SpeedPanel: Ad monetisation takes over the world

[Music] so come on it's worth getting settled into this because it's going to be a roller coaster ride of very very useful information that's why I love doing hosting on on this the massage track each time it's because I spend half fine yeah my working life consulting on games and if I didn't come and do this track I'd get left behind so it's really useful for me so you all right thank you all for being here today my name is Dan Laughlin I've got a great group of panelists here and we're gonna try to keep this quick and snappy so if you've been to one of our panels before you know I don't let anyone introduce themselves because everyone just talks

and talks and talks so I'm gonna introduce everybody and then we're gonna roll through some questions their answers will already be up on the screen so we can dive right in if you have a question jump in let's keep this interactive should be fun all right first a word from your sponsor of course mine so again Dan Laughlin I'm with hyper Amex we're based in New York City and we are 100% focus on bringing mobile apps the brands that they crave to monetize so you're used to app install ads for reward of video for interstitial we bring ads from Audi Toyota Intel that kind of thing so we work with play Rick's pocket gems social point some of our clients so if you're interested in reward video interstitial on the brand side find me afterwards all right so who do we have up here today so we have a keen from triple dot so keen he's done a lot in this space you may have seen him around he formerly at Facebook helped launch the audience network in amia and originally from Turkey am i right yes but found his way to the United States

and went to much better universities than I did at Harvard and Yale so congrats to you for that all right and then we've got next we have Ellie from super solid so Ellie's got a ton of experience into the world having worked in social casino and then joined super solid and added monetization to her tool belt so lots there and also Ellie is from a place where I thought people only moved to to work on games from Cypress right yes I've never been loved to go alright so enric from lab cave interacts with chief marketing officer there lab cave if you're not familiar they published a bunch of games also working on some cool tools for developed developers and notable fact about Enric is he only lives in super cool cities Los Angeles Madrid Barcelona New York London not gonna get you to move to Seattle to to live it in my my neck of the woods in my yeah alright and finally we have a net from dirty bit so and that is basically does everything to do with

marketing there and if you're not familiar with dirty bit famous for the Fun Run series rates attic titles which a net once got to play with the president of Finland that's our claim to fame alright some questions on monetization alright so this has been a big year big twelve months for ad monetization it really you know there's been a thing for a while right we're talking about this every year but it seems like it really took off in a big way this year and part of it yeah it's definitely credit given to the guys who are just up here you know Facebook finally really nailed rewarded video and in the monetization side and everyone's eCPMs jumps so everyone got more competitive there's a lot going on people are using multiple floors or sandwich eNOS they call it there's just a lot happening there's new tools that are helping people optimize better and so as we go into this year you know building off of all that there's a lot going on with bidding and and mediation systems becoming more more sophisticated so we're gonna talk about all that stuff so with all that happening the question

to you guys is how are you taking advantage of it what are some of the things you've done in the last 12 months that really help you grow your business on monetization side so I put some short versions of the answers they gave me if anyone wants to jump out feel free helpful to to look at all the bigger studios and their successes and try to impress and also of course do deals negotiate with network setting floors and comes improving its a particular major developer you look up to there is quite a few of them here so yeah that's good sure so from our perspective the Met metathesis that we have is that ad based monetization can now support scalable user acquisition that is mainly due to a lot of kind of marketeers realizing the kind of power that they can achieve the

powerful marketing they can do on mobile used to be mainly performance marketing we see that kind of more shifting towards like brand marketing as well and there's still something missing so like the sophistication that the developers kind of deploy on monetization the third-party tools and services are just kind of catching up to in our opinion so like their companies like for us like you know we talked about Sula being one of them is like we use them quite a lot and you know Graham games just proactively ask you a question Graham Games is a company that kind of we really learned quite a lot from in terms of like how they approach it and and I didn't mention this in your show but your studio triple dot which Yuto founded in the last couple years you know your first games are in the solitaire market and I'm guessing you're working on some other stuff but are you've been able to do real user acquisition for the solitaire times yes yes in fact this is the reason we chose those games is you know we're very metric driven so we look at how much we

can afford to spend in terms of CPI and then how you know in terms of the lifetime value that title will generate when you say solitaire many people are surprised but indeed it you know we said the innovation happens under the hood so using some of these techniques that we've learned in our previous roles we are to afford school anyway and Rick Carelli anything you went through in there before well sure I mean a few years ago developer Nell runner here about running ads on their games now we're seeing it the other way around which is how much money can I get out my impression so what we're seeing a lab kale is a you know there are so much demand for good track good quality traffic that obviously working out it can be sometimes threatening in its it is a proper team in place to work it out but I'm if you do your your job accordingly you can work out some deals with existing networks our future neighbors that kinjal actually I believe your existing revenue so we are actually adding ads to our games and that's how we're taking advantage of the ad

monetization on the rise usually our game specifically focus on in-app purchases however after we did a lot of research on different areas of the game that it wouldn't make sense to a dance to we also have more of a see if you are me because now we can add ad monetization as well as in-app purchases revenue circle its complete all right so what to monitor ad based monetization it I feel like in our industry user acquisition got a lot of the early tech work and brainpower and everyone's so focused on how do we make you a work and now it feels like the monetization side is starting to catch up in terms of the investment in technology you know talked about talk to us about the tools you're using what you've seen out there what you like you mentioned Summa and it was a tool it that we found it to be very impressive so yeah I mean as a start-up we kind of try to do things in parallel track so eventually we want to build kind of some of our own services and our own tools but there's a lot of you know

interesting tools that are in the market Summa is one you know we use various different analytics systems in order to kind of integrate into our you know dashboards and so we use firebase we use more pop for mediation etc etc I think there's a you know I mentioned similar just because that's like the one thing that does something that's we were previously able to do which is to kind of try to find the user like you know try to determine our ad whales and things like that I can speak more but I don't want to hog the time so I'll actually before I the next question was highly related to this I'll just do it right now to today do you segment your users based on how they engage with ads and so that was 5050 here we got a 50/50 yeah jump on it yeah on our side we are the third one it's building our own we haven't tried several ad base or tools to work out our

existing traffic and we are not happy with what we have seen and we test so about eight nine months ago which had to start building our own so until the early stages but hopefully we'll have a sooner released to make what we've seen so far with our own test is that we increase up to 20% our existing revenue obviously 20% is a decent number to consider so you know I think the one thing that hopeful in the near future we're gonna deal is result for our parts we have our own parts of the back-end system but and on a daily basis I use the dashboard we used iron source for mediation so I monitor there and we have some misfortunes firebases go so for us we use fiber for our game food to treat Delta DNA ads for a game home street and we're setting up Moo pub whatever you are doing yeah

the reason we actually are using Delta DNA smart ads for home street is because platform and it actually makes it really easy to use their mediation analytics platform the same time yeah one of things as a brand focused network that we were selfishly very interested in this world of greater detail finding add Wells and all that as it if there's a lot of users out there that never respond to app install ads they never install them so there's a lot of waste where if you could segment users into the the types that do respond to those versus don't the ones that don't you could serve brand ETSU first because you know those go to monitor every time and then focus really you know really generate high bids on those users that are receptive to have install that say what soon was doing what Delta DNA's been working on that and now I earn source announced you know their user level feature and is rolling that out so I think there's a lot going on in that space alright so are you excited scared or indifferent about bid made bid based mediation everyone said the right

thing here everyone says oh I had a good response I think there's you and that was like you didn't give me the option to say all of the above yeah it was excited scared or indifferent right so excited and scared because it's a new world a lot of people talking about it a lot of providers having the only real solution so it's gonna be exciting to see this year who the results from the different parts begin mcnamaras it's hard to work out across the smoke and see who is actually bringing you know an edge technology wise and rather than who just stops to talk so as well which been excited and I was yeah the trigger would be the right answer we feel the same way on the ad network side right we've got partners have a slightly different flavor of how they're gonna do it and different timelines and all that so it's a lot to take in I would say I mean we're obviously excited but you know there's

gonna be some core kind of trash coming with it so as you know the Facebook's and the more pubs with the world try to kind of figure out exactly what it should look like yeah so you know we are cautiously optimistic I would say yeah I agree I think especially for a smaller company it would probably save a lot of time for us but at the same time we would have to sift through all the crap let some bigger developers deal that's right all right here we go different different different take here so what are some games out there maybe some developers that really you think are nailing ad based monetization right now who are you looking up to you know who should the audience be downloading right after this to to get some good ideas of what to do next and and you're not allowed to name your own game so you guys followed the rules here anyone want to jump in sure so from my perspective whenever I see whatever I want to see who's advertising

like I want to see the kind of demand side of things what's going on I download either the latest Buddah or the good job games and I look at kind of which ads I see I think the real innovation happened and but when Vudu tried to take a very like methodical approach to add based monetization and then obviously Lion Studios good job games quali they're following when we kind of think about like the sophisticated ad based monetization developers we think of who do a good job games yeah my response was fast lane wrote to revenge from spacing I liked the game in general for monetization both within a purchase and ads but it's I think it's because it's clearly built with ad monetization in mind and UX is nice the buttons are nice that it fits right it fits in in the gameplay yeah so I decided that game so my choice was bad

LAN brawl and that was because I felt like they had a really nice balance between in-app purchases and ad monetization so they have these eggs that you can win and also every couple of hours you get a free egg that you can boost with an ad to get a better reward at the end so the eggs are like chests but in this case they are eggs but they also have a shop where you can buy these eggs it's like a gotcha mechanic yeah you can enhance by watching ads Angry Birds King one I mean if you check it out we're looking on Google it was a a year and a half or two years ago from their existing users though they complained that they were taking out ads from the game what's kind of you know people complaining about taking ads from the game improve that how well it was done based you get really good reports when you were watching videos so I think they had the right reason for a user to actually watch an item pay attention I think that's you know to me that was like the perfect and case scenario good all right

so this is about internal warfare and how you get things done as an ad network we are always caught in the crossfire between business people who want to do more stuff our SDK and like product or art or you know other teams who just don't want to focus on that when I work on features so how do you guys manage this what's every every company is different but any tips and tricks on getting the work done for ads which isn't always the top priority for the company well it's getting a lot of data together to predict the impact on how much money this will make the the presenter the product team and then after that after the product team approves after we've compiled all of these predictions together we then go to the tech team and then we begged them to make time for it text for art's after you've done a we beg them even what the best numbers they're still begging involved right yeah sadly a lot of other people have great numbers in the company that also

need to do some writing so it's who begs better having a project manager I mean I don't know if that's my answer I know it looks obvious but to me when I when I John Lackey was like ah that's why approaching - it exists so you have someone that's paralyzes and tells you you know we should be focusing on X or Y and have a an analysis and a rationale behind it so everyone from different teams understands you know this guy tells us which path we should be following and obviously agree that the Rays are gonna be following with a party or monitor things yeah I can definitely I won't name any names but with all the companies that I've had the pleasure to work with over a few jobs in this space the ones that have someone who's at least partially dedicated to monetization that can work with all the studio teams those are the ones that have successful integrations that are consistent and where the tech works because everyone is following the same playbook if if the studio manager has complete control and they're all different then it's it's very haphazard any other thoughts on that I guess if you're if you're a co-founder you just

get to side whatever right no it doesn't work like that ago he met the other answers and it's actually funny cuz like those definitely wouldn't work in our studio for example because we are very much like you know the apt analogy of a start-up is like you jump off a cliff and you try to build an airplane on the way down so that's kind of what we are like a little bit so you know we just kind of make a decision as to how the prioritization should work it doesn't have to be me or like any of my co-founders it's just someone who has the ownership and then we just even if we disagree we kind of commit to that so I think the trick is to really figure out which one what kind of you know product you're trying to build or what kind of feature you're trying to put in and whether you should do it yourself or whether you should rely on a third party that's kind of the biggest alright one last quick one this is lightning round a piece of advice for those new to

monetization I love the first answer who this is from someone who lives in the darkness half the year in Finland so I think talk to two people if you're like this talk to others my experience is that people are more than willing to whom we are a small games community so definitely reach out asked for recognized Finland I said Finland like twice Norway sorry Norway I think mine is a second one although I agree and dealer I mean like probably likely to write that third one - yeah just go to your existing network and ask for a hire you see p.m. you will be surprised sometimes you just get a yes and just make more money out of your existing eventually so definitely give it a go yeah that definitely works yeah I I learned a lot from talking to our mediation platforms and other they're just really eager to teach

things so I think most the things I learned you were from just talking these people I just said put your head down grind through there's no silver bullets you know gonna suck before it gets better again yes yes a net from Norway play a lot of girls always good advice all right I don't know if we actually have time for questions I think we're just about out but I love all this something to me it's about breaking down three simple things it's like you know how we get more people playing how do we get more of those people staying and how do we get people to spend more money with us and it simply is that you know you're not gonna get the resources in the team you're not gonna get the benefit you're not gonna get the conversion rates and but all of these are absolutely you know she's all gold by the way you know sort of the stuff that all you should be paying attention to in terms of how you make the best out of your it's your gaming experience and all that no I say thank you very much guys [Applause]

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