The Walled Garden Stack: Why no new Mediation platform has Survived Since 2017 by Felix Braberg

By my estimates, I think the daily global mediation markets facilitates between 38 million to uh 38 to 50 million payouts per day in publisher earnings. So the main mediation players still today is Appl and Max, Unity Level Play, Google ADM Mob and then you have the two other ones which is DTX fair bit and chart boost. Uh they have a product called Helium. So the interesting things here is that these main players in the mediation space on mobile hasn't changed at all since pretty much 2017 or something like those coins up worlds. We're the two and a half gamers the midnight crew talking UA adverts and game design too mate feeling shak bringing the insight we're rocking those vibes till the early day life a master eyes on the prize tracking

data through the cyerspace skies feeling stacks colors like a wizard in disguise jacks lift us to the highest and a half gamers talking smack slow hockey sick got your back ads are beautiful they light the way click it fast don't delayhuh Uh-huh. Aha. Aha. Aha.
Hello everyone and welcome to yet another fantastic solo episode of the Two and a Half Gamers podcast where you can stay two and a half steps ahead of the mobile gaming industry. So, as you can see, today is another solo episode, which means we're going to be focusing on something ad monetization related because after I did the last one of these a couple of weeks ago, you guys said you really liked it. So, I wanted to expand on that and do another solo

episode. So, what last time when I was alone, I spoke most about the ad placements that I've seen to work a lot lately. So what I wanted to do now was shift the gears a bit more and talk about the other side of admonetization. So that is how networks are performing overall so far in 2025. So I made you guys a little deck. I think we'll only have about 10 or 15 minute minutes of talk, but hopefully by the end of this the aim is that you kind of will know what the things that I'm excited about on the earning side from the different networks currently so far in 2025. So you know what networks to keep an eye out for and you know what networks to work with. The first thing that I'm starting to notice so far in 2025 is that there's a lot of classic kind of ad monetized heavy publishers that are kind of taking a step away from using ads as a major

monetization tool. The most interesting things is that when we were doing the reviews on this channel of Whittle Defender by Hab, which is traditionally a Yeah, Hab's best known for like Survivor.io or Archer where the monetization is actually 50/50. So 50% ads and 50% APS. What's interesting here is that on Whittle Defender, and this has kind of been a trend with Hab for the last year where they're moving more and more away from this hybrid monetization uh monetization split in their games and they're actually moving more and more into hard more like midcore or casual games where the monetization is actually tilted more to APS. So on Whittle Defender, only about 11 or 12% of the total monetization mixes actually comes from their rewarded ads and they've completely abandoned interstitial ads.

What's even more interesting is that RollIC, which is a brand or a studio that's synonymous with ad revenue because they had their big rise during the hyper casual era. And the last two games that they've brought out, Whole People and Knitout, which has been their last two puzzle hits, have had probably the lowest amount of ad revenue of any of their titles. I estimate anywhere between 15 to 20% uh of those of the revenues earned in those titles are actually coming from ad revenue. So this is quite interesting. So you have two of the main kind of studios in the world that used to be synonymous with ad monetization and ad revenue taking a step away towards AP revenue. So from my perspective, I think there's a couple of things that's behind this shift from ad revenue to AP revenue. And one of the main ones is that for the last 2 years, ad monetization has gotten absolutely

clobbered in terms of overall eCPM. So as a rule of thumb or what I usually say, eCPMs right now are about 20% lower, I would say, across the board to what they were during the co time. So there's a couple of things behind this, right? So co times it was just silly season because eCPMs were so high because people were forced to spend a lot of time on mobile because they had nothing to do. Then you also have a bunch of privacy changes which have changed particularly on iOS which has decreased eCPMs. And then also you have the shift inside of mediation platforms where essentially you used to have a setup where you had hybrid setup where you had both biders and ad placements in terms of yeah waterfall calls and when you completely remove the waterfall calls there's nothing that really keeps the overall price in the average mediation stack high. So usually what you have happen to see what happens over time is that eCPMs tend to decrease over time when you have

majority of the revenue on bidding and that's kind of the trend that we're seeing across the board in all mediation platforms. But one of the interesting things here is that these two studios are moving away from ad monetization. And probably the interesting thing from habi here that you also see on Capiarago and Archerro 2 is that they're also bundling a lot into kind of their AP sales that actually removes all the ads. So for example, if you pay for something for £15 or 15 or 15, then actually you remove ads forever including rewarded ads. thing to remember here as well mediation platform how they're kind of set up is that they're built to be walled gardens right so level play Google and apploving they basically control the networks that we're able to work with which basically means that the demand is kind of

controlled so this is a list of all the networks that are currently available in the mediation platforms on the left is uh level play on the right is appl These are kind of some of the main networks, but and kind of a big overview on what's actually going on in the mediation market as a whole. Uh by my estimates, I think the daily global mediation markets facilitates between 38 million to uh 38 to 50 million payouts per day in publisher earnings. So the main mediation players still today is AppLab and Max, Unity Level Play, Google ADM Mob and then you have the two other ones which is DTX fair bit and chart boost. Uh they have a product called Helium. So the interesting things here is that these main players in the mediation space on mobile hasn't changed at all since pretty much 2017 or something like that. The only one that used to be on

here was Mopub which was owned by Twitter. And the interesting thing here is like this is a kind of a cornered market to say that there's no new entrance into this market because essentially Google kind of controls this space by giving by controlling who they give access to for Google bidding. So for example, if I'm a new mediation platform that wants to enter this market, it's going to be very hard for me to get Google bidding because essentially they control who you work with and it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. So networks to be able to connect to a new mediation platform, they want to be assured that they can get high amounts of demand that basically plugs into their new mediation platform. And if you can't guarantee that, then you won't basically get any development time from the developers to actually build out the demand side of this. So it's always a kind of cat like chicken and egg problem where you it's really hard for new entrance to kind of break into this space. So, as you can

see by some market estimates that I've been doing, so AppLin Max is absolutely dominating both the Android and the iOS mediation market share. Crazy how much they've been able to grow. And basically, my main thoughts behind this is because basically Max is the only mediation platform that gives you access to ad ras and blended rowass campaigns, but only if you're on their mediation platform. So I can still run ad row or ad row as campaigns on unity and Google even though if I don't mediate with those platforms but applovin was the only one that kind of push that through to be one of the main things that is a value ad from being on applovin max. So what's going on? What's going on here in terms of the largest networks? So, here's a list of the overall largest networks I saw in terms of share revenue across my clients

in November to December 2024. So, that's last Christmas, so about 6 months ago. So, let's see what's actually going on here. As most of my clients have been on AppLab Max, this is basically very Maxheavy data that's coming in here. But you can see like in the top it's pretty much dominated by applo and Google and meta. The most interesting thing here is that on banners right now the biggest source of demand in the world is now or in Europe and in the US is actually now Amazon publisher services. So right here this is not volume this is revenue right. So the most interesting thing here is that Amazon publisher services has surpassed Google as the number one source of banner revenue in the states and in Europe. The interesting thing here is that Amazon Publisher Services controls how many publishers they're currently working with. So what's interesting here is that

Amazon, they basically entered the market a couple of years ago into mobile, but what they did was they did a controlled launch. So you had to apply to basically get access to Amazon publisher services. And what actually happened a couple of weeks ago was that they kicked off about a hundred publishers from their platform without a warning. No one really knows what Amazon right now is doing or why they kick these publishers off. It's a bit hard to say why, but essentially it's kind of a frustrating network to work with because a you might not be approved to work with them, but if you do, it's usually a good thing. So, Amazon publisher services which is typical to Amazon their main benefit from working on this network is that you can launch something called the Amazon TAM or transparent ad marketplace. So, what TAM allows you to do is actually call up the largest DSPs

or demand sources inside of Amazon Publisher Services and work with them directly on a IO deal, which means that the typical price that Amazon charges, I think, is about 17 or 36% for actually showing ads from other demand partners through their SDK. But what actually happens is that if you work with them direct, basically they cut that fee to near zero. So, the interesting thing here is that Amazon has been probably for the clients that I'm using it on, one of the strongest networks in the last two or three years on banners. But basically, they control who you work with. So, it's actually really hard to get on that platform. Super unfair, super frustrating. Even more frustrating because in the last couple of weeks, they basically just cancelled a bunch of the publishers and no one really knows what's going on there. I used to be able to speak to them on a call or things like that, but I haven't been able to do that for years and no one really knows what's going on there. So, it's a bit upsetting that one of the largest networks is being kind of so

untransparent on who they work with and why, which is a bit sad, which makes this kind of yeah, working with this network kind of hard. So, one of the other networks I also wanted to talk to about or that I'm seeing quite a lot of interesting things come out of is Malokco. So I'm not being paid anything for saying this but essentially Malokco has been one of the latest incumbents that came into the space and if we look at the rankings here again you can see that uh already already here just during Christmas time is one of the largest banner providers on iOS and one of the largest rewarded ad providers on iOS and the same thing on Android. So you can see it here. So the interesting thing about Maloka is it's a DSP right so what that means is that DSPs traditionally buy only inventory with algorithms from S and the thing about

SSPs is that they don't have any direct relationship with you as a publisher. What they actually do is they buy inventory secondhand via networks that have a direct SDK link with you. So these are typically the sources that you can see in the adups txt file. So resellers, right? So usually DSPs don't like to go direct because it's not part of their business model. So what Maloka has actually started to do now is basically start to go direct to publishers because they've gotten so big in terms of spend. I think I heard some rumors that uh it's rumored that Maloco will have about $2.2 billion worth of spend in 2025, which is up from I think 1.1 last year. So it's growing like wildfire. So whatever they're doing on the US side is working extremely well. Uh but basically what happens is when you hit a certain mark as a DSP that means that uh you can't simply get

enough demand anymore or supply anymore to satisfy your demands. You actually have to start going direct. So this is exactly what Maloko started to do about 2 years ago. Uh basically they launched their SDK and it was also a little bit like Amazon is doing. So they had a select group of publishers that they wanted to work with. Traditionally, you want to work with probably the top 100 or top 200 publishers on mobile because that gives you a very good coverage of the users that you kind of want to get access to. So Maloco recently uh announced that they will allow anyone basically just to sign up on their web page. So basically anyone now can sign up uh and use Maloco in their ad stack. And it's kind of been one of the best networks to add for me in my clients. Typically when you add Maloco usually where you see overall on videos about a 8 to 15% increase on ad arow basis and sometimes on banners they take up to 20% increases on iOS or Android

but I've seen even bigger. So probably Maloka has been one of the most interesting surprises for me in this last year of an example of a DSP being so big that they actually have to go direct. So that sums it up for me. Basically what I just wanted to talk about or reiterate here is that the two strongest networks that are kind of the newcomers is Amazon Publisher Services which is extremely hard to work with which is frustrating. And the other network that you can work with is Maloco, which is one of the networks that has been growing the most lately. That sums it up for me today. If you want me to do any of these short episodes covering any topic that you want to know about, please write me in the comments and I will make a specific video on any ad monetization topics that you would like to know more about. So, this has been another very brief but hopefully interesting episode for you uh on ad monetization, and I hope to see you again next time. Bye-bye.

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