Session: What’s Really Limiting Publisher Monetisation Today - Olga Zharuk, TeqBlaze.

Next we have um Olga Zaruk from Tech Blaze who's going to be talking about what's really limiting publisher monetization today.
Uh my name is Olga. I'm chief product officer at Tech Blaze. Uh at my role, I as a product person, I like to talk to people to understand what is uh the pain and how we can uh solve it with our product. So basically talking to big publishers I can see some patterns. Um

the stack the ad stack is getting complex is getting more complex and it's starting to really difficult to manage it and that's what I can see right now. So there are a lot of vendors that are helping publishers um to solve their problems but they're getting control out of publishers and that's where I can see the the problems. Uh so as I was saying the monetization stack uh is um is really hard and there are a lot of different tools that you are using from day to day. uh you have a lot of SDKs, you have a lot of analytics, you have a lot of dashboards, but then you don't understand what really affects your revenue. Uh sometimes it happens that revenue goes up and goes down and you just look into numbers and you don't understand why it happened

and it it it's really uh bad. So let's uh review two examples, two scenarios. So the first one player is in your game. They see an ad of your direct competitor. No install happens or even worse install happened. So uh the advertiser wasted their budget. The you delivered zero impression and the players got annoyed. Why it happened? because stack controls everything and you you cannot affect it. Another another scenario rewarded video. So player agrees to watch the rewarded video. Uh usually they they expect some kind of short ad but the ad is 90 seconds. So the trust between you and player is lost. Um retention drops like everything bad. That's not the ad problem. That's the problem related to

control as well because like you cannot control that. It's all on the uh vendor side. It didn't happen overnight like all the tools that you are using on daily basis they were uh invented for some reason because they are solving their own uh problem. they are leading uh they're trying to um maximize their own metric like SDKs, mediation, analytics, biddings, speeders and so on. So uh look on this slide every error is potential conflict. Every error it's decision point and on like every error something might went wrong and you do not control it again. So um like I was saying every tool is trying to solve its own metric and um

the problem is that um you need to have your uh you need to have an access and control what ad is shown in your game in your application. And uh the the problem is that um the auction logic becomes impossible to explain because again it's happening on the vendor side. Let's [music] look let's look on uh on this slide. So if you are talking about transparency transparency is not only uh about the dashboards about the data that you see. Transparency is um being able to explain why specific bidder won and why it happened. So you need to look on um on the managing side and try to understand why uh what decision uh affect the

revenue in good or bad scenario. If you are talking about um control again it's about setting up and uh managing the rules that affect the auction and of course the player experience. If you're talking about independence, um it means that you need to choose your partners and work with them because they support your strategy because they can help you to scale, not because if you don't work with them, everything just will be up. Sorry. So uh I'm suggesting moving from reacting to directing. When I'm saying reacting, it means that uh you're looking into numbers, you're trying to adjust something, you're trying to uh optimize numbers, you're trying to work with data. I'm suggesting you to um try

to prevent any kind of changes without your decision. You need to um make forecasts. You need to understand that every decision might lead to some specific changes. Um so uh you can you can control your demands. You can control the ads that are shown in your apps. And that's why I'm I'm uh offering you to switch from reacting to directing and to control your own stack. So um I have three really simple question that you can reply or know uh today. So can you understand what decisions uh affected your revenue not just looking into the reports or looking into numbers if you can that's really good.

If you're thinking about it and you cannot reply on this, I think that that might be a problem. Uh, can you change anything in the auction without breaking everything? If you can, again, that's really good. If you're trying not to touch anything because it will be uh it will break up. I think that's something that you need uh to think about. Um, do you understand again what uh do do you understand what kind of things you need to do to uh monetize better? Again, that's good. If if it's really hard to answer one of your one of these questions, you need like to think about it. And again, I'm not against of any vendors. I'm totally for them because they're trying to make your life easier. They uh they giving you all the tools

and they're trying to help you so you don't spend a lot of time. But if you want to scale your business, you need to look for partners to work with and the vendors should work with you and they should help you to scale your business. That's what I'm um trying to say today. So uh again one idea that I want you to take from uh from this session is uh find your partners you would like to work with and find your partners who will help to scale your business with you. Um, thank you. [applause]