The Right Publishing Model for Ad Monetisation Games; Light Publishing

[Music] thanks for staying to hear this presentation I'm Melinda from Abby Lee we actually haven't really expanded our operations outside of China since 2016 and so this is kind of our first time to come to speak at a large gaming event like this and present what we have been working on and a way that we want to propose to work with studios and even publishers outside of China so I wouldn't say it's the right way of publishing and the title isn't about light publishing is what we call it actually I wanted to kind of explain how

we came to arrive at the idea of working through light publishing and it's kind of an opportunity also to give us to give avidly some you know feedback or comments about what you guys think about this model of working with partners so I'm a little brain dead from jet lag since 2:00 a.m. okay so then just if I'm missing anything I will go through this quickly because I'm not an youäôre monetization expert it's more generic publishing model that I'm going to talk about so I would leave more time for questions so I wanted to break down the session and kind of the talk in three big parts one is to look at kind of the context of China where we built the business on so we so we started out in 2016 to publish games for Chinese

developers globally we didn't publish them in China and kind of I wanted to show like the trends that are happening in China that kind of propelled us to do this the second is based on the foundation of business that we have the kind of data that we've been able to accumulate working with all these developers in China and the technology and the kind of the granularity that we focused on trying to optimize publishing in general and then thirdly is that new way that we are proposing to work with partners outside of China and this is where we'd hope to hear from you guys as well so I'll start with China's export market I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with this you might be but okay first about avidly so we started in 2016 before that we were actually an Android developer and then that exited to a very large Internet

company at that time in China the whole team the founders started to reorient into social gaming these are some of our biggest titles we have a range from hyper casual now to casual to even mid hardcore mostly focused on Southeast Asia and Japan but this is kind of like our whole portfolio the 150 games that we've acute that we've published up to date that's not all of them are online anymore some of them are off shelf so this is just kind of a idea of the scale that we have right now on publishing so we were able to take advantage of China's this this huge push towards getting the developers to make games and target the global market and not China as you know like the policies around

game content domestically is getting tighter and tighter not just for in-app purchase but also for ads so so they are the and you can see from the Global Users spent here that users are actually players outside of China actually quite what's the word they're quite they quite like the games that are coming out from Chinese developers so we've been working with this group of developers and we're still continuing to expand that network the second year here is just to show kind of the main market so you can see it's still a lot of tier one markets Middle East Africa Southeast Asia these are growing so we are actually doing a lot of this UA activity user acquisition for a lot of our partners games in these markets this is a projection so up until 2021 so and

this is not even counting ad revenue so so we're expecting that a lot more are gonna come out of China and they are going to be competing globally with other games that are also not published in China so this is kind of just a scale of revenue but you could see it's going to be 30 to 40 percent by by next year and so I've been hearing like the you know everybody talking about this hybrid monetization model so actually not there aren't a lot of developers or studios in China that are choosing to monetize the hybrid way I think it's catching on they actually we are in a way pushing them to monitor to add ads into their games or they're kind of not really the desire

isn't that great but but this is there's a growth and we see that they are going to kind of add more ads into their games and this hybrid model is actually going to take on more so you're gonna see more games Chinese made games competing on the global stage with more of a hybrid monetization model so this is so after it so the context of the market that we have been building the business around we not only publish but we also help them monetize optimize their monetization in the games so right now we have almost almost 3000 actually 3000 game apps from all over kind of 200 developers or publishers in China and over half of

that so I think over over a thousand we actually manually optimize and this is for their in-game ad mechanism add logic add design placements and this this kind of this it it was a monetization platform that we built in-house for avidly but we kind of opened that up for our partners so this is kind of the numbers in terms of monetization that we are working on so here we we do have a comprehensive report that we released this year but it's in Chinese so I didn't bring any but in that we kind of look at all the different kind of ad formats and how they impact retention rates and what

metrics should you actually care about such as you know there's a there's a penetration rate that equation that we actually look at instead of just focusing on optimizing your a CPM so so based on this market Chinese market going global we've been able to build kind of a proprietary Big Data engine and we're still trying to every year we're trying to drive more value out of this kind of big data engine and to get more ways to help our partners publish more effectively so so um so next I'm gonna talk a little bit about the two pillars I'm just gonna quickly go through them the two pillars

that we have been focusing on are publishing core competency on and the product itself when we evaluate a game we do look at a lot of the product design but but we focus primarily on what we can do which is mostly UN monetization and we think that these three things has to go hand in hand in order to make a product successful so in terms of UA these are the three pillars that we mainly look at creative and assets this year we actually have a plan to to get more granular in terms of ranking them during our campaigns so I can't share too much hopefully next year I'll be able to but but basically what we're trying to do here is to spend the least amount of money to acquire the most the best users so later I'll talk a little bit more about this in terms of ad monetization so based on the almost 3000

games that we have this is kind of the this is not there's nothing you know secretive about this equation which is why I confirmed with our monetization lead we can put this out here but this is mainly to show that how we optimize for an impression and it's very much a lot of this weight is put on this user level add value or or a label that we give them when they enter the game and we have almost 3000 games that we have done this for so there are some patterns that you can see with different genres and this is mainly ad behavior so this is just to give you an idea on the ad on the monetization side how granular it gets okay and then this is just to illustrate

that we as a publishing house we don't do any in-house development we work with our partners and we rely on them for the content and their development so they're relying on okay so there's a mess up in format it should go from so we're looking from impression to click download install and for some games even registration and then you continuously track that engagement so we're so we are we are constantly looking at you know based on understanding this not funnel but this kind of logic behind you a and connection between you and monetization we thought really hard about you know as a publishing company we have all these third-party third parties that we rely on data and analytics and optimization

what can we do based on our own data and our foundation to connect this entire process and so actually we came up with something proprietary last year and this is kind of a screenshot of how it kind of looks like on the back end of our monetization platform which we opened up for our partners is to connect UA and monetization so based on the granularity of you know our users add behavior information we are able to track or measure their ad revenue per user on the per user level and use this information to connect to so we can actually connect this level of information back to apps fire whether you're using apps fire or

whether you're using ad just to connect it back to your campaign ROI and and here I circled these two these two things is mainly to show that actually only a very small percentage of your users contribute to most of your revenue and you can see that new users so there's there are a lot of factors that would go into impacting your ad revenue and we wanted to get a little bit more you know detail about how that's how that looks exactly and then how and then help our partners to get use that level of information back into their user acquisition strategy so we did this for our own game and we actually did this we actually use this for all of our games right now it connects to our in-house

publishing all in one kind of data system and we have this ad user ad revenue user level ad revenue data level that's plugged into all our UA spend per channel and and so for this game you could look it up on the Play Store we were able to determine so you can look at how this would impact our decision and even for some of the social casino games like bingo party that we have this level of information actually was able to help us raise our o I by between ten to forty percent and we test this on our own games and we are actually hoping that Morgan could benefit from this level of data okay and so this is kind of just to illustrate our back-end all-in-one

publishing system that we have that we use we actually built it from scratch in 2016 when we started publishing games and then it's you know it follows the product throughout its lifecycle so our partner is actually just focused on the development and they just handed a hand over the game to us this is for like a traditional publishing model so we do everything around this and we make sure that we actually are able to project you know the kind of ROI that you'll be seeing throughout the lifecycle so which brings to what Mike said about the right publishing model we actually so I'm over time now so we actually thought really hard about what can we do with this level of technology that we have to work with more partners and we actually thought maybe we don't have to always publish a game for them for for those

who want to self publish we actually proposed something called white label publishing so this is like will pop you publish the game under your own Brown under your own account and we do everything around it so remember that triangle with you at monetization will do everything around that game and be able to still use what we have that whole product lifecycle projection model to help you to kind of model out the ROI and actually the terms are quite simple so in this case we are not a publisher really anymore although we do everything a publisher does but we're kind of just the service kind of the we're kind of just the service provider to help your game succeed and we take a minority of the profit share so this

think why is a profit share is because this would be total revenue minus you a cost so you can everything is very transparent on what we spend since everything is data-driven so anyway so this is I'm out of time but the key thing here is that we wanted to basically help more games help more ideas with the methodology that we have in the capabilities that we have and we can create more repeat excites us not just for games that we publish so yeah so I can add me here and I do look forward to hearing all your feedback and yeah thanks my fantastic Belinda thank you very much [Applause]

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