Trends in mobile game monetization

thank you guys for joining us we are here today to talk about monetization got some experts in the field here who've been doing this for years been running all sorts of ads and different stuff to to bring more pennies out of each user so I will we've only got 30 seconds 30 seconds 30 seconds go 30 minutes here a bunch of questions and we want to leave a little time for Q&A so new approach we're gonna put their answers on the screen so you don't have to spend time like going at each person and then we'll just dive into like the most interesting stuff from each question and and the color commentary so we have a bunch of different types of studios represented here I'll go through each each person here we got CK over here are inside so CK's got is the CEO of COO apps and they make some really cool casual games really a great little company that's mostly in the Philippines CK is out of Seattle which is where I'm

from too and so they run a bunch of different video and interstitial run like every ad network ever so they can they can tell you anything Taber thinking ape local celebrity in the game development world I'd say I've been coming to his meetups for years and you know yes everyone knows tabor so social kind of messaging type games they've run a bunch of different types of ads as well we've got CJ from I win a veteran of the space all sorts of kind of casual casual games one of their bigger games is Deal or No Deal from the the game show and then we've got Kenneth here from hothead a big local studio also a local celebrity at least in my mind I've been working with Kenneth off and on for years it seems like and they run every type of that Under the Sun as well so that's that's it for the intros so kind of diverse set of types of games represented here but lots of experience

on monetization and you know as this business of advertising has matured these guys have kind of been along for the ride to learn all the things to do right and wrong so we'll dive into that so my first question I posed the crew here was okay so what percentage of your engineering resources go to ads in any way shape or form whether it's putting in SDKs or building UI related to ads and then what percentage of your revenue comes from ads I'm missing one answer here but surprisingly or maybe not surprisingly depending on your perspective you'll see revenue here is really quite a great investment you could say ad revenue versus engineering any comments here from the crew and you know after you when you thought about this question did did did it spark any insights or thoughts I think for us like none of the engineers wanted to work on the ads too much and so it's always like hey if we get this in we can get a bunch more features and so yeah for us that

explains why you know a large percent of our revenue come from ads but in terms of time spent like it's it's much easier to get the team excited for working on getting features and stuff but you know like we we need to monetize and especially for casual games I think ads are really important and so yeah that's that's for us yeah I'm like in my hand I guess I'm obligated yep but when they did and in Deal or No Deal where the game is the game it's a very simple game so for literally two years we did no updates to the game other than updating ad SDKs so we came very hard to sort of you know talk about and promote hey you know when you're gonna do an update the value add there and so we sort of just started making stuff up but so very little effort I think went to actually the production of the game and significant amount actually went to working with the likes of hyper Amex or a new ad supplier but what we did see what was pretty unique is that every single time that we added more ads into the game it had no impact on retention

but it always had a greater impact on monetization so the net net was more ads the better you don't have to answer if you don't so I think the industry in evolving so it's the ad space so I think period maybe like three four years ago you can't you just answer engineering essentially just to put an SDK in but nowadays you're asking the engineer and the designer and the producer you're involving a lot more people but the effort is well worth it I would say that because you have to definitely incorporate not just putting SDK in but incorporate into your game as well I think that's the biggest different and we we definitely see an impact on revenue and I I concur that as definitely if you put it in the right way it doesn't hurt retention in fact it will help retention and engagement and it will help confusion as well

yeah our games are a little bit more mid-course so we have less probably less ads but we spent we spent probably less time on engineering as well but we did build an entire system for party in my dorm which allowed us to spend very little time integrating new ad networks and so we spent a lot of initial resources but now it's actually quite many this is the most self-serving slide for me I work at an ad network just full disclosure it's called hyper Amex we run brand video ads in games so work with these guys to help monetize you know a lot of the ads you see in games are for other games we try to bring in ads from Toyota and McDonald's that kind of thing and one of the things we always hear from from developers is it just takes too much effort to my engineers don't want to do it or you know I've got other priorities and when I hear about the percentage of revenue that's coming from ads growing and growing from almost every studio I talk to since I've been doing this it seems like that that pay

off you know is often worth it all right next question so avoidable mistakes that you've made along this path I put the kind of the highlights up here not being aggressive enough etc except or anyone want to comment on their their comment here and I actually don't know who said what here I kept a totally anonymous eye it's true I do you look at my SurveyMonkey account I guess I'll start again so mine is the last one not being able to turn off admin works remotely so dad was really good he definitely delivered on his promises but there's some ad networks that when they initially talk to you they promise blah blah CPMs blah blah fill rates and so yeah so when you add it in and then you go oh shoot like it's not it's not what you expected and then and then you want to turn it off and then you go and you ask your engineers I go can we turn it off and they say no it was hard-coded there's that that then you know so that's I'd say that's one of the you

learn that pretty quickly so yeah so - oh and networks and SDK are created like I think that's a common mistake that's saying okay so never a lie would be they all the same not much different in reality it's not the engineer requirement is definitely different you have to look at the memory consumption the size there's a lot to think about and one tip is talk to you talk to your friends talk to your friends in industry basically as the network ask them for reference and basically saying hey who do you work with who would you like recommends that I can talk to you because there's a lot of you know on the publisher side we love sharing information with another pub so that they are avoid the pit for because in return essentially we've I think anyway is paid forward so at some point you gonna have a network that you're gonna share back with me same you know same kind of thing to avoid and then we that's how we learn essentially

- the rewards in the core loop cannibalize revenue so we first integrated ads we had it so that the ads rewarded progress into the core loop and that was kind of dangerous it cannibalized some of our revenue it still performed really well but we didn't want to cannibalize our in-app purchases so we changed it to reward goods outside of the core loop and that was a much better yeah this is a really interesting answer because I like to believe in my perfect world that it would never cannibalize revenue ads are perfect but it was actually kind of interesting to see someone put that because it's actually the opposite of what some other comments later here are because it like games like Crossy Road put it right into the core loop and it's been a big bonanza if you will but you guys are actually smart enough to analyze it in a way that like you could tell first yeah and Crossy roads is kind of a game designed to deliver at right are games designed of these long-term social

interactions and so it's important for us to not cannibalize that you know purchase but also we design our games with no video ads to start so trying to shoehorn it in was really it took some you know massaging and we found a pretty good basically a variable reward system where they have a spinner to get some rewards and that allowed us to really tweak and control how much currency were giving out and how many Goods and putting custom quality items for the players that they can only get from video ads and so they want the video ads because they can only get certain things from video ads but it doesn't count applies the rest of yeah I think that variable reward thing works well too it's something we work with glue on there Racing rivals game and they do a great job of like oh sometimes I get diamonds or sometimes I get cash and it's different every time and you know get that kind of slot mechanic in people's head it's I'm not sure which mine was but I'd have to say probably because actually all these I think are very relevant to all the games but I would certainly concur with that all not

ad networks are the same and they also change over time so you'll be working with one ad network in six months that might be losing some momentum in the space and so I think it's critical to continue to either a mediate or continue to test various other ones and really relevant to that you know we sorted out with interstitials and then we went to video and none of them were rewarded never said hey if we're gonna turn a Jim ads down quote-unquote people's throats you know might as well give them give them some value out of that and so we really then moved all ads to eat rewarded ads and it's not as if they had to go to a certain area to get rewarded stuff that he just happened for watching a video which became much more I think you guys might have invented the rewarded interstitial I don't think I've ever seen it before it was like it's a forced ad but you get rewarded it's kind of nice well genius really it's like if you're gonna make someone watching that alright let's go to the next one so mediation all these guys use a third party in some case also some

combination of in-house software to manage multiple networks in one game so that you can optimize revenue from a bunch of different networks so the number one reason for doing that simplicity that's that's I like that one a lot because that's something we talked about in my company lies is making this kind of thing simple but all these are good reasons any any of you that have gone the route of in-house versus third party and gone through that transition and seek a I think you guys we did and we worked with one group not to sort of mention names and then we did switch to hyper aromatics but sometimes mediation works and it doesn't because a lot of times the ad networks don't like it in so you have to still carry their SDK anyway we have been happy was sort of the HyperX model but I think you know when you look at all of these here it certainly yields a higher CPM but I think it gives you a good visibility into all the networks and which networks are trending higher and so you don't

have to do this manual process of turning one off and turning the other one on ultimately it produces a higher yield it saves you that engineering time to every every time you want to show off a network yeah I always say let let a company like ours do the dirty work looks like our core mission is to help companies do this there's no reason to kind of reinvent the wheel though that said CK you guys do a little bit of your own and you seem to do well with it you kind of do a hybrid model yeah so so we do our own mediation we started off like really early like 2013 when ad was basically at calling it was only choice and then very quickly I think vongole contacted us and we want to try it out and I think that was before any of the mediations were out so we had built our own and then what end up happening was like the eCPMs don't don't fluctuate too much on like a daily basis it's actually over weeks and so we just look at it once a week and then sort of change the waterfall and that's been good enough but before Android for example because

there's more so fragmentation and Andrew for us as a hobby and so for that one we use use mediation but yeah but in general like if we build it ourselves allows us to have more control and testing out networks that may or may not be supported by some of the mediations and so yeah no all right let's move to the next one here so average eCPM in the US for rewarded video on iOS so I think we see a nice range here I guess my my first thought is you know eCPMs are often a reflection of the type of game that you run so I'm just gonna guess that the highest one here is the most hardcore game and the lowest one is the most casual game is that fair guess yeah any major fluctuations or disagree that because our games Deal or No Deal is extremely casual yet it probably actually does have a highest CPM here and the reason being is that I would actually say is because the game is

actually not that much fun and so there's a high click-through rate got a boring I'm gonna exit out this other ad looks more appealing but the reality is is that when you're playing the game do you know do it's a super fun TV game to watch you know got Howie Howie and you know bunch of characters on there and winning real money but when you aren't bringing real money and you're older than the age of five it becomes pretty boring and so you then get presented this casino ad casino ads you know have a cost per install that you know that the advertisers are paying six seven dollars per install thus yields a higher CPM yeah if you if you have the audience an audience that likes casino games like yours is pretty well cuz it's pretty similar then you can do well I think the the casino guys drive really high a CPM you know my casino I also have a casino title and that I run in the eCPM as high like yours as well there's a demographic skews that way yeah so I the only thing

I would add is it's the you CPM some time for personal opinion is not the best way to measure success because it also depends on how your game is feeding ads if you're feeling a reward video and you don't cap them and people just go nuts and just farming you serve an odd impression but then you don't get a lot of conversion so essentially you're using p.m. wood just driven down to the bottom right but any of you you know do some of you know a small capping that prevent people to farm in your economy then that will count wise the economy but at the same time your eCPM wood will be higher it's kind of tangent but we also capped it based on time so we have an appointment mechanic in the game to do video ads and they're actually increased the number of sessions per day in our game so it actually had a positive influence on the product metrics I don't think there's some nuance as to how your how placements work with people's mindset right like if you're an endless runner

and you died and you're presented this opportunity to to watch a video to download a game in order to keep going you're not really in the mindset of wanting to explore that other game you know you're just like I just need that so I can like finish my my guy whereas if you're kind of in the store which isn't always the greatest place but at least maybe you're in the mindset like oh I'm kind of casually bouncing around the edges of the game I'm not like super into the game maybe I didn't need that we'll look at clash of clans or whatever I just saw this game that's like shooting up the charts right now rodeo stampede I don't you guys seen this it's published by yota one and it looks kind of like a cross erode kind of game and they're really smart I don't know who actually developed it but they they did this thing worth when you're it's it's a runner essentially and so when your guy dies it's like would you like to watch a video and if you say yes it says cool the video will run after you die again like so basically you get to keep going you know and then when you're done with that then you see the video so you're more likely to actually download there's

a stack what's that do they stack you know keeps yeah I'm gonna watch like 10 minutes Alex I think you can only do one good question the pad in my game is awesome yeah so anyway that's interesting idea I mean the types of ads we run the which are brand ads don't we don't care if someone no one's trying to install an app so Toyota's gonna pay out the same amount no matter what whereas you know supercell is gonna only pay if your users are downloading so in some placements like that you know a CPV a cost per view ad might perform better than see I add in other places where user actually can sit there and download that might do better yeah yeah I tell the Browns figure that out branded ads are the that's an appropriate word oh sorry yeah they're awesome yeah I mean and it's interesting with brands cuz we'll talk to a brand who like all this they've got an agency that's spending millions of dollars for them like we're gonna do billboards and print and radio and apps and these are not the people who understand all the nuances of of the app world and then you've got a different department in the company it's like oh we're building an

app and we want users for it or you know so like that the jack-in-the-box app team is totally different from the brand awareness team that might spend a million dollars run inside of of apps it's it's still a a new world for them okay do you allow competitive ad so ads that might take your players to a game that's very similar to yours we have a mix of answers here but no one shuts them out completely here Kenneth you've got a very hardcore game you're willing to do that yeah yeah so definitely sometimes for us and it all depends on how comfortable you are with your own game so if we identify some of the top competitors who are also doing well we probably prompt them and vice-versa we know that we've been block as well but we believe in our titles have a very high quality and if a similar genre which tends to have a high conversion because if someone playing a shooting game they're most likely try another shooting game and what we did see before is that when someone download

well the games they will actually come back and actually spend more and we find that very interesting and then we try to you know diagnose that and be basically the only reason we come up with well that's a inferior product but inferior product and then so they would come back and say hey I'll enjoy your game I'll spend more yeah it's almost like you've just gone - you've helped them you've helped prove that your game is better than the market that's it it's kind of the elephant in the room right is we don't get paid unless somebody installs the other game and so to say in your product like you don't want to show competitive game but you want people to install the game so you get paid for the video ad it means that you might as well just show the game that you know they're gonna go find in the store anyway for example in casino we know that casino people will spin all their chips away and go play another casino game so we're fine showing other casino games yeah I mean no it's the same for us it's a yes and

there's definitely other word games out there and I think people like at least for us like we've seen if they're stock then they you know maybe go play another game or they think about it and then come back later and so yeah everyone's playing a lot of in addition to apps we also run some game review sites like games Evo and download free games and actually just this morning we were about to push live some some new ads from kriti oh and tabouleh and the first ad I saw was from one of our competitors and I immediately said hey we're not gonna go live unless we turn off those ads whereas in our apps we don't seem to have a problem with that but on the website we do seem to have a problem with that but I would ever say probably a little different if I was running a casino app you know I probably would be hesitant to run then another casino ad but for whatever reason that they get in the app world it does seem to be different than perhaps in the web world because there's the nuances you can segment to right you see someone who hasn't spent for 60 days and show them everything kind of thing alright tip for

improving discovery or views so this is where ya integrate ads into the core loop so you know I've seen when I was in my previous company I was at flurry and I had access to a lot of data and and and since then I've always taken an interest in seeing what is the frequency of views per da you in a game because you can what I've seen is that there's a benchmark basically one view per da U is a pretty good integration of rewarded video if you're down at like point two or something like that you're not trying that hard if you really nail it you can get two or three views per day if you build it in a way that's like you know really showcases rewarded video so I see people all over the map on that but have you guys done something where you you flip one switch and all the sudden you went from you know half of you for per day to one or something like that anything that's really move the needle well so for us like we we started off just being in the store you could watch a wider video and then we put it sort of like in the main

puzzle view and in that I think double like a 2.5 X to almost triple of impressions because I mean that view is just looked at way more times in the store view for us and so but when we put it there we wanted to be careful that wasn't annoying so we put it in a native way such that if you you would only see it if you really look there it wasn't like grabbing her attention and wasn't popping it wasn't jumping yeah we put it there when you when you ran out of coins you either had to buy more coins and so the game essentially comes to an end and so we sort of put it in the paywall you could either buy coins or watch a video naturally you know people click on them and watch a video but I think putting it at that point of a friction was was pretty critical so I think it changes quite a bit since cross zero came on board before cross zero everything just have a button in the story and we were told before that's the worst place because how many people actually clicked

to the store and those people who click through store might be your pay or your whales and then you just ask them to get free stuff so the place that non-payers ever go exactly so that log pairs 90% of them will go to the store so and costly will kind of show us the way in a sense that not only they put it in the game but they don't show it all the time not every after mission so when it actually comes up you feel that you have to engage with it and that's the other game that does well was compass point wise and it's they are more midcourt but they you know they randomized they put it in the game they have a little trail wagon that just kind of catch your eye so to speak so I think for us is we try different things but definitely placement and adding to the end of the mission those are definitely a big sell for us all right we're kind of already talking about this other games that use ads well I threw in rodeo Stampede at

the end I wasn't familiar tap Titan we think that it yeah it's an idol game but they have a really cool mechanic where this like little dude comes up kind of like the wagon and you have them and you can watch a video ad but there's no real incentive to monetize other than the video ad so it really rewards you for doing it and it's part of that core gameplay it's variable I've watched a lot of videos and taps I can't resist any other solitaire I mean those guys mobility where's that integrated like every ad network ever what was it about their particular method that you guys liked I threw that that went in there and again I think they did a great job having it at sort of the end of the game you know extremely well integrated you know the game is 100% free but the ads that they run were very cool from the standpoint that you can actually play another games sort of trial within it so they had yachty for buddies and you get

you know roll the dice but I think it was it was pretty immersive and I think you know naturally I think when people expect to place all two it should be free and so from an end-user standpoint feel you're getting some value being able to play a free game so be able to watch an ad it seems like when people use interstitials as very clear gateways to to new content in a very predictable manner it's pretty acceptable to the user yeah it's the it's the kind of spam out of nowhere interstitials that I think people throw people off all right any other last comments on game sight who makes AD decisions in your games this is just something I find interesting as someone who's always trying to figure out who do I talk to as an ad network so I'd be talking to the executive producer or the CEO or the senior monetization manager I see you all put who you are you know on this because you all think you're in charge but well product people hate ads and exec say you have to make money it's a fight right but tabor your product guy

and you you you embrace the ad model because you're told to I could I guess I kind of straddle both sort of sides of that but I think we also just have a different model at our studio or product is of King so every team is that's part of a business unit the product runs that so if we think it's a good decision we have to hit our metrics and if we can make it work then that's probably why we have such a good integration I think is that in order to make it work we wanted to do it the right way we wanted to do it as part of the game so we made a very good product design least in theory yep all right we already talked about this you guys have all studied the impact of ads on retention and that seemed favorable so we'll skip that cadence for monitoring ad performance any tips here you're not looking at this every hour but you're also not waiting until the end of the month to see how things are going

how much optimization can you really do or how much I would yelling at your ad networks really helps so I think that's coming to play with mediation some you know some people don't I talked to you saying hey we have mediation now so we don't have to look at the performance which is waiting for money to throw in and at the end of the month it's like why am i you CPM actually lower than last month's and it's like so I think that's a lot to do with having mediation it's only part of the you know solution you still have to is your onus because the mediation doesn't technically work for you they you don't you pay them but then if you fail they don't lose a penny at all so it's your job on the line so you should check you know periodically if if not daily then weekly and then make suggestion just basically saying maybe like a net will have a new SDK and then they have the mediation hasn't updated that doctor yet and then it crashes if you check that at the end of month you miss a whole month worth of

you know revenue on that right so you have to make sure that you have to talk to your account manager to make sure that do they have a big campaign coming out if so that do you want to paralyze them in a different way there's a lot of business I involve and wait that's when you know the Politan doesn't really like doing it and that's why the business guy we should make the decision hey there's a lot of moving parts I guess we only have a couple minutes so let me just I think we're good here at questions I always like to work this picture into every presentation I have I see a hand back there i'ma take one you know you start they kind of said yeah chatting with a lot of people industry yeah I mean I think we put many of them up there but you know from a video standpoint I think you start with sort of the big three or four maybe a beloved bongo ad colony I was there anyone else for unity ads there's

basically four or five big app install based networks so yeah app love and ad colony unity chartboost fungal and then we're us hyper mechs and media bricks are the two brand focused networks and then after that there's there's the new guys like em nectar which is a playable ads company of them they're good yeah and and then there's a bunch of I guess if those are the big video guys there's several others but that's what mediation can be really useful because you can integrate a bunch of networks and then just toggle on the backend which ones you want to put so I have four games with four different demographics and that's the other thing is each network is better for a different demographic so you know that's really important thing to keep in mind so best thing is to talk to somebody come find one of us and we'll try to give you some insight I guess until which network for your game everything is just test and optimize oh also make deals with the ad networks because they're always willing to deal as you said that's one comment I was an add to that is yeah they do pay bonuses

for first call you know so you know be on top of the waterfall is critical yeah and they'll pay bonuses for that don't make any questions because as a mediator I get to see kind of the different performance of different ad networks and talk to all these different companies and I'll get three networks or three three developers roguelike Apple ovens the best I love that plugin and then the next one I there's like they suck I just dropped them and it's like you know it's just every game has different characteristics that that perform differently for different networks and yet people are networks are always jockeying and if they see that something works really well for them they might say hey I'll give you X percent bonus if you give me first position for December and if somebody comes calling and they're like hey we want first position in the waterfall don't say yes talk to the rest of the networks because chances are they're all have the same interaction for it sorry guys that's true yes right so I guess two thoughts one is

on the second question until you have scale like several hundred thousand VA use you really can't get a conversation directly with big brands they just they just can't deal with it even and as like since we talked to those guys directly like sometimes we'll we'll try to broker deals between games and brands and even then it's really difficult and we're talking about like we work with you know like storm eight and angry birds and stuff like that and even then it's it's hard so I wouldn't worry about direct deals with brands unless there's some unless you happen to be like a yeah maybe you're a motocross game and you happen to know someone in the motocross industry or something like that you don't really have to work to get grants to place ads in your game if you're running AdMob or ad colony whatever they're going to start throwing a bunch of ads at your game and seeing what works and so the first like week that they'll go live with you you you might

see a lot more traffic than eventually you're gonna see because they're testing out all sorts of different genres and kind of their machines are learning what's working what's not or maybe it's machine maybe it's it's human optimized but put it in a few different networks and see how it works but maybe more relevant is like to two competing thoughts one is if you're really small and still new I wouldn't worry too much about ads yet unless it's gonna be a part of your core design in which case you want to be thinking about on day one like Crossy Road one hundred-percent if you're designing another cross you wrote then you want to think about ads right now but if you're designing a game with long term retention it's more strategic like focus on all that stuff because every piece of the product that you put in that increases retention or monetization for those core users is gonna be way more valuable than video ads so you have to think about the game as well