oh my God I can't believe it I've never seen more excited people in my whole life now we're going to talk about remove ads messaging how to use ads to drive iaps and subscriptions with Felix braberg who's from 2.5 Gamers giveing up for Felix [Applause] please thank you for that warm introduction so this is the new Xbox

Series S from curries what's up every that's not mine hi everyone I guess I'm here to close out the stage today uh I'm here to talk about something that I think is actually quite interesting there's not a lot of things that happen in Mobile gaming but right now there's actually some Innovation happening and I'm here to talk about that and that is of course how to use ads to actually drive iaps and subscriptions but before getting started with that there's one big meta trend that I'm seeing happening this year and that is that this year 2025 will be the year of the app and what do I mean by that traditionally everyone knows that mobile gaming has been leading Innovation whatever happens in mobile games trickles down to apps and then basically to The Wider Community but this is the first year where I'm starting to see app developers and the design choices that they're making in their apps actually leading and pushing what's happening in Mobile

gaming so Mobile gaming companies are copying app companies so that's a lot like of a trend that we're going to talk about today but a little bit about me I'm Felix I've been in industry for eight years I worked in two dsps L is here from one of them I worked in I worked in an ad Network that was accused of doing the biggest fraud scandal in the world I'll let you look up which network it is but anyway so uh right now uh I'm a consult consult uh I've been working with about 35 mobile games and apps all together they have earned $350 million in ad revenue and that's how I learned I also am one of the co-hosts on Two and a Half Gamers uh where I am with yakob and mate yakob unfortunately is having a baby so he's not here and Ma unfortunately is in the Maldives so yeah pretty good life right anyway so enough about that but this is what I want to talk to you about so first I want to talk talk about some publisher

Trends what's enabling essentially these changes on the remove ads messaging side ad quality and how the reduction in ad quality is actually enabling you to do a lot more creative things with remove ads messaging and then I'm going to show you the most like three biggest examples of what I think is driving a lot of iips and subscriptions from just showing how annoying ads can be so let's start so in the last 30 days these are the gaming companies that have gotten the most downloads so you can see here there the kind of Publishers that you'd expect you have azour seame supersonic 96 million downloads in the last 30 days that's crazy amounts right so these are the hybrid casual games I took out the mega cap social gaming companies so basically the top list in terms of downloads is still absolutely dominated by Gaming but what's starting to happen is that on the 40th and 50th place in terms of downloads you're

starting to get this and what is this this is app companies that is to say companies that make app ad apps and that utilize mainly subscriptions are now finally starting to be in the top 50 in terms of overall downloads and what does that mean when you have a lot of downloads you can also monetize a lot of users with ads because the key to having ad revenue is you need to have a lot of users to watch a lot of ads so these companies are good at a couple of things and one of them is AB testing so they do a lot of AB testing particularly on pricing and that's kind of what's driving one of these changes as well but also I need to mention before that something about ad quality everyone here Works in Mobile right so everyone has opened a mobile app or a mobile game in the last year you know that ad quality is getting worse what I mean by worse is that ads are getting longer and it's getting harder to click out of so ads are

getting a worse and worse reps because basically these companies have realized they can increase their margins by having longer and more difficult to click out of ads when I started in the industry a rewarded ad was 30 seconds now the most aggressive end card I think on App 11 is 114 seconds for rewarded ads so it's getting longer banners also the refresh rate used to be 30 seconds now it's down to 5 seconds and yeah that's causing a lot of retention drop right so here also is a list of 6 months ago uh of this is the largest by volume uh networks on Apple and Max and essentially I took the liberty of highlighting the only company up until 6 months ago that did not have long rewarded ads or intrusive end cards this is the same list now so all major networks on mobile now have longer ads intrusive end cards and worse basically

user experience because essentially margins increase so those two things we have app companies that are starting to get into the download charts making money on ads ads are getting longer and no company in this industry is not having longer and longer ads so let's take a look at an example so this is the highly lucrative and highly interesting and highly new brain training app market so basically it's a market that sits kind of at the interest section between what is a game and what is an app right so this Market has made about $300 million and you can see lately it's really starting to accelerate in terms of revenues right and this Market is dominated by two apps or games depending how you look at them and that is one impulse and the other one is called Elevate so how these apps or games whatever you want to call them how they actually work is that you every day have to do three exercises that is said to

improve cognitive ability and your IQ so if you've seen these ads where you see Albert Einstein ads this is always one of these two apps right so users every day are encouraged to go inside the app do three brain training exercises and if they want to stay in the app longer than that they're encouraged to do some games that improve cognitive ability these games look a lot like hyper casual games like yeah but I'm not here to judge so we're going to do a game so this is the retention profiles of these two apps Elevate and impulse one of these apps has also monetizes with interstitials rewarded and banner ads and one of these apps does not have ads at all so put your hands up if you think it's Elevate that has no ads in the app okay no ads okay and put your hands up if you think that's impulse that has no ads in

it all right actually no so impulse is the app that actually has ads in it but what you look at here is quite interesting right because the retention profiles are very similar and everyone knows that retention tends to go down when you have intrusive ads like interstitials so let's look back 18 months on the same retention profiles of the same apps so you can see here that impulse instead of having day 27 or day one retention of 27% it has 19 so that's when they added ads right so long ads like ruin your retention profile right so what happened between 18 months and that they basically started experimenting with the first Trend that I'm seeing which is remove ads push notifications so during the first time user experience in impulse what happens is after the the first interstitial ads

every user is shown this message which says ads are skippable after 5 to 15 seconds but don't worry we need this to help further our app uh app development this are the signs that you should look out for to essentially close the ads so if you think about what's Happening Here is usually when you have a user it's usually a user versus the developer but what's Happening Here is impulse is actually creating a third party so basically instead of being the user and the developer it's also now the ad Network so they're starting to shift the blame away from themselves about the annoying ads second intitial that users are shown in the firsttime user experience and impulse is do you know you can actually play without ads if you become a premium user very clever third interstitial that's shown to firsttime user experience is actually they show you the remove ads button that's there all the time and don't where you can go and remove ads whenever

you want so the fourth interstitial that's shown to users users are actually presented with a double Choice which we'll get into a bit more later where essentially they're faced with two numbers that they can choose either a three-day trial and then after that at $6.99 a week or a lifetime removing ads for €44 this is exactly what app companies do extremely well right then the fifth interatial you just want to remove ads for this time type of behavior for only this without becoming a premium subscriber so moving forward so what they're actually doing is they're addressing kind of the immediate attention and basically having an emotional impact to separate the developer which is usually always associated with bad ads and they're actually saying hey there's also a network that's doing this but don't worry I'm on the user side I'm helping you to show you how to click out of these ads right so

the third or the second thing that I'm also seeing happen which is also being driven by mobile gaming or mobile app companies is the double choice right so here we have the impulse double choice to remove ads where basically three-day trial and lifetime but also pinouts a game that's kind of scaling right now in the hybrid casual genre essentially users are faced with a choice where they can either remove ads for $5.99 for seven days on a subscription that renews every week or 9.99 forever and then basically this is utilized also by mini games screw Jam all these other games that are kind of scaling on the ultra casual hybrid casual side right so what's actually happening here is a very famous psychological phenomenon that's been utilized forever but basically is basically if you give a user two different price points essentially what happens is the higher price point gets anchored so if you also provide a lower value price that makes it look even cheaper so yeah

and then the perceived value of that thing increases so this is also from another game called uh I think a satis or yeah stst ststem yeah and they started to utilize this as well and this is actually for abig games this is actually their main and best selling IAP in this game so moving on to the Third Way how ad app companies are kind of driving Innovation and that is essentially they're also doing something called bundling bundling has been around in Mobile gaming forever so how this is done is done a bit different in different Publishers and different developers um how it's being done in word connect which is one of the biggest word games in the world is that they bundle the remove ads and remove intrusive ads segment uh of the ads uh for higher value IAP purchases so they're trying to drive users to not make the $69 purchase but to make the

$12.99 purchase because they're also bundling it with oh if you buy it then essentially you remove all intrusive ads also what's happening on raid Rush which is an interesting company from Turkey is that any IP purchases that you make is also bundled in with the removing interstitial ads also you can see here uh tricky twist new game they just came out a couple months ago they're doing exactly the same if you yeah buy one of of these you also get remove banners you get 10 hints anyway this is not really new this has been kind of done for quite a long time where you bundle in removing ads like this but yeah essentially talked about this but essentially let me show you what's happening right now uh by taking a look at habby so Hab is probably the best and biggest hybrid casual company right now on the market and this is what they're doing for Cy bar go and Aero arero 2 so

they're taking bundling to an even step further which means that if you buy the lifetime ad free card they're also bundling that with incre uh with increasing the amount of soft currency that you're given every day so basically what they're doing is if you're playing this game a lot and it has a good retention profile that means you progress quicker if you also remove the ads and will reward you across your whole lifetime by not only removing ads but also increasing the amount of soft currency you get from the game every day so how to use ads to drive I APS and subscriptions easy one push notifications after the first intrusive ads are shown two present double price choices to remove the ads and third bundle the ad choices with other items so this QR code right here uh is basically goes to my newsletter uh I write about a lot of these things cuz I'm a bit of a nerd but I love this kind

of stuff sign up if you want I don't know how much time we have but I'll love to take some questions if anyone has any any questions we can probably take one question or two if they're fast question one yes thanks I'm from 52 entertainment uh hi and thanks for your for your speech uh for games uh as simple as an hyper casual game what type of conversion rate are you looking at or aiming at for such tool like no ads it's a bit hard right so it depends on the game so Abby games they make 50k a month on sistem selling this like remove ads iip but basically should be viewed as like getting the first purchase right so we all know that the most like the highest predictor of future purchases is previous purch purch right so the

hardest thing is to just get over that first hurdle and that's basically what this is utilized for and another question please was here yeah can you have a good [Music] voice the practice for example when when you're removing ads you're not only giving U soft paren you're giving some other items grp players stop getting those items will they be incentivized like I'm paying for not watching ads yeah for watching rewarded I can get soft Curren I can get some additional items for example in yeah uh what's the best practice for that so best practi is never remove the rewarded ads right because essentially that's what keeps coming back it has the highest ecpm and has highest conversion rates right so typically best practices is that you remove interstitials and Banners the intrusive ones right but the thing is like we all know that every app is different every game is different so you need to test it um yeah I worked with hordes and heroes the number one

selling pack there was remove ads completely cuz it was such a good deal so there's no uniform best practice just test everything right thank you very much Felix thank you please give me a big round of applause that was was old