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

[Music] welcome everybody this is no gaming podcast two and a half gamers session number four discussing latest news fun stuff and dropping some knowledge so uh don't forget let's not take this too seriously we are having fun and this is four am discussion at 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 hello there hello jakob oh my god you're looking very very cool remo i gotta admit see yeah thank you so what's up with the new sunglasses oh well it's not sunglasses sorry it's actually better than because if i i usually stay up long uh during the night to like do some stuff

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 ice a lot when you're there all right my blues brother yeah i can like imagine you're thinking really really deep uh when you think these glasses on all right so uh today we are covering some like latest news about bungie facebook losses uh new york times buying bordel and of course an nft uh 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's your week so 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 because 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 you guys think what do we think about it maybe it's not 80 80 60 or whatever else is the the number 68 60 i don't know yeah i i currently i'm just like hearing everyone piling on facebook with the beginning of the end vipe and pretty much loss of three of those activisions all together in one day well it's uh it's not the really a good period of time for facebook well

and it started i think in like last year in the middle of the of the year but since i got my 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 shake-up in the whole like uh environment there so it's interesting to hear people's opinions like what's what's going to be done next uh one on facebook site to kind of counter this and then on the other competitor side such as tiktok 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 because oh wow this is so surprising is it really well no no probably i mean you could see this for some time already come on you know like 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 whatever happened last year and uh you know we already saw all the att idfas and uh and whatever else as well so it's not like oh well magically nothing happened and now they their stock just uh you know dropped you know i've been looking at this from another perspective uh more of a shadow perspective and for those who don't speak german it's like playing from someone else's pain but it's not a book i'm taking pleasure of because i saw this headline that do you guys remember during meme stock times uh yeah but like the whole game stuff there was one hedge fund called yeah called melvin capital that got hammered uh and pretty much nearly went bust like uh it was shorting gamestop milling capital had to get i think it was like a two billion dollar loan into the hedge fund to stay afloat

uh so they're down by a lot and in december melvin capital took out a 1.4 billion dollar position in facebook which means that their hedge fund now combined with gamestop and facebook is down ninety four percent oh it's been 12 months ouch that brought me a lot of joy yeah okay i can see i can see this on your face nice well we jumped from like uh directly to face yeah we jumped into facebook but i i wanted to ask 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 somewhere well what was this 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 turn this ship around you mean any any light at the end of the tunnel yes exactly is tick tock that light at the end of the tunnel maybe [Laughter] i have to say you know their other ui channels that you can run the ui on still and i'm hearing a lot of developers just moving away from facebook and or at least like decreasing budgets heavily so uh well good luck really looking forward i can't comment any anything else it won't but you know since tiktok has what like 1 billion i may use not or like the the user count yeah 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 tech talk compared to facebook as a percentage

20 maybe yeah particularly right now but uh that's gonna change uh in the very near future maybe maybe let's cover the actual news so we know what we're actually talking about we can continue the discussion oh okay mr daredevil so yeah let me just get there really quickly people can get some facts behind the uh the context here so facebook pretty much was announcing their results for the last quarter and the big big news from the whole announcement is of course that after 18 years of growth of their daus this is the first time in company history when they lost the ea use 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 i haven't seen the latest uh like closing call yesterday or friday but yeah it's pretty

imaginative like 250 billion or somewhere there of a loss of value so yeah mark got kicked out of the top 10 wealthiest people in the world and then the other news is that their vr division meta also announcing their results and pretty much it confirmed their dedication there that they are burning like 10 billion a year into that with some kind of meager i don't know 1 billion something of revenue compared to like 10 billion loss so this kind of proves the point that everybody's saying that the whole metaverse whatever you can imagine from that point is kind of five to ten years away anyway so there's no way at least 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 they're 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 let's go heavily on video because video on contrast is one of the least money making machines in facebook i mean like their competitor machine to tick-tock which like tic toc is crushing them pretty much so they are 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 tick tock 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 it happen because they blocked my account that's the truth yes so so these are the facts do we have any predictions of these like what would you do it would be mark or cheryl

somewhere during the exact thing and like do something with facebook or even meta or like the whole company strategy well you know they're covering their uh asses with the metaverse thing but it's just burning money i mean 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 go like let me correct that it's saying we're going all in on vr yeah old methods okay 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 it will be a thing and it will be a thing controlled by facebook or meta or whatever name you kind of come up with by the time pretty much yeah selling ads uh right in in the metaverse in your face in your face of course in your vr

in vr well like like jokes uh aside the like really like i said the quality of players is like dropping quite heavily so unless they again pull something magically like they did with the aaa 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 and so unless they pull something like this then 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 for me from a guy perspective like their easier strategy was like whoever's competing against them buy them out so they bought instagram they bought whatsapp now they cannot buy take talk and places much it's end of the line and there's lego regulators catching up to them which there's still like a real possibility that they will be forced to

they de-invest from whatsapp and instagram well we'll see about that 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 is looking at this thanks for getting us back on track there we were wandering but watch it can we move on to my favorite news story i think of last week wordle oh yeah sure yeah the new york times uh bought bortle so the times announced the purchase of the game on monday adding the puzzle game to their portfolio award games such as crossword the mini and spelling bee and as of december 2021 the new york times has over one million games subscription so i've i'm sure that you've heard about this uh wardle game which is i think everybody is playing at the moment around us it really viral hit or became viral hit some time ago and now uh it was one guy who made it i think it was like

a hobby project of him obviously the guy name was josh wardle he's some brooklyn based 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 okay gets bought in in what february well okay good job man pretty nice so the real story i think here is around a guy who uploaded the wordle game on the app store he made this game as a pretty much a hobby project i think about five years ago it's called wordle on the app store it's wordle with an exclamation mark and it's made by a guy called steven carvada 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

so i did some ad monetization digging uh i played his game so right now he monetizes with banners and rewarded videos and i played it for about 10 minutes made a note how many ads i sold 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 three months and has the same dau which might not happen but it's not impossible to imagine that he's set to make more money than the joshua guy did from selling his game to new york times he'll make in revenue well i wish i sent i found stephen carvada on linkedin and i sent him a message congratulating him because 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 eu will last more than uh three months and he'll make more money but isn't this this like the issue here that like you cannot pay a button or pretty much you know copyright design of a game that means that like anyone can jump on this pretty much like the hyper casuals i guess should be like pretty easy like two-week 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 yeah wordle word all this word all that and yeah i mean that's kind of what happens in our industry i've seen many times like the original idea pretty much getting short end of the stick by the by the end of the run where the clone would be even more successful than the original yeah well that happened multiple times hyper casuals well very nice story well uh maybe someday we'll all make games uh like this in the

in the app store and make some decent money but isn't this like the third or second time new york times is kind of engaging into the gaming industry i think they even have their own studio put 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 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 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 yeah put it behind the paywall yeah that's true and this is viral hit so uh definitely something you keep in mind but in the end 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 new

the newspaper as well the games are the games are on the side you know you know things happen outside the game yeah yeah you know i know that i never go there [Laughter] yeah okay okay let's move on now let's move on this is uh this is pretty funny one uh so niso uh as a company uh predicts that nft companies will transform into luxury and lifestyle brands and the exp exposure from social media influencers will boost the reach of the nfts to the republic this is so hilarious i mean uh they point out uh the board ape yacht club is popular amongst the rappers and snoop dogg and post mall and emmy name and whoever else and uh and thanks to their social media followers this will just boost all the nft hype uh to divide the audience i mean this is uh

i'm not sure like why they think this is uh it's going to happen but it's so wrong on so many levels i mean come on seriously ugh what do you think it's wrong on so many levels how is this going to be a luxury or lifestyle seriously how how is going to be an nft avatar uh or whatever as a luxury brand why how is that have you not heard about the latest trend from art basel in miami where these crazy kids were wearing apple watches as necklaces 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 so super boomer this is gonna be your thing sounds stupid uh it's not so stupid it's pretty much too much money on the market i just wait for the interest rates to go up oh yeah okay and then the holland of the uh hype is going away

okay i know i don't see this this is going to happen i would most likely see these companies go into the gaming like you know the the board ape is already doing is like they they publish the uh their game like apes versus mutants which is an archer clone no monetization nothing it is kind of 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 and they're trying to go to gaming similar as amazon is trying to go into games for many years [Laughter] okay okay okay okay okay okay fair enough fair enough oh yeah well that's it from the news i think uh well there is the only one plenty of them yeah well you mean the bungee from the beginning yeah we just skip it the

action why are you right yeah the actual news yeah that's true yeah yeah do we want to cover that or should we just move on to education all right so uh i wanted to talk about a bit about soft launching a mobile game from a admon perspective and what you as a developer should think about so what prompted me to want to talk about this is actually a statistic article that came out about a month ago that stated that mobile game ad spending is expected to grow from from 32 billion which it was in 220 2020 and it's expected to grow to 130 billion in by 2025 and that's up 300 percent in just five years so with this amount of 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 on how you as a mobile game dev should think about ad monetization when you're soft launching and global launching your next mobile game and march in remo please feel free to kind of stop me at any time if you think i'm using terms or anything like that that doesn't make any sense and you can call me out on youtube right now like do we think the number is justified it's 130 in five years from 30 really when 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 a perfect one to ask because it's more than 100 yeah well it's definitely more than hundred percent uh but uh

[Music] i think it's a it still could be true even even if cps are pretty pretty high you know the uh the ability to spend like cross-platform is uh you know mobile is still the the biggest platform out there and if you have cross-platform mobile um pc and desktop launchers and whatever it's still the the desktop inventory is very small and shrinking every day so he's discounting 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 of course because if you say like the current gaming like mobile industry is making like like 90 billion a year let's say and it's it's then making 32 billion in that spanner or you said 45 so let's take that so

you can 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 sure why not why not because i didn't see that number in the other analysis ever well we saw in the analysis from an uh news that nft is going into the luxury and lifestyle brands so you know it seems to me just like too big of a number honestly it's like uh i don't know all right well we'll see i guess you know the article after this and you can go into it i could never have seen i'm just getting getting this back up on track so soft launching [Laughter] 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 iaps so the advice i'm giving here is set to be for the middle 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 the spectrum nine times out of ten 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 because you get the highest ecpms compared to other four 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 you get the most amount of competition for your inventory for this format from other networks because 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 is equal to fill or impressions times ecpm so everything you do to maximize ad revenue 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 hundred deaths per day because what you need to push to to push a lot of percentage of your

player base to actually work watch at least few hours a day not just like few people watching hundreds of ads per day so there's a diminishing return here so 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 add metric that you should be looking at is impressions per dau i.e how many ads do your users actually watch a day 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 dau or anything above that how did you how did you come up with that number so essentially 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 six to eight cents per user per day now if you achieve about 7 impressions per dau 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 a dollar twenty or a dollar to a dollar fifty to your to their overall ltv so from my perspective as a mediation admin 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 dau number as close to or above five impressions per dau as you possibly can okay and how can you do that actually i actually wanted to pause here since we actually happen to have a game designer

oh yeah okay i would say the the other percentage number which is the how much percentage of your dau 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 sixth seventh impression per dau like usually how i see it is that you have four to five impressions per dau eight impressions print daily engage users if you are only counting the ones that are actually watching the s because they will they will just behave that like is usually double the number that and then just pretty much focusing on that engagement percentage and pulling it up and how you do that is you spread the ad 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 diamond and big 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 adhesive and they are pretty much offered into your face in the right moment like similar can you give an example yeah of course dynamic 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 a usual fail state scenario and then you are offered the possibility to watch an ad or something kind of happens in the game and there's some kind of trigger point and then you are offered an ad rather than just having a button that is sitting there on your main ui which is screaming at you or hinting and popping like watching that watching that watching that 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 four hours so i would say going dynamic is really important and then the even more advanced solution is having ads in events where you would have events and ads integrated 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 you mean game even not uh even there's a tracking uh um thing event in a game yeah game event like meaning some kind of a seasonal content that you do okay starting okay it goes out okay um when when do developers need to start thinking about this at monetization in the soft launch like really in the beginning of the retention stage or like uh in the monetization stage or when i think it's even in like game design pre-production stage where you pre-collections yeah yeah because

you need to know like what you're selling and how people should be familiar what the 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 iep revenue oh okay okay well i know we're getting advanced but like let's face it this is how it works like it should it shouldn't be like that that we you know construct the game to be hundred percent iep and then sometime later down the line oh there's this you know nice thing called adds let's slap it on top yeah yeah yeah but there's the thing like this never works like uh half of the developers uh think about it yeah so that's that's why i asked this i asked this question yeah you need to do it differently if you want to do it like you know buy 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 mid-core gamer like usually if it's a game that has 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 things and your sources some of the sources are pretty much coming with the adds and you are

counting for the player to watch the ads as a normal player progression so that that isn't very normal basically no cannibalization of the revenue because it's already counted yeah i think i think the usual adventure capital is adventure communist idol games like you always have the like best converting at placement which is like speed up your you know economic game by two times and the whole game is pretty much balanced around that that it counts with you that you always have this ad placement on because otherwise you're just scrolling on the floor yeah okay but remo correct me if i am you're kind of seeing these idle metrics that used to only be in idle games kind of making their way to every genre of every style of game right now is that kind of a trend you're saying definitely not like the the idol 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 are exponential and sometimes the numbers game gets 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 can a really good practices are coming between the games in a way that 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 that you 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 instance your character dies and you can you know get your health back and like have more to rise 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

thrice is the you know better placement here but your game needs to be able to support 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 around for 20 minutes he doesn't want to reset again 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 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 gacha 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 has 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 core loop offers that of course monetize your fail state 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 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 very cleverly these days that you know they are pretty much counting with 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 uh offer like a piece of cake on top of it oh that's very good very nice very nice that sounds quite cool emo so i'm going to move on that was really good advice actually like i think we actually covered some pretty good topics there so if you think about that during soft launch and when you're kind of designing

the game 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 dau that's when your northstar metric should kind of shift away from impressions per dau and engagement and in my argument now your northstar metric during global launch and after you've hit those metric should shift to add arp down from an ad monetization perspective one thing that is add revenue per daily activity one thing i wanna i wanna ask like okay so you're talking about if you are hitting these numbers then move towards the the arp now if 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 yeah like that's the you know tricky part because if 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 um you know can be it stellar and every other kpo is falling apart if you design your economy properly is usually okay with ips and ads in like if you do it you know from the beginning not the fact 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 like yeah there's this like usual that you have buy everything button in the game i've seen that everything button and then no ads for like 99 cents yes like oh well how in the is this going to be profitable 99 cents just saying that games that have the no ads button what the button does is that it removes interstitials and some kind of uh yeah no reward yeah but you always are there with rewarded videos even on top

of that it doesn't mean that like you don't have rewarded videos from that point of time yep all right sorry felix continue please come on no no no no no no no no worries but back to your point where you said much it's actually a very good point because if you remember what i said about the formula ad revenue equals pretty much fill or impressions times ecpm so if you want to increase your ad revenue you can also here at this stage you can this is where 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 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 it gets a bit more complicated in terms of networks that i recommend to start with right now on both ios and android i would recommend that you start with five

networks and there are facebook admob unity iron source and uploading these networks will be more than enough 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 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 basically in that pod in that blog post i go into exactly how you should start by setting up your mediation and also what kind of data you should be looking at from to increase your ad revenue in terms of fill and those yeah there is basically also like the example waterfall setup

that you should uh you should think about exactly uh i kind of want to shift gears here before kind of moving into some fun facts on ad monetization and just ask you marty like what kind of different ua strategies uh do you employ when it's around if you have a lot of iap and ad revenue and how do you structure ua campaigns again differently if you have both let's say let's say we have like 50 50 split which is uh well that would be amazing for the the ui person to have because you have all the possibilities 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 the one part of the strategy aiming for purchases and payers and whales basically and the other part would be using uh the ad revenue events so no game events but the event uh 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 admob but google ads is also um having a possibility of running and address-based campaigns so um you are trying to optimize for the value of the ad revenue so when i am talking about the value-based campaigns i'm talking about the purchase or 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 advails 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 percent of ads and the 30 of iips uh your ua 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 it's not always like a black and white and different ui channels offer different ua 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 50 50 split and you have a game yep which ad networks do you expect to be spending like to be your top five app networks that you spend with well i would say google definitely is the top one because you can you can run the the t ros campaigns which is the value optimized for purchases but actually add the based uh roads as well so you you can have both uh the most powerful optimization um set up on purchase campaigns and monetize campaigns on google and then well facebook obviously

is still even though the quality is dropping so you can still run pretty good ios campaigns there which is uh i know it's surprised and a lot of developers are not doing it because well they can't measure it properly but still facebook and ios 14 campaigns are 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 on facebook and then you have the unity which i mentioned which is a ros campaigns on both purchase or ad monetization [Music] optimization and then i would go with tick-tock and with iron source as well and uploading uploading too so you have uh uploading campaigns where you can uh as well as you can do it on unity and google just focus on ad monetization value and purchase value campaigns um so yeah that's it man

cool makes sense well i hope that would make sense uh it all depends on the split of the of the app in-app purchases versus the address yeah i would just say that seeing games that are 50-50 is very rare occasion usually like you know the distribution in the market is usually 70 30 one way or the other 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 yeah it's definitely rare to see but kudos to the guys that uh make it work on 50 50 it's really hard it opens up a lot of possibilities like i said so now you know i don't need to focus only on the the high paying payers and players which obviously drives the cpi up but you can also try to run cpi campaigns with like the lowest cost possible just to get

enough impressions there and uh like a huge amount of players into the game last time that i heard i think a good example for a 50 50 game would be arcero really yeah i thought it's more skilled towards uh ads rather than i'm quite i think they kind of switched a little bit like if you compare for instance how idle miners switched because it was completely ads and now it's like 50 50 also but i think from the beginning as i heard archer was 50 50 or even maybe more ads but then they can make made the economy much more robust so i would say even maybe skew towards 60 40. but yeah i can watch for that now but during lunch definitely i heard that they were 50 50. okay cool i think uh i think we should leave it there because i have some other fun good things to know such as thing is how ecpm is calculated yeah how

like first impressions matter more than kind of the later impressions but i'm thinking maybe i should say with that so you actually should go and check out the blog uh on lenkarnik.me and read it because it makes a bit more sense when you're reading it uh yeah but at least or anything at least like um let us know or like uh try to um explain how the networks make money because you know everybody says like oh well they're not making any any cut you you what you see in the in the dashboards uh it's all the money you get like yeah sure but no networks need to make money because well they would go bankrupt right so for themselves yeah yeah they do yeah 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 the non networks 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 competitive waterfalls set up 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 images that's how they make money on the monetization side i'll remember that they will undercut themselves pretty much there yeah exactly yeah so if you keep one network uh they're definitely not gonna stick to giving you thirty percent they'll uh i can guarantee you that you're like no process you know you're 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 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 administration person you need to always be a bit like the disapproving father almost so you never give a compliment to another 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 yeah i might want to try because they're already really happy with me i might want to try pushing my margins let's say from 30 to 35 yeah and then when i have a call with them in two weeks are they still happy yeah and if they still are let's let's move into 40 that margin a bit more exactly and that's how it works so okay 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 [Laughter] oh my god oh my god whoa oh i hope we don't get banned on our you know accounts on the net network but okay well that's uh it's good to know it's really good to know and uh well should we just uh should should we just leave it here with uh amazing

mushroom analogy well i got 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 admont side during the soft launch grow your marshalls grow your mushrooms uh in the meantime and we'll speak to you next week thank you guys bye-bye [Music]