two & a half gamers session #4 - How to soft launch a mobile game Ad monetisation Perspective

[Music] welcome everybody this is no gaming podcast 2 and a half Gamers session number four we're discussing latest news fun stuff and dropping some knowledge so uh you know don't forget let's not take this too seriously we're having fun and this is 400 a.m. discussion and the conference is Vibe so let's dive in and enjoy the vibe again and uh you know um hey guys hello Felix hello Jacob ja hello yakob oh my God you're looking very very cool Remo I got to admit see yeah told you so what's up with the new sunglasses oh well it's not sunglasses sorry it's actually better then because if I I usually stay up long u during the night to like do some St because

sometimes that's the best creative part for a designer obviously because every everyone is quiet and you can think really deep how to design some some things so it kind of helps on the eyes a lot when you're there all right my Blues Brother yeah I can I can imagine you're thinking really really deep uh when you're having these these glasses on all right so uh today we are covering some uh like latest news about Bungie uh Facebook losses New York Times buying wle and of course an nft um topic as well as usual it's like every week there is something and then we have the main topic which is soft launching a mobile game from ad monetization perspective by Felix here amazing really looking forward to it so how was your how was your week so uh I think uh well before you you go uh we're recording this on Sunday so you most probably heard all the news

on the on the different podcasts but you didn't hear our own take so guys what's up uh everything's good but I mean I guess these are kind of turning into this week in gaming Acquisitions CU there's just you know the acquisition train is just keeping on rolling uh of course Sony buying Bungie uh acquired Bungie for 3.6 billion it's the latest string in Big Ticket consolidation deals in the games industry what do we guys what do we think about it maybe it's not 80 86 or whatever else is the the number 68 68 oh yeah I currently I'm just like hearing everyone piling on Facebook with the beginning of the end wipe and pretty much loss of three of those activations all together in one day well it's uh it's not a really a good period of time for Facebook book

well and it started I think in like last year in the middle of the the year but since I got my uh Facebook account unlocked I'm not going to talk about any bad things about Facebook so everything is good but I think I think we are due like for a healthy shakeup in the whole like uh environment there so it's interesting to hear people's opinions and like what's what's going to be done next uh one on Facebook side to kind of counter this and then on the other comp side such as Tik Tok and like where the whole pretty much part of this platform at industry is going to move out a lot of people are surprised like oh wow Facebook is really going down like hey where were you like last half a year seriously he because oh wow this is so surprising like is it really well no no probably I mean you you could see this for for some time already come on you know losing billions you know if you compare the stock price so so it seems

it's a little bit surprising if the Share value went like 23% in one day of course yes that's surprising but it is based on uh whatever happened last year and uh you know we already saw all the at ID FAS and whatever else as well so it's not like oh well magically nothing happened and now they they their stock just uh you know dropped you know I've been looking at this from another perspective uh more of a D fla perspective and for those who don't speak German it's like from someone else's pain but it's not book I'm taking pleasure of because I saw this headline that do you guys remember during mem stock times uh like the whole GameStop there was one head called yeah called melin Capital that got hammered uh and pretty much nearly went bust like um it was short in GameStop melv Capital had to get I think it was like a$2 billion loan into the hedge fund to stay AF flat

uh so they're down by a lot and in December Melvin Capital took out a $1.4 billion position in Facebook which means that their hedge fund now combined with GameStop and Facebook is down 94% mons we say here ouch that brought me a lot of Joy yeah I okay I can see I can see this on your face nice H well we jumped from like uh directly to Facebook we jumped directly to Facebook but I wanted to ask M I know you don't want to comment to get blocked but do you see anything in terms of quality going down on Facebook from a UA perspective last six months quite heavily started summer well what was this like right after summer I think in uh September maybe the quality is dropping like every month still and I

don't see any any correction to actually uh turn this ship around you mean any any light at the end of the tunnel yes exactly is Tik Tok that light at the end of the tunnel maybe Facebook I have to say you know there there are other UA channels that you can run the UA on still and I'm hearing a lot of developers just moving away from Facebook U or at least like decreasing budgets heavily so uh well good luck really looking forward I can't commend any anything else and w't but you know since Tik Tok has what like one billion Maus not or like the the the user count they announced it in September so now you know they're really growing rapidly for some time already how much are you spending right now on Tik Tok compared to Facebook as a percentage 20%

maybe yeah on TI to right now but that's uh that's going to change in the very near future maybe maybe let's cover the actual news so we know what we're actually talking about then continue the discussion oh okay Mr Daredevil so uh yeah let me just get there really quickly so people can get some facts behind the uh the context here so Facebook pretty much was announcing their results for the last quarter and uh the big big news from the whole announcements is of course that after 18 years of growth of their dius this is the first time in company history when they lost Theus just by 1 million but the important word here is that the growth was lost it was not positive but negative and then uh yeah that's pretty much the main reason why the market tanks so so heavily uh I think it's already 23 or 24% or even more don't know haven't seen the latest like closing call yesterday or Friday but

yeah it's pry imine vicinity of like 250 billion or somewhere there of a loss of value so yeah Mark got kick out of the top 10 wealthiest people in the world yeah and then uh the other news is that their VR division uh meta also announcing their results and pretty much uh it confirmed their dedication there that they are burning like 10 billion a year into that which some kind of meager I don't know 1 billion something of a revenue compared to like 10 billion loss so this kind of proves the point that uh everybody saying that the whole metaverse whatever you can imagine from that point is kind of 5 to 10 years away anyway so there's no like least at least five to 10 I I agree with that notion of course like from the point of technology so there's pretty much no saving hand of like let's switch to VR and there's going to be everything rainbows and Roses that's one thing and the other thing is that uh even I think it was

even this week where there was this like leaked Memo from Facebook where Mark said that uh let's go heavily on video because video on uh contrast is one of the Le least U moneymaking machines in Facebook I mean like their competitor machine to Tik Tok which like Tik Tok is crashing them pretty much so they're trying to kind of follow the trend here which is like one of the first signs that they pretty much they're not making the Trend they're following the trend again and trying to catch up on the video with Tik Tok and yeah pretty much people are leaving the platform so yeah lots of bad news I guess and then there's of course the like one of the biggest I think it was the biggest drop in like a company like market capitalization ever yeah and you know why did happen because they blocked my account that's the truth true yes so so so these are the facts do we have any predictions of these like what would you do would be Mark or Cheryl somewhere

there in the exact thing and like do something with Facebook or even meta or like the whole company strategy well you know they are covering their asses with the metaverse uh thing but it's just burning money if you think about it what Mark did was he changed the company to the name to meta saying we're going to go all in on the metaverse without it being an actual Revenue driver it's pretty much saying we're going to like let me correct that it's saying we're going all in on VR not metaverse yeah exactly and you know they've turned themselves from you know a Fang stock which they were one of the biggest ones to a growth stock that you're supposed to speculate in so now buying a Facebook stock is yeah I believe that the metaverse will be a thing might not and and it will be a thing and it will be a thing controlled by Facebook or meta or whatever name you can come up with by that time pretty much yeah selling ads uh right in in the metaverse in your face in your face of course in your V in VR well like like

jokes aside the like really like I said the quality of of players is like dropping quite heavily so unless they again pull something magically like they did with The triaa Campaign which is the automated iPads campaign uh again which they stole from Google because they were running this automated campaign for a long time already so now suddenly they just uh switch to everything Automation and machine learning so unless they pull something like this then um I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel like I I think like it's it's pretty much the end of the overall like company strategy because if you look from from like higher perspective like there easiest strategy was like whoever is competing against them buy them out so they bought Instagram they bought WhatsApp now they cannot buy Tik Tok and is much it's end of the line and there's leg Regulators catching up to them which there's still like a real possibility that they will be forced to De invest

from WhatsApp and Instagram well we'll see about that we'll see yeah we'll see about it of course but that's the option is still lying on the table it's not it's not out of the question of course of course Well everybody's looking at this thanks for getting us back on track there we were uh wanding but Ma can we move on to my favorite news story I think of last week Wordle oh yeah sure yeah yeah the New York Times uh bought wle um so the times announced the purchase of the game on Monday adding the puzzle game to their portfolio of Bo games such as crossw the mini and spelling B and as of December 2021 the New York Times has over 1 million game subscription so I've I'm sure that you've heard about this uh wal game which is I think everybody is playing at the moment around us it's really viral hit or became viral hit some time ago and now uh it was one guy who made it I think it was a like a

hobby project of him of his the guy name was Josh wle he's some Brooklyn base guy who used to work at Reddit and there is like zero monetization in the game he made the game in October yeah there you go made the game in October uh gets bought in h in what February well okay good job man pretty nice well any comments believe the story there's it Absolut H hilarious story if you just dig a bit so the real story I think here is around a guy who uploaded uh the Wordle game on the App Store he made this game as a pretty much a hobby project I think about 5 years ago it's called wle on the App Store it's wle with an exclamation mark and it's made by a guy called Steven carva and judging by the amount of organic traffic he's gotten because of all the buzz around the world buyout from the desktop game

which is completely different this guy he's has right now about a million daily active users in the states yeah yum yum so I did some ad monetization digging uh I played his game so right now he monetizes with banners and rewarded M uh videos and I played it for about 10 minutes made a note how many ads I saw and I think from my estimation that this guy is making somewhere between 17K to 20K A Day In AD Revenue currently which means that if he keeps this up for 3 months and has the same da which might not happen but it's not impossible to imagine that he's set to make more money than the Josh wle guy did from selling his game to New York Times he'll make in Revenue well I I sent I found Steven carv on LinkedIn and I sent him a message congratulating him cuz

essentially he won the lottery oh yeah definitely if you're a listener well done well done mate well done nice well hopefully uh the da will last more than three months and he'll make more money but isn't isn't this this like the common issue here that like you cannot P patent or pretty much you know copyright design of a game that means that in like anyone can jump on this pretty much like the hyper casuals I guess should be like pretty easy like two we job for them to create something similar and just push it to the top of the chart 100% I mean there's already a bunch of clones go Wordle Wordle this whle that um and yeah I mean it's kind of what happens in our industry isn't it yeah I've seen many times like the original idea pretty much getting uh short end of the stick by the by the end of the run where where the Clone would be even more successful than the original yeah well that happened multiple times in hyper casuals anyway yeah

well very nice story well uh maybe someday we'll all make games like this in the in the App Store and make some decent money but but but isn't this like the third or second time New York Times is kind of engaging into gaming industry I think they even have their own Studio bought out or something like that I'm not sure about the studio but they made it pretty clear that they're uh pretty serious about the the games they they have and uh I know yeah I think maybe you're right they bought some studio that made the cooking games but I'm not sure if I'm not making this up I mean they they had their goal like I said before that they want to reach 10 million subscriptions digital subscriptions by 2025 and you know gaming definitely would fit into that if there's some games that you love playing put it behind the pay wall yeah that's true and this is viral hit so uh definitely something to keep in mind but in the endend it's just like

a copy of Apple's arcade isn't it like I mean the New York Times model um yeah but you know you have the the newspaper as well the games are the games are on the side just you know you know things happen outside of gaming Remo yeah yeah yeah I know that part I never go go there yeah yeah okay okay let's move on let's move on this is H this is pretty funny one uh uh so newu uh as a company uh predicts that nftd companies will transform into luxury and lifestyle Brands and the Expo exposure from social media influencers will boost the reach of the nfts to the vi public this is so hilarious I mean uh they point out uh that bort ape Yak Club is popular amongst the rappers and Snoop Dog and postm and amm and whoever else and uh and thanks to their social media

followers this will just boost all the NFD hype uh to the Wi audience I mean this is ah I'm not sure like why they think this is is going to happen but it's so wrong on so many levels I mean come on seriously H why do you think it's wrong on so many levels I mean how how is this is going to be a luxury or lifestyle seriously how how is going to be an nft avatar uh or whatever as as a luxury brand why have you not heard about the latest trend from art bosel in Miami where these crazy kids were wearing Apple watches as necklaces with like a slideshow with their nfts and they walked around with it showing it off you're in the wrong club man obviously probably probably oh my God this is so don't be a boomer M this is going to be a thing so stupid really uh it's not it's not so stupid it's pretty

much too much money on the market we just wait for the interest rates to go up oh yeah okay and then the whole NFD uh H is going away okay I know I don't see this this going to happen I I would most likely see these uh companies go into the gaming uh like you know the the board ape is already doing it like they they published the their game like Apes versus Mutants which is a Archer of Cl no monetization nothing it is kind of is that's true still way more interesting than uh the luxury or Lifestyle brand I I would just say going and trying are two different things okay they're trying to go to gaming similar as Amazon is trying to go into gaming for many years now okay okay okay okay okay okay fair enough fair enough but yeah well that's it from the news I think uh well

there's definitely did we get the Sony one yeah well you mean the Bungie from the beginning yeah we just skip it right yeah the actual news yeah that's true yeah yeah yeah do we want to cover that or should we just move on to educational matters no we can go Felix all right so uh I wanted to talk about uh a bit about soft launching a mobile game from a admon perspective and what you as a Developers think about so what prompted me to want to talk about this is actually a Statia article that came out about a month ago uh that stated that mobile game ad spending is expected to grow from uh from 32 billion which it was in 220 uh 2020 and it's expected to grow to 130 billion in by 2025 and that's up 300% in just 5 years so with this amount of money money being pumped into UA uh it's safe to say that

overall uh mobile ad Revenue will only grow and be even a larger part of your overall revenue for mobile games in the future and I wanted to give a bit of a guide uh on how you as a mobile Game Dev should think about um ad monetization when you're soft launching and Global launching your next mobile game and Ma and Remo please feel free to kind of stop and anytime if you think I'm using terms or any SL like that that doesn't make any sense and call me out on it yeah let me let me just do it right now like do we think the number is Justified it's 130 in 5 years from 30 really with all the cross platform whatever CPI is hitting so high that this number is Justified I mean it's set to be 45 uh billion uh like last year in 2021 so could be I mean Machi I think is the perfect one to ask on that because it's

more than 100% yeah well it's definitely more than 100% uh but uh I think it's it still could be true even even if cpis are pretty pretty high you know the uh the ability to spend like crossplatform is uh you know mobile is still the the biggest platform out there and if you have CL crossplatform mobile l um PC and desktop launchers and whatever it's still the the desktop inventory is very small and shrinking every day so so is this counting with let's say whole India pretty pretty much jumping on the trend or whatever like what's what's like because I'm just trying to like I mean this includes China as well 100% yeah of course oh because if you say like the current gaming like mobile industry is making like what like 90 billion a year let's say and it's it's then making 32

billion in the ad spender or you said 40 Felix so let's take that so if we if we multiply that by pretty much four times would that also mean then the on the other hand we would be making four times the revenue sure why not why not why not yeah why not why not because I didn't see that number in the other analysis ever well we saw in the analysis from newu that nft is going into the luxury and Lifestyle brand so it seems to me just like too big of a number honestly it's like don't know well article after this and you can go into it uh but kind of getting getting this back a bit on track uh So Soft launching so uh if you think of all mobile games uh like genres on a spectrum from hyper casual on one end to

hardcore on the other ones um the two extremes will always monetize like 97% from either ads or I APS so the advice I'm giving here is set to be for the middle like ground so that is to say not hyper casual or hardcore games so if your game sits in the middle of the spectrum you first need to decide which kind of AD format works best for you and if you sit in the middle of this spectrum 9 times out of 10 the ad format that's the best for you is the rewarded ad format uh rewarded ads are the Undisputed King in terms of ad monetization uh because you get the highest ecpm compared to other for formats you get the highest completion rates uh it's the lowest amount of friction from users since it's opt in and from a mediation perspective as well uh you get the most amount of competition for your inventory for this format from other Works CU everyone's competing to get this time of type of

inventory because it converts super well so in order to maximize your ad Revenue uh you need to keep in mind that as a game developer ad Revenue uh is equal to fill or Impressions times ecpm so everything you do to maximize ad Revenue uh from a design perspective or a monetization perspective should be aimed either at increasing Impressions or the ecpm and generally how I like to frame it is that during soft launch you should focus your energy either on like you should focus your energy first and foremost on maximizing The Impressions uh and once that is done that's when you should move on to maximizing your ecpm does that make sense no so far I would say just at some point there's like a diminishing return here within these so it's not that like you really need to push like people to watch

100 DS per day because what you need to push to to push lot of percentage of your player base to actually W watch at least few ads a day not just like few people watching hundreds of ads per day so there there's a diminishing return here so yeah 100% yeah so that's actually a bit what I wanted to talk about as well because during soft launch I would recommend that your Northstar ad metric that you should be looking at is impressions per da I.E how many ads do your users actually watch a day uh and if you want ad revenue from my perspective to have an impact on your overall UA efforts kind of the gold standard here that you want to aim towards is five Impressions per da or anything above that yeah how did you how did you come up with that number so essentially uh I took all the games that I'm kind of monetizing with and I looked at kind of the bottom line impact uh in terms of AD ARP down on top of

everything so with a proper mediation setup if you achieve five Impressions per Dau you will add about 6 to 8 cents per user per day now if you achieve about seven Impressions per da uh that will be about 12 to 15 cents per user per day so it might not sound like a lot but if you think about it if you retain a user for 10 days and they watch seven Impressions a day ads will have added about a120 or a dollar to a150 to your to their overall LTV so from my perspective as a mediation uh ad ad monetization uh person I would recommend that you shouldn't really worry about mediation at this kind of stage and because you're doing a million other things and what you should really worry about at this early stage is getting that Impressions per da number as close to or above five Impressions per da as you possibly can

okay and how can you do that actually I actually wanted to pause here since we actually happened to have a game designer on the call and ask our resident expert here yeah so I would say the the other percentage number which is the how much percentage of your da actually interacts with the ads like meaning that the metric is based on like at least one watching One impression per day and then they they get counted into the percentage so let's talk like a 60% to be some kind of a good Baseline that you want to reach so this is much more important to kind of Tinker with rather than pushing people to that six seven impression per diu like usually how I see it is that you have four to five Impressions per di eight Impressions per Daily engage users if you're only counting the ones that are actually watching the ads because they will they will just behave that like it's usually double of the number that and then just pretty much focusing on that engage percentage and pulling it up and how you

do that is you spread the Ed placements throughout your game naturally so pretty much imagine a normal core Loop and you need to have some kind of like a let's say bus stop system around it so people can watch that during like any part of the game because people usually have the problem that they have one of those and it's really good in your face or like really accessible but then uh they kind of Miss on the dynamic ones and the dynamic ones are the best ones in my opinion because they don't clutter the game UI so you don't you need like pretty much Stitch your game with here's an ad here's an ad here's an ad here's an ad and they are pretty much offered into your face in the right moment can simar give an example of the yeah of course you you run out of something and only when you run out of something then you are offered to get more of it by watching an ad or you get into usual fail State scenario and then you are offered the possibility watching that or something kind of happens in the game and there's some kind of trigger point and then you are offered that rather

than just having a button that is sitting there on your main UI which is screaming at you or hinting and popping like watch an ad watch an ad watch an ad that you pretty much get annoyed with and if you actually watch the ad then it goes on cool down and sits there in a cool down mode for like 4 hours so I would say going Dynamic is really important and then the even more advaned solution is having ads in events where you would have events and ads integ ated into them so that's even more dynamic because the whole placement will pretty much vanish away with the whole event as it goes and comes I mean game event not event as a tracking uh um think event in a game yeah game event like meaning some kind of a seasonal content that you pretty much start in and goes out okay um so when when do developers need to start thinking about this uh at um monetization in the soft loung like really in the beginning of the retention

stage or like uh in the monetization stage or when exactly I think it's even in like game design preproduction stage yeah yeah because you need to know like what you're selling and how people should be familiar what they overall Revenue share of the game should look like I mean the type of it so how much percentage they would aim towards uh ad revenue and normal IP Revenue o okay okay well that's uh I I know we're getting Advanced but like let's face it this is how it works like it shouldn't be like that that we you know construct the game to be 100% IP and then sometime later down the line oh there's this you know nice thing called ads let's slap it on top yeah but that's the thing like that's like that's like U half of the developers uh think about it that's that's why I ask that's why I ask this question yeah you need to do it differently if you want to do it like you know by the books and if you do it by the books you do it like this and then on the other hand what you do is if it's a midore game or like usually if it's a game that have some kind of economy going into it you pretty much

dedicate a percentage of the economy to be going through the ads so as you're planning your syns and your sources some of the sources are pretty much coming with the ads and you are counting for the player to watch the ads as a norm player progression that's completely basically no cannibalization of the revenue because it's already counted in like think think the usual Adventure capital is Adventure communist idle games like you always have the like best converting ad placement which is like speed up your you know economy game by two times and the whole game is pretty much balanced around that that it counts with you that you always have this add placement on because otherwise you're just crawling on the floor yeah okay but Remo correct me if I wrong you're kind of seeing these Idol metrics that used to only be in Idol games kind of making their way to every genre of every style of game right now is that kind of a trend you're seeing oh no no definitely not like the E the idle game

economies they have their own sorts of problems I don't think so we want to get into that because they need to go through reset as they're exponential and sometimes the numbers game get so high that you lose track of like actual value and they need to reset and have Prestige currency and stuff like that so that's different but I would say uh a lot of these kind of really good practices are coming uh between the games in a way that uh people usually monetize a lot of those fail States if your game is able to give you that like that that's one of the things that's more towards casual side but on the other hand uh you know just leaving the resources in in the ad economy is the best best option in my my book they do pretty much dedicate some kind of the resources and people always want to go for power like the the fail State ones are better because you are pretty much monetizing a try which is not like part of your economy so you're not giving away economy you're giving just like a ticket so think something like archero for inance your character dies and you can you know get your

health back and like have more tries on the same run and you're not giving away your economy but economy is always much more stable and you need to like count it in but the tries is the you know better placement here but your game needs to be able to support that that that's the hard part like finding actually that placement where you can offer like you know one more heart one more try one more something that is basically not an economy but in that specific scenario it's really valuable to the user because he has been you know playing the like Rogue like run for 20 minutes he doesn't want to reset again M oh okay so in your opinion just simplifying everything we just talked about what would be your three top placements for ads that you would recommend that game developers should start by testing um if it's like a RPG Style game or like pretty much there's an economy running in between it have some kind of a random economy gain GAA or something like that so pretty much give a possibility to get

some kind of AD wheel or whatever Wheel of Fortune that you can get some small part of the economy of course with some kind of a big jackpot possibility that have like really really small chance of course then uh the other one will be monetize your fail state if you are able to do that if your cor Loop offers that of course monetize your fail state that that's like of course and then the third one would be if you have some kind of session limiter you can also put it on on top of ads so you run out of energy you offer 25 more energy like let's say the current merge games are using it very cleverly these days that you know they are pretty much counting with it that you consume four ads to get twice as much energy as you normally regenerate so that's also the one just pretty much if you're eating the game offer like a piece of cake on top of it oo o that sounded very good nice wow very nice yeah very nice that sounds quite good Remo so I'm going to move on

that was really good advice actually like I think we actually covered some pretty good topics there uh so if you think about that during soft launch and when you're kind of Designing the game uh when you kind of hit those metrics when you start basically seeing a high engagement on your ads and a high volume of Impressions per da that's when your Northstar metric should kind of shift away from Impressions per da and engagement and in my argument now Northstar metric during Global launch and after you've hit those metric should shift to ad arpal from an ad monetization perspective that is ADD Revenue per daily active user one thing I want to I want to ask like okay so you're you're talking about if you are hitting these numbers then move towards the the ad AR Dow if if you are not then what you know you should basically go back and speak to a person like Remo who can help you out to make sure that you're hitting those marks you like that's the you know tricky part because if uh then you are just spending four

months five months tweaking the the ad monetization and you know every like every other kpi is just falling apart you know can be it doesn't usually work like that that ad monetization is stellar and every other kpi is falling apart if you design your economy properly it's usually okay with IPS and ads in like if you do it you know from the beginning okay not not that you slap ads on top of it or the other way around some people just do it the other way which is even worse that you you know think about the ad economy and then you slap IPS on top of it yeah like there's this like usual that you have buy everything button in the game bu everything button and then no ads for like 99 Cents like oh well how in the is this going to be profitable 99 Cents come on yeah just saying that games that have the no ads button what the button does is that it removes

interstitials and some kind of a no reward it yeah yeah but you always are there with rewarded videos even on top of that it it doesn't mean that like you don't have rewarded videos from that point of time yep yeah all right sorry Felix no no wor but back to your point what you said mi it's actually a very good point because if you remember what I said about the formula add Revenue equals pretty much fill or Impressions times ecpm so if you want to increase your ad Revenue uh you can also here at this stage you can this is when I would say like this is when you should add a mediation partner so A good rule of thumb is if you have one network bidding in on your inventory if you just add another Network to compete with that one network that you already have uh through a mediation layer then your ad Revenue will increase by about 100% from just having one partner so competition here is key so adding a mediation that's usually when to get gets a bit more complicated uh in terms of networks that

I recommend to start with uh right now uh on both IOS and Android uh I would recommend that you start with uh five networks uh there are Facebook admob Unity iron source and app loving these networks will be more than enough uh until your game starts to make about 2k A Day In AD revenue and they'll give you equally good coverage on both iOS and Android so what does a good mediation setup look like uh I'm not going to go through exactly right now how it looks like because I actually wrote a blog post that I believe will be published on your blog yes that's very true so I would actually recommend to go there and check it out because it's really hard to convey in words exactly what you should look at so basic in that pod in that blog post I go into exactly how you should start uh by setting up your media and also what kind of data you should be

looking at from to increase your ad Revenue in terms of fill and those things but yeah there is basically also like the example waterfall setup that you should you should think about exactly uh I kind of wanted to shift gears here before kind of moving into some fun facts on ad monetization and just ask you m like what kind of different UA strategies uh do you employ when it's around if you have a lot of I and AD revenue and how do you structure UA campaigns different differently if you have both Revenue sources let's say let's say we have like 5050 split which is uh well that would be amazing for the the UA person to have because you have all the possibil possibilities on the purchase campaigns and the same amount of possibilities on the admon or ad Revenue based campaigns so that's basically you're thinking about uh the purchase campaigns and value optimized campaigns is a is a one part of the strategy aiming for purchases and payers and whales basically and the other part

would be using um the ad Revenue events so no no game events but uh the event which is fired when players watches an ad so that's uh that can be used also for uh for optimization on the campaign level and now even uh you know Unity or um Ado Noto but Google ads is also um having a possibility of running an ad Ras based campaigns so um you are trying to optimize for the value of the ad Revenue so when I am talking about the the value based campaigns I'm talking about the purchase or the the amount of money that players can pay or will pay in the game but here it's more about the value of AD Revenue so it's uh basically hunting ad Wells so that's also one part of the of the whole strategy so if the 50/50 is a split it's easy but then if you have 70% of ads and 30% of iips uh

your us strategy should be definitely more skewed towards the the ad monetization events and optimization towards the the ad Revenue rather than the the purchase campaigns but it's not always like uh black and white and different UA channels offer different uh UA uh possibilities and optimization strategies as well so yeah well well plenty of stuff man plenty of stuff quite interesting out of curiosity if you're doing a 5050 uh split and you have a game which ad networks do you expect to be spending like to be your top five networks that you spend with well I would say Google definitely is is the top one because you can you can run run the the Tas campaigns which is the the value optimized for purchases but actually ad based Ras as well so you you can have both the most powerful optimization um

set up on uh on the purchase campaigns and AD monetized campaigns on Google and then uh well Facebook obviously is still even uh though the quality is dropping you can still run pretty good iOS campaigns there which is I know it's surprised and a lot of uh developers are not doing it because well they can't measure it properly but still Facebook and iOS 14 campaigns are U working quite well not very much on the Android side but well you can still spend a quite decent amount of money on Android as well there or Facebook and then you have uh the unity which I mentioned which is Ross campaigns on both purchase or ad monetization um optimization and then um I would go with Tik Tok and um what iron source as well and applin Appling too so you have uh uping campaigns where you can uh as well as you can do it on unit and Google just focus on ad monetization value and

purchase value campaigns um so uh yeah that's it man cool makes sense well I hope I hope it makes sense uh it's a it's it all depends on the split of the of the E inup purchases versus the ad revenues yeah I would just say that seeing games that are 5050 is very rare occasion mhm usually you like you know the distribution in the market is usually 7030 one way or the other yeah but 50/50 is really really hard to see and even to hit yeah well thank God I have two games like that oh but it's yeah it's definitely rare to see uh but kudos to the guys that uh make it work on 50/50 it's really hard but yeah opens up a lot of possibilities like I said so now you know uh you don't need to focus only on the the high paying uh um payers and players uh which obviously drives the

CPI up but you can also um try to run CPI campaigns with like the lowest cost possible just to get enough uh Impressions there and the the like a huge amount of uh of players into the game last time last time that I heard I think a good example for a 50/50 game would be archero really I thought it's more skewed towards ads yeah I'm quite surprised to hear that actually I think they kind of Switched a little bit like if you compare for instance how idle Miner switched because it was completely ads and now it's like 50/50 also but I think from the beginning as I heard our Cher was 50/50 or even maybe more ads but then they kind of make made the economy much more robust so I would say even maybe skew toward 6040 but yeah can can watch for that now but during launch definitely I heard that they were 50/50 mhm okay cool I think uh I think we should leave it there uh because I have some

other fun good things to know uh such as thing as how ecpm is calculated oh yeah uh how like First Impressions matter more than kind of the later Impressions but I'm thinking maybe I should save that you actually should go and check out the blog uh on larik domme and read it uh because it makes a bit more sense when you're reading it uh is there least at least let um let us know or like uh try to to um explain how the ad networks make money because you know everybody says like oh well they're not making any any cut you you will what you see in the in the dashboards it's all the money you get like yeah sure but no ad networks need to make money because well they would go bankrupt right so for themselves yeah they do who would have thought so ad networks make money uh from your inventory uh by taking a cut uh on the ads they show in your game so generally this split is 70% to the publisher uh like you and then 30% goes

to the network so the Crux here is that you as the publisher you never have a way of checking uh on their margins on an ad Network's margins the only thing you can do to ensure that they don't overcharge on this or basically take let's say 40 or even 50% which I've seen happen a couple times is that you need to make sure that you have as compe waterfall setup as humanly possible and that's the only defense you as a publisher have against them taking too much of that cut so by having many networks competing for your inventory then you ensure that they earn 30% or sometimes even less for your inventory so that's how they make money on the monetization side that they will undercut themselves pretty much exactly yeah so if you keep one network uh they're definitely not going to stick to giving giv you 30% they'll uh I can guarantee you that and

will it be like a slow process anyway or like just usually like let's let's you know go hypothetical here like we're doing bad decisions so we just keep one network so it will be some kind of adaptive algorithm that figures out by I don't know week three week four that yeah I'm competing with no one let's you know take as much margin as possible usually what it is is uh you as an ad monetization manager if you have no contact with the network um if you don't get complaints then you start slowly pushing your margin up until you start hearing complaints which is why you need to be a bit of an annoying publisher when you're doing this or as an ad monetization person you need to always be a bit like the disapproving father almost so you never give a compliment to an ad Network saying they always like to ask like oh how are we doing are we in the top three but you should never reply to those questions like it's in your interest from a game theory perspective here the less they know so what you should do is if someone asks you at an ad Network oh how are we doing what you

should reply then is oh yeah you're doing okay you're finally in the top six I'm hoping to push it up a bit and that should be the only thing that you should reply because if I working in an ad Network know that we're in the top one I might want to try cuz they're already really happy with me I might want to try pushing my margins let's say from 30% to 35 and then when I have a call with them in two weeks are they still happy with me if they still are yeah a bit more exactly and that's how it works so I got taught ad monetization that you as an ad monetization manager how you treat ad networks should be exactly like you treat or exactly like you grow mushrooms you keep them in the dark and you feed them crap that's oh my god oh my god well o I hope we don't get banned on our you know account on the any network work but but okay well that's uh that's good to know

that's really good to know and uh well should we just uh should should we just leave it here with the amazing mushroom analogy oh I God Felix that was amazing no really yeah thanks thanks for this uh amazing um story and information about how to you know work on the admon side during the soft launch grow your mushrooms grow your mushrooms uh in the meantime and uh well speak to you next week thank you guys bye-bye see [Music] you yeah yeah you can you can talk I can cut it out anyway so you can talk yeah uh could I uh could someone else read the worldle part uh like the world news one and then I could start maybe with the bungee or sure I can uh I can do the World Part do you want to also cover a bit do an intro ma like what we're covering like the topics yeah we just do

the like latest news and the the main topic ad man lunch and you know I don't want to talk about the bunge Facebook world maybe I can maybe I can actually mention it I can talk also about the we can cover it quite quickly yeah yeah okay you be quiet for a second baby no you're back no camera is still not back it means it's still like cheaky I saw him moving I saw him moving yeah but what yeah usually like that that you need to have a second Felix now in the room okay and then the the Frozen one will leave in a second I guess okay should I close the old one yes yeah let okay did did it the pl [Music]