Superstar Session: Seize the Moment-Seasonal Changes in the Asian Market -The Best Times to Monetise

uh without much further ado let's get things moving um i'd like to kick off this track with our superstar session entitled seizing the moment seasonal changes in the asian market and the best times to monetize and acquire your users and presenting this is jason parmar from pango awesome thank you kate um just gonna share my screen and check that it all looks good from a presentation standpoint looks great awesome cool so thank you everyone for joining us today i really appreciate it um yeah so we'll be going through season the moment the seasonal changes in the asian market and the best times for you to monetize and acquire your users in asia um i'm jason i work at pangol here in emea and uh i look after our gaming publishers based here in europe um and here's a picture of me without a bid

so um if you've not heard of us uh we're the go-to place for user acquisition and monetization uh over a billion in total dow 11 billion daily impressions we haven't actually been going that long so to reach these numbers has been an incredibly fast time scale um and already breaking into the top ten uh globally for hyper-casual monetization and why does that matter as i said before um yeah in the last two years we've had 18x growth and why why is that important to you guys well from a developer's standpoint um we have the exclusive demand from tick tock for business we support uh in-app bidding and um from an advertiser standpoint we've got extremely powerful uh in-app advertising ua uh with high-quality traffic across a massive network but more on us later let's kick off with asia and why are we talking about it well because it's the largest game in market globally so here's just one bit of data

on that um asia actually almost makes up almost 50 percent of all games market revenue globally um with 1.5 billion people and quite a sizable almost 85 billion us dollars um china is a big part of that and so we're going to begin with them we call this like an attunement to ads and why do we say that well the chinese population is way more used to the freemium model and ads rather than subscription models like we have more in the west when it comes to consuming content and especially those in the less populated cities in the country um and this isn't just true for apps and games but on mobile but also in tv streaming as well so you know we have netflix and amazon prime and hulu and we're kind of more used to this subscription-based model where we might not see any ads for example but in china most of the on-demand streaming platforms like 10 video billy billy all employ a free model with ads

um and you can pay to get rid of them like we have in some platforms but it's a lot more normal to have at supported content an example of this actually that's quite quite practical is when you buy a tv the manufacturer of a lot of popular tv brands especially in the less densely populated cities um as soon as you h turn on the telly um they'll have a like a pop-up ad and that's not you know in linear television you're watching that's from the manufacturer that's pre-cached and that's something i've never heard of or seen in the west so that's just one example where china is very high in ad exposure connected to that it's kind of no surprise that ad revenue is on the rise in the country um you can see this stat from nico partners here 76 of players are from tier three to five cities in china which is 70 of the game revenue so with most of the players based in these tier three to five cities

they tend to have less income to spend on in-app purchases and games tend to be significantly more ad funded so as a market china does see significantly more of an ad focus for driving revenue now back to the seasonality so a big one here is chinese new year or lunar year and the three biggest industries across the ua side are gaming ecom and education january and february are the months where it tends to be more focused on gaming and education apps and you see these big spikes in those areas and the traffic uh on those apps dramatically increases during this period um inflating the revenue obtained and in the case of e-com they tend to go a little bit colder during this period and their investments tend to go down a little bit so chinese new year is a very very big big part of the year and very good for games to run in-game events um and i think all everyone who's based in china should be running live ops uh to engage in their audience during

this period um especially for around the festivals like luna festival uh many players are attracted to these games because of these events there's special in-game rewards and exclusive items during this period and besides just ua to acquire users you'll notice a lot of games companies also invest to retarget and also try and attract lapsed players with these special special deals and exclusive exclusive available in the in-game events next up in the seasonality we have the summer holidays where we notice big a big increase in mobile games revenue and total downloads um it's a time where students are essentially off and with less studies there's more times to gain so you'll notice that they both go up um and the gaming industry goes very very big in this part but once the holidays are over you do notice the revenue and downloads kind of stabilize um as people get back to studying in university and then finally another big seasonal trend in china is um

i mean we kind of call them shopping crazes um we it's where the gaming industry kind of invests a lot earlier in the year the two i mentioned before but ecommerce has created its own special days to drive um like traffic in their platform and focus in a lot of ua just before the date itself of these two these two are singles day which is on 11 11 and uh double 12 12 december and these are huge huge days for e-commerce generally and you see a huge massive influx of ad investment across multiple channels um which mobile games actually get to benefit from um but game gaming gaming spend tends to drop off here just purely from competition perspective because e-commerce spend absolutely skyrockets from november towards the end of the year and then kind of a bit on opportunity at least um in in china is uh splash ads which

don't aren't as popular here in the west very much but these are ads that pop up on the screen as soon as you actually open the app um so you might have a small logo of the app you're launching but mostly an ad they're usually skippable within five seconds um but an interesting trend here we've seen is that traditionally this hasn't been used very much in gaming it's mostly been an econ but um what we're starting to notice is gaming companies test this and actually have some pretty interesting results um one in particular we saw that i think his particular interest is um running these a b tests on okay we're gonna try splash ads what works should we have uh one a day two a day or every single time they open the app they get it and actually the best results for the one where the slash ad was shown every single time the user opened the app not only with an increase in rpu but no negative impacts on retention rates or rewarded video cpms which begs the question this is actually quite a big opportunity and it's obviously proven quite successful in china um in

the west it's not used as much but actually i think is it reflects quite a large opportunity as well um for the other markets globally to actually take advantage and test this in the future with that that will wrap up china and we'll move straight on to japan which we call an everlasting love for manga um because as you can see over the last few years in particular you've seen an explosion of manga on on phones and on digital um the market in japan for manga is absolutely huge um but why is this interesting well it's because of the very high user affinity between manga and core games so um manga apps tend to have a slightly higher frequency of the app launches per day longer sessions and the audience is around 18 to 35 um but so we kind of might think of it as like we binge watch tv they kind of binge read manga that's probably the easiest way to think about it but with these with these characteristics that actually lends itself extremely well

to the audience of of the core games so slg here on the right they did a case study with pretty amazing results as you can see um cvr 17 higher paying user rate went up um from 30 to 36 um so it's a if you're in the core game space this is actually a pretty good opportunity to link yourself towards that manga industry to acquire users because they're a very similar audience um and we can see they actually follow the same trends and downloads over the year and then moving on to seasonality um the big the big one in japan is actually golden week um where will you'll notice both manga and the core games launch new products in this same period um and it's very key because what we observe here is earlier in the you're you're best off launching actually at the start just before golden week that's why we said golden week preparation so you've got march to may but actually again a bit early is kind of the key here um and so you have golden week in japan and there's four festivities right

um after each other and chinese game publishers also launched their games in japan in this period so they're already kind of going into that so it's right after chinese new year and they they prepare very well for that and you'll see good results um and then next up you've got the summer holidays and a bond festival which is in japan um the summer holidays are great time for game developers and manga apps to focus on this is the right time to run like some of your in-game events again uh similar to how we mentioned in china when you've got the school holidays it's a it's a very lucrative time and a bond festival if you don't know is a three-day long festival where um students and adults are all off so it's a great opportunity to run events based on that people have got more time across across all of the ages and finally just to cap off japan now um we've got shigatsu which is new year um which is another really great time to launch campaigns and liveops especially any in-game promotions for in-app purchase in japanese new year is traditionally

received these red envelopes and actually pretty similar to china but it isn't just physical cash it's actually often like digital currency that people can spend as much so a lot of the money from these random red envelopes goes towards in-app purchases so hence why it's a very good time to run in-game promotions for your in-app purchases of your business so that will wrap up japan next we'll move on to korea which is a market that is very famous for mmorpgs the main thing we notice here is that a pretty massive eight of the top 10 grossing games in korea are mmorpgs and if you compare that that's a it's only four in china and none in japan so this is a huge huge market mmorpgs have continued to grow as well and we see here chat multiplayer and events but events has actually driven the most increase in revenue of 26 and these inga ingames events have been promoted with ua um and retargeting around the same time

in the festivities in korea um you've got the summer holidays you've got the global new year and christmas you've got korean new day new year and uh sam valentin so we see similar seasonality in asia there and these events drive so much revenue for the mmorpg games that they run them all throughout the year with clear pace peaks where players are enjoying their holidays here are some examples here an interesting pattern here that we've observed though is that many of the events happen in the first half of the month and this because people in korea and japan as i very briefly mentioned earlier they tend to spend um the money on games in the first weeks of the month when they have a higher budget at their disposal um this is very similar to you know finding me if you want a free drink you're probably going to get me best towards the end of the month when i've just been paid so similar to that you're much better trying to get people earlier at these events because that's in the early weeks of the month because that's when they're going to spend the most money with their disposable income

so in summary the the biggest mobile games in korea mainly focus uh their ad spend during these festivities um and as a general rule of thumb as with all games publishers should avoid the launch during college periods when students are studying for example as revenue clearly drops in these periods versus you can see in the summer holidays new year um it's it's much more stable and we'll come on to this a little bit later but i just wanted to briefly mention actually if you're if you're a record game developer we actually have a special solution just for you so you can definitely reach out to us um if you are in that sector we've specialized in the hyper casual quite a lot but we have solutions for for core games as well which um are quite promising that'll bring us on to the fourth area of asia we're going to cover which is uh southeast asia that's what c stands for and it's the fastest growing mobile market in the world um very simply put vietnam malaysia indonesia and thailand we group together specifically for this um sometimes people kind of call it the

new china just because of the rapid growth for mobile penetration as well as um general gdp as well um but and a seriously growing population um and but they observe quite an interesting trend so if we see here on the revenue fluctuations it's very clear there's quite there's three basic peaks here um and although these countries are all quite different from each other there's a lot of similarities we can see so paying attention to these trends uh definitely will help you from a ua monetization perspective um so first off we'll kick off with may may may is quite an interesting time because you have songkran in thailand and ramadan in indonesia and malaysia songkran is thailand's new year where people are off and for ramadan um according to appsfire mobile gaming helps them throughout their day with peaks in in-app purchase after the morning prayers about six to nine am and then eight p.m to midnight especially especially in casual games so if in the casual game space time of day has a big factor to do with ramadan which is a very big festival in

indonesia and malaysia but all were based around pretty much what you can see is i think pretty much the top peak of the year and then we move on to uh what we call the mega cell spillover effect on gaming so gaming benefits from another huge e-commerce um trend that i've very briefly talked about with the uh in about china with the rise of e-commerce so they take a little bit further in southeast asia um you know we talked about singles day and double 12 in in china but in in uh the southeast asian region you have a few more we have nine nine ten ten 11 11 and 12 12 and these kind of repeating number days are actually done four times um so with an increase in population uh mobile device penetration going up internet penetration e-commerce companies are massively investing uh to seize market share here um and there's a great spell of effect to mobile gaming so rather than investing in ad campaigns

um competing with e-com industries for people's attention is quite expensive games actually probably shouldn't invest in the ua quite as heavily specifically just because of the rates but if they strengthen their user attention and monetization opportunities again with in-game events and new updates you can have this bleeding effect off the back of econ which is which is really good um but yeah planning your ua around this and maybe going larger and ramadan for example is is probably smarter generally speaking and that can't that summarizes the full markets um i've just i've just covered but we'll do a quick recap uh to say just in case you missed anything because i think i went through that relatively quickly um so summer holidays you can see in all four regions we've covered here um particularly japan we suggest launching uh during a bomb festival which is in august where both students and adults are free next up we've got chinese new year and korean year also been key times for activity running in-game themed events

with exclusive rewards and time limited in-app is very critical here um and then q4 tends to be an explosive time for e-commerce um and rather than competing on with the e-commerce apps for users attentions focusing on increasing retention adding new content and in-game events in order to benefit from the spillover effects is probably the smarter thing to do here and then finally may is a very big time in japan and southeast asia capitalizing if you run localized ua campaigns you can yield really good results so as i mentioned ramadan and sokka and as well as japan japan's golden week is a very very good time here so with a few minutes left i thought i'd go a little bit over um to help you understand a little bit about pangal and who we are in case you haven't heard of us um and how we can help you with ua in in-game monetization so we're the two halves of our business i'll just talk about monetization first um so if you're a mobile games publisher one of the key differentials is that we have full access and exclusive access to

the tick tock for business ad demand um we're currently live with in at bidding which is getting better and better so we still support waterfall but as we progress over the future we're getting stronger and stronger in this area we also run the most popular ad formats um for mobile gaming so rewarded interstitial native and we can support the ua monetization growth loop um and then the ua side um yeah algorithmic driven ad tech which is really good app event optimization you've got playable ads playable production tools so for all of this we definitely recommend if if you're involved in asia at all are you interested in making money in that market um you should definitely already be working with us or if you aren't um check it out and just see for yourself um and for the next bit i'll just show you these are just some small selection of the partners we already work with in this uh in this area a lot of the top gaming published already there um but here's a small selection um and a

little bit about i mean this is actually why i joined um why why it's uh it's worth getting involved with now anyway and it's mostly just to do with this tremendous growth we've seen um as i mentioned before tick-tock for business grows on a ua side it benefits us and you have this incredible loop um so we've seen that in japan um i mean you can see we launched that less than two years ago um but if you if you think about how young we are it's quite massive having only launched like 18 months ago and seven with 7x that ad spend in less than a year since we started to point android but most notably um that's about 65 percent of the entire country's population is now covered by pango in japan which is which is phenomenal um in korea very similar story but launched even less uh long ago um less than a year ago but similarly very rapid growth in that market ax growth um and almost 60 percent i was 60 of top

gaming companies and almost 60 of the country's population already covered um covered by us and then southeast asia um even more growth um with 108 million dow um 800 percent increase in native and banner is really strong um so yeah it's very exciting and uh what we have is we're still early on the journey i would say um so to go beyond asia we currently can help you get to all the markets already listed but equally russia and some regions in minas specifically saudi arabia the uae egypt and turkey and i'd just probably close this all off by saying we're quite early in our in our growth trajectory all things considered um so it's an extremely exciting time as we continue to invest in our product to make it the best in the world and uh hopefully you know continue to expand and grow um around the world so with that thank you for taking the time there um please do send then some questions in so we've got a

few minutes to answer those um and yeah please feel free to reach out to me on linkedin for anything else or if you want to know anything we don't get covered or can't reach out just connect with me on linkedin message me on the discord and and we can chat so with that i'll hand over to you kate i think yes well you do have quite a few questions so uh we've got about eight minutes left so uh yeah so the first one was how do you think advertising growth will impact premium games in china which does which does seem pretty healthy compared to elsewhere uh cool sorry wait how do i think uh advertising growth will impact premium gains in china yeah that's a good question i think when you when you're saying premium games i'm assuming he means ones that rely more heavily on iap versus iaa i think generally as a trend you'll notice as countries tend to get richer like like we do in the west that in-app purchases tend to actually go up as people get more disposable income the advertising side will put more pressure on a lot of the premium games

to actually support formats that um are maybe more user-friendly for example i think rewarded video is probably the best example of this we've seen a lot of other formats like say when we have interstitial video they can slightly damage the user experience so if you're a premium app um you might you want to stay you probably want to stay clear of that right but with rewarded when you have the option you don't really annoy anyone so i think i think the impact would actually mean that a lot of the premium apps might look more into in-app advertising and conversely over time those completely ad-funded apps that exist right now in 10 years time they might start pushing more towards their in-app purchases and subscriptions as well yeah great um do you have examples of core games that are aren't manga mmo etc based on doing well in the japanese market as a western developer i understand it's very hard to crack japan yes okay i need to i'll have to get back to you personally on like once i check

with the team on what those examples are because we'd have to get probably sign off from our partners so i don't want to say anything that gets me in trouble but um very very good question if you can follow that up with me actually i can find out if i can get um we can we can get back on which ones they those are but um yeah i think that's a really valid valid point i think japan is actually an incredibly difficult market um it runs pretty isolated um and and is different and we have to kind of rethink a lot of our western uh well i'm in the west so i'm saying that my preconceptions and that's what i've been doing since i joined the company so um i'll try and get you some examples over um of how they've done that great uh another question is pango playable what are some campaign setup tips sorry say that one again they they asked if pengle is playable oh excuse me is pic in pango playable what are some campaign setup tips sorry um we have a tool to help uh with uh

setting up the playables and i recommend definitely using that and then obviously the the main thing is just kind of testing really um once you've once you've set up your campaign set it live obviously run what you think is going to work best play around and test test test and that i think that's kind of the key to i think i think everyone will say this is probably the key to being successful my my experience in gaming before um and in previous roles as well has always been um the more you test the more you the more you know and then you know what to commit to and go big on so um we've got the tools to help you help you with that um but yeah the tools to help you create them and then test them i would say great uh is pango playable shown in other games or tick-tock i can't speak about tick-tock specifically but um when you buy pangol we do support it yes and it's not a blanket our publishers all have the option of what formats they support and choose to take on so yes um on the take top side i can't i

can't speak to that yet this might be a big question but the they did say that the info about time timing of sessions during ramadan was very insightful are there any other similar seasonal patterns that we should be considering when looking at particular asian markets yeah i mean we've gone through most of the major ones there there's definitely things i've missed um that i'm probably not aware of um so i mean i tend to ask people because i thankfully know enough people from those countries when it comes up um but yeah definitely i would look online and just check and then um that they'll all be more prevalent we've kind of given you the main ones there but um there's certainly more and if you wanted to go more granular say you take the advice from what we've presented today yeah take it a step further and go the more localization you can do the better it is and you know i'd say compare that to your own experience in life like when you see something um that you know i live here in the uk when i see something that's very relevant to

british cultural events i'm all over it and everyone is like that pretty much in their own country so um i don't have any at the top of my head i would add to that list that we've talked about i think we've covered the main ones but yeah look look up some more i think there's definitely ones i've missed we've we've just given you the high level there great and why do you think splash ads are not as popular in the western markets i i have a theory yeah um because i looked into it before i think and i'm unaware of this i don't know how many people have run tests to actually get results on how it works that's why i found it so interesting that we had the um when they run the three and the results were oh no the best is actually doing it every time i mean it kind of blew my mind but it makes sense and i think in the west we kind of just don't want to do it so you know you've got your balance i think every company has this right on the publisher side you have your balance between user experience and um your monetization and i think because we

we all um by default would go that seems intrusive like that seems intrusive from day one that it's got to be bad for user experience but i haven't actually seen many studies that actually prove that um so far and i think maybe what we've done is we've we've just seen it and gone no that just sounds terrible but i think it's encouraging to see maybe we should open up i would also highlight that i think there's not that many um on the ad tech side that are actually supporting the format right now i think that will be in the future um and there are some but it's very limited but i think it's a growth opportunity for the for the future years because um i'm pretty sure a lot of the the tech providers and obviously including ourselves and that will consider supporting it in the future um because it run the tests and get the numbers and i think it will change i i think in china they did it more because we took i talked about the ad tolerance they have so there i think it would be more of a no-brainer to go for it straight away

and see because i think we've held back in the west because we have like a product manager sees it just goes no you know when i've worked at a games company i know this is more than anyone um so i think maybe we need to open our minds a little bit in the future and i think it will get there let's see um so yeah we we're not gonna get all these questions and that's just a reminder to people that we do have discord so you can always hop over to discord and answer the questions there assuming that jason if you're gonna hop over there too and reply to questions so there's plenty of time over on discord to answer to ask your questions this last one very quickly um uh i'll just uh i'm actually going to skip down because that one question is way too long do western holidays get accepted in regional markets like christmas july 4th etc depends um i'm not i can't speak to it too much there are interesting ones where you know just from personal experience if you go to i i think this one's pretty interesting if

you've ever heard of kfc in in japan uh over the christmas period it's incredibly popular i think they've done a i mean they did this a long time ago but it's pretty genius like in in japan they think you have chicken at christmas and you go to kfc like kfc buckets are like reserved at christmas i think that there is a for the ones that aren't observed for religious reasons let's say christmas for example they can become culturally interested in right so in that case that's a very good example of a western uh festivity actually being reshaped as well by by a company in the west uh with kfc there so i think there are they are observed obviously not just um uh religious religiously but um yeah you can you can find out and we can notice the spikes in traffic we didn't notice any of that came out enough to put into this presentation as a key one but it does make sense right if you've already got the assets and you're running seasonality in your western markets i recommend going in

country by country specifically to check and see if there is any popularity because there is things that spill over and we've seen that with western brands that have done done very well in china it's the ones with the very strong brands um that have created like a more cultural sense of identity or coolness to them um so i think i think some of the festivities could bleed over um but it'll be case by case great well excellent well that's all the time we have so thank you very much that was incredibly insightful yes and uh please reach out for any other questions and we can we can chat you