two & a half gamers session #9 - How to increase AdARPDAU? How Adnetworks make money? Admonetisat...

[Music] welcome everyone uh this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast when have Gamers session number nine welcome everybody we are discussing latest news fun stuff and dropping some knowledge but also don't forget this is an 400 a.m. convers [ __ ] this is 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe you say conversion I did say conversion I did say conversion well well have you been working hard this week oh yeah of course nevertheless welcome guys and also welcome yakob and and Felix should we do an intro again Felix to you know make you happy of course anything to make me happy okay let's let's do that let's do a quick intros Felix please go I'm Felix I'm the director of ad monetization at networking I focus on ads in the game and making the most

possible revenue from advertising in the game oo you stepped up your game bro nice good intro yeah I can continue uh named Jacob uh in game design and monetization currently head of monetization and repl been squeezing the game uh for six years now squeezing the game okay I I didn't prepare anything like this but okay so mate here I'm your host as well as I am um running some UA campaigns where working with different U gaming companies around the world spending a huge amount of money but in a profitable way uh okay so what are we talking about today there are some news uh talking about two billion invested into the blockchain idle Miner Tycoon Launches on Facebook gaming hilarious uh Google launches a Google Play partner program for large game developers we have Wildlife Studios entering blockchain space and Instagram and nfts new news and then we're going to dive

into the ad monetization fundamentals and the Q&A session and also ask me anything segment at the end two previous um fundamentals and amas were pretty pretty funny but also uh we dropped some knowledge that um others and you listeners as well um really enjoyed so uh thank you for that and also please subscribe to our amazing YouTube channel and also to Spotify and uh well iOS apple or whatever or wherever you are listening to this or watching this so let's uh let's dive in so the news well I've been seeing around uh lately well well there's the hyp about around the blockchain gaming sector and now I've read an article about um the investing into the blockchain gaming space so uh that's kind of like incre inreasing over time

and uh we are seeing 2 billion invested in 2022 and you know now it's like mid-march so that's it's pretty impressive so um it's been increasing for last five quarters so if we are looking at the q1 last year so 2021 it was 430 million okay then it was a small dip four 400 million in Q2 2021 then increased quite heavily in Q3 to 1.2 billion and then uh again in Q4 1.6 billion and now as I said we are sitting on 200 two billion uh in this quarter and it's not even end of the quarter so pretty interesting hype uh pretty interesting well I I'm sure that like half of this uh this money is Anoka just investing in a lot of companies any thoughts I think we are still seeing the same

names pretty much uh within the spectrum of uh either like fores Sara daps polygon animoca openc immutable so either a blockchain ecosystem or a big protocol not that focused on game companies specifically I would say so well I guess we're more into like infrastructure Anoka is building a pretty huge network of all the companies and there like some of the gaming companies as well so you know I mean I'm the only one who's been directly affected by this see as for a bought Network I can't comment too much on this stuff but I mean investment in any type of gaming thing is should be a good thing I'm I'm quite excited to see where this will go usually when you have a lot of capital deployed in a specific sector it's not a bad thing like the ultimate outcome will be that there will be new games that people will play and people will enjoy

but how do we get there that's the kind of that's the part that I'm saying that I don't see new games being part of this more of like we're preparing to make new games or like we are building the tools or infrastructure to build new games but not like the Investments I don't think so those are into game ideas or game like products they are more into like these ecosystem infrastructur tools or Studios that will actually make the games I mean the games here that are getting invested in or the people that are getting investment like it's a very longtail thing building good games that are fun like we're not going to see any of the outcom at least year and a half oh my God yeah I think this is the the main problem here that like the whole crypto Community is kind of disconnected a little bit from the fact that like they need to build the games that last because they are fun and engaging in the first place not just like a investment crypto machine yeah but we're getting there yeah we're getting there of course we're getting there and we'll see the results there are still like a lot of pump and dump

activities and rock pools my favorite board uh but what can we do that's you know that's also like part of the ecosystem as Nico said it just uh slows down some processes and uh Evolution but it's still you know we can't do anything about it at the moment yeah like I think as I was let lightly looking at the de rator data again however valid it is uh yeah let's say axi user wallets continue to decline and drop so I guess this is all in line with that notion that all of the like first wave crypto first games will probably die off slowly and then we get into the they announced second they announced the the increase of percentage of fee they're getting maret yeah they're getting from every transaction that yeah that let's say it was very similar move than what Ubisoft did so um you know with the nfts the

backlash was absolutely there the interesting part was when everybody was asking why didn't they get to vote on it through they Dow like now now you get to see how DS work yeah well I said you know uh they could get um the the players to vote but the part the fun part of of the whole uh of their Dow is that they have like what the majority of votes anyway so it would be a nice at least a nice you know gesture towards to have a formal vote actually be able to vote even though you know you know um in advance that you you cannot overvote them you will lose what can we do um should we move on to to the idle minor Tycoon that Launches on on Facebook gaming ah well I'm not sure what to think about you yeah do you want to do you want to read it Rema yeah so kbri uh I think fluffy fairy games was the

previous name that they changed so they more real I think I love that yeah so they put uh idle Miner Tycoon their most successful game on Facebook uh since the launch on 2016 on mobile uh for anyone to remember kri games has been acquired for 100 million by Ubisoft and I guess they are 200 100 if I understand I'm not sure correct me if I'm wrong all those Founders Founders are already gone yeah they are gone and they're trying to reinvest uh earnings I think back into the industry through some startups or Investments but yeah like this company is pretty curious because I know that the first game was like a major success uh first it was running mostly on ads then they they were able to switch it also into IP so I guess they ared at something like 50/50 split between IP and and ads reaching

like a pretty big scale of I I don't think so like 5 million a month or 6 million don't know but then they made the second game which was Factory Tycoon yeah which unfortunately didn't cut it uh and then they sold the company now you know since uh I think like last year they made a lot of idle games uh and they launched like idle what firefight fighter tycoon or something like that like definitely like five new games I mean not sure how how they actually do and if they're able to earn some money but um definitely get they got back on track with launching new games so can someone explain to me why you'd want to put your game on Facebook cloud like a mobile game I'm not really I'm trying to see it is it to unlock new audience or is it because the game is so heavy that you need to have like a crazy machine to run it I'm a bit confused why you yeah I maybe maybe

Facebook paid you off no I'm well I'm not sure if that's uh that's something that happened really but uh from the announcement they said they want to reach uh new players around the world uh and with this like cloud game on Facebook gaming I mean it's just like the you know HTML 5 game uh it was uh hype a long time ago I wasn't sure as well like why would you do it I mean if it's something that you can do very easily from the like resources standpoint then yes but yeah I'm not sure like if this is going to get them like any money at all I mean it's just like a dying platform yeah do do we assume then the Facebook basically goes like hey you have a popular game we want to have a popular game how much do I make out the check to be like tell me a number maybe or some free UA or you know free free UA on on that platform it's like uh well not true that's something that happens

don't know but for me usually companies do for cl Closs platform push like if you take for instance Star Trek PC client or R Legends PC client you want to avoid the fee because you're going through your own store either through website browser or like some kind of computer client PC based one but don't know like what's the angle here well nobody knows they just said uh you know potential to bring a in bring in new players from around the world whatever that means like I would be really curious what's the like major plan behind the whole studio from Ubisoft side like what's their take on whole mobile because I think I'm not sure Ubisoft most of their games yeah there weren't like really big successes what's uh what's ubisoft's most successful mobile title again it's not Assassin's Creed it's the the shark they had the mobile Assassin's Creed actually they it was like a fallout shelter clone that didn't make it was there like a South uh Park game then they had like a squad based shoot a squad based RPG with Tom Clancy I think

or something like that they also shut that one down I don't know like they're trying to jam their IP somewhere there but don't know if it's like a fit tier well I I can't I can't recall any any mobile success of Ubisoft honestly so idle Miner is their most successful mobile title then or could be could yeah could be didn't didn't they both also catchup sure but yeah it's did they have like Hungry Shark adventure and those things yeah it did yeah of course anyway okay so what do we make of this move Facebook basically paying them or they actually want to get new users what do we think I think they they want to grow the the Facebook gaming platform with this this move rather than like anything else because well you know they partnered with uh kri because I think they already have a very um well intense relationship yeah because well uh they're definitely spending some uh

interesting money on Facebook or at least they were in the past so uh this can be just uh because of that relationship or maybe that's just the consolidation that Ubisoft is trying to put you know the resources from the company somewhere else and then just keep the game running on as much platforms as possible but like if you are running more platforms doesn't that really require even more resources rather than less resources do yeah of course I mean if if you remember if it's making still you know enough money you want to keep it alive of course yeah but it won't get any younger like the game is still like six years old but if you remember when we launched uh like Cort or D Adventure on Amazon that was also like something that required like more hands more QA more resources develop uh for more resources to actually develop that platform as well but yeah we we don't know we don't know how is this going to uh work for

Facebook or cbri but interesting news well it's uh no this week's news is is kind of like a a slow one so we pick this one no major multi-billion acquis not this week un weird like it kind of says how like overheated the gaming industry is like this is the first time we're doing a new segment on a nine episode where we don't have a large multi-million dollar acquisition to announce which is yeah that's true maybe we've seen the peak huh yeah well I'm not going to comment on that because when I did last time it was just uh catastrophic next week it was a again way bigger m&a yeah let's move on I guess yeah so uh yeah I can do this one it's just Google lunches the Google Play partner program for large game developers uh so they had the this um this Google Summit and they announced

that the Google Play partner program is going to be launched and they will provide the larger developers and Studios the resources they need to maintain and scale their games this is amazing including faster releases additional tools to help fight scaled abuse and more this is very good timing because in last couple of weeks we are seeing 7 to 10 days approval times on Google Play which never happened before which is even worse than iOS ever been until this point I mean it was seven days for iOS is like s years ago now it's like one or two days and uh Google is getting behind on this so uh well absolutely great and there's one one comment from from their representative so quote uh the Google Play partner program is for large scale develop velers those who have long lead times and are

investing a lot of time and money in their games through the whole life cycle what this program does is provide additional services and features that are really tailored for them it focuses on fast again fast releases pre-launch tools growth engagement tools and whatever else so this is very nice um sales pitch is isn't this all just about the fact that you can skip those seven days seven days there's like whole update cycle for some games of course it's just some temporary [ __ ] they having at the moment but I mean this is I'm not sure like what are they uh trying to provide here I mean you have the pre-launch tools anyway all the Google Play experiments everything growth what do you have there I mean what Google ads or the pre-launch tools as well is this like pre-registration campaigns oo amazing what a useless piece of [ __ ] for uh for pre registration campaigns I mean just it's

like waste of money so does anyone know what Google actually does on their side when you submit a new build for like an update like is it an algorithm or is it people that sit and go through the game because like the last year we've had so many issues with updating games like on Android it's like it's really noticeable in the last six months how much like slower it's gotten and how much more picky they are it's uh it's definitely an algo if you if you are um submitting your build for featuring or game for featuring they are doing a manual review from their editorial team but everything else is just analo I know I talked to Rudy and he also said like look so I don't know how to you know make it faster because it's out of my hands unfortunately maybe get more servers with gole Google Cloud oh yeah oh speed it up spe that yeah so okay looking forward to this uh partner program there was a partner program for small um

developers not sure if that something that really helped them yeah let's move on I guess should I uh read the next one because I'm actually bit excited about this one because I actually made some money because of this so uh Wildlife Studios is entering the blockchain nft and web 3 space so they relieved that revealed that they will be expanding into the web 3 gaming by launching on the Avalanche public blockchain the studio began by bringing its Flagship title Castle Crush to Avalanche blockchain and will Implement new features such as upgrade to the user experience and game functionality this news actually caused the €200 I had in avalanche to go up by 64% so thank you very much let me check if I I have some avalan as well have anything on Avalanche yeah let's see well I've you know my coinbase app was

uh pretty much closed in the last couple of weeks and months yeah it's it's been too depressing to open exactly yeah yeah yeah so okay I have I have few questions here of course you of course Mr Crypt skeptic what's the difference what's the difference between crypto gaming in web3 space I don't think anyone knows yet man yeah well okay so um if you if you listen to crypto corner and Nico speaking speaking about um uh web 3 versus the blockchain games and um crypto gaming so basically you have the blockchain games and web 3 is um is the whole ecosystem so all the platforms and everything I I'm just getting I'm just getting the feel that you can change the world web three from future and that's it and it matches everything yeah it matches everything it is true and you know next question is this is this uh okay with the store guidelines then oh

we we will see we will see we see nobody said they will implement the the new features in the in the mobile um version of the game app yeah nobody said that yeah yeah I'm I'm really curious because I think uh it is what Anoka Anoka has the castle Defenders game that they added crypto stuff on top of it like an older game and they again duct tapes and crypto stuff in it and it seems it works great because at least on that the users they are growing pretty fast so I'm guessing they are doing the same approach there but I still don't know the exact te details how these are connected to actual crypto wallets well I need to look into it more Clos you know what I what I found out one of uh one of the guys from B life Studios he left and joined Google and when he was leaving he posted a very nice um byby message on LinkedIn and I found out like Ricardo who was our uh main um Facebook

rep for Pixel Federation and then boom he's working at Wildlife Studios oh my God it's like congrats man that's uh that's pretty good that's pretty good well he's he's from Brazil originally so it makes sense but what I don't know is like what the [ __ ] is Castle Crush I mean I've never heard of that game seriously it's pretty big yes okay I should do my homework yeah you should this is this is the this is the uh part I'm telling you that they're actually using a pretty old game so the audience is definitely there question is if it will grow because of the crypto functionality added on top of it so we'll see because I know they have like much more games there oh this one okay I know this one ah now I know why I I didn't know because they have it on the fun games for free iOS account that's why I I yeah okay I know it's Wildlife Studios okay nice yeah they have a lot of games like the tennis Clash one I know about tennis Clash yeah

of course that's the you know the main game and and zuba as well right so uh now they have the the sky Warriors the new airplane or jet yeah they're pretty big like if I understand correctly the company has billions in valuation currently of after last raises they have multiple games um outside of their like main Wild live Studios account that's what was confusing so the cast crush is on the on the other one yeah yeah all right so we'll see like I'm I'm really looking forward to this second wave of like crypto games pretty much like how they will fair so do you already see what would be what will be the third wave of of crypto gaming I would say I would say uh that first first part was the one where crypto was first yep second part is the one that you don't need to need crypto first but most of the games are kind of duct taped and the third one will be games that are done with the tend to have crypto

unlocked later but it's builing there from the start and when you say crypto there do you mean nfts and like you can own characters and like Commerce or do you mean like you're earning or when you say like it's actually integral part like how do you actually mean it there's a wallet connection functionality doesn't matter what what's in the wallet yeah because there then you are multiple parts of the the blockchain technology then you can leverage obviously you know staking or or earning as well depends like what do you build that you don't need Stak I know you don't need you can have it it's just a part of uh what you can get okay yeah let's uh let's move on let's move on uh to the to the next news it's most interesting anyone yeah Mark tuber again announcing big things because he's been doing this from October where he announced that they're going full VR so now they announced they're going to use nfts uh on Instagram somewhere like ler no specific details as

always um yeah I guess I would take this with a like pinch of salt here because Facebook's stock price is pretty much going down all the time I even read that they're like Cutting Company benefits lately uh because of that um how would that help uh increasing the stock price I'm assum I'm assuming have NS on Instagram what's going to happen is Facebook is going to take a nice little commiss they're going to take a 30 % just like they do on the App Stores from every nft that's transaction uh I don't think so crypto people will you know allow them to take 30% open see takes like 2.5% that's the thing it's not going to be crypto people it's going to be all the instagrammers and photographers it's uh it's way different audience but the question is why would you then s your nfts on Instagram if you can just s them on why because it's going to be way easier than on the open c ah oh yeah well 28% cut is way easier no but honestly like we haven't announced but like they have

whatever like what I always say is like the key to success always and Instagram has this it's distribution if you have distribution you always win look at the App Stores look at everything from like the Mexican cartels to Ikea like they have distribution if you have distribution you control the market and you always win like I'm going to it's actually quite interesting like out of all the nft projects I've heard about if they actually start launching it and let creators sell the stuff like nfts and earn money charge something with that distribution they have what 1.2 billion monthly active or something crazy like that like this could be an absolute growth bomb if done correctly I'm actually quite like bullish on this so so much so much [ __ ] guys this is complete [ __ ] all right well come come at me come at with me with an argument why don't you think this is going to be a cool cool thing I'm actually quite like money man the money will decide what will be done here and the money means the cut why do you think like how how many Filipino people are

playing axi Infiniti and like jumping through all of those Hoops in order to get into the game and earn money because there's money in it and if there will be a store which has just lower percentage share or percentage cut they will go there you have an open C Market and you you know you have all your nfts there tens of thousands of n nfts there but that's the part about the NS you don't need to get them anyway know them because you know nobody cares but you have all the people on the Instagram you have like Felix said all the distribution there you have now 80 million less people on the Instagram what that's a rounding error with they're kind of like like da that's a rounding error yeah yeah I know but I'm just saying like it won't won't fly when they when they say that they want to do 30% cut I don't think so they will I don't think they will do I just said that like I have no idea they could do 15% but like this could be like actually like a genuine way for face I see some

growth yeah I'm yeah I'm feelings on this one we see okay sure yeah we'll see we'll see we can uh we can make a bet uh you know whatever dinner we can we can have in the future so either you pay or or we pay yeah best than crypto yeah I can yeah of course aval lunche Felix already made some money on that I got a lot of them so yeah life on that I have n so all right REM since you're since you're a bit pessimistic I think you should take us to the last story and then today to the so there's a there's a Forbes article which is kind of non article it's just U like one of the nice guys Paul tassi from Forbes the one that usually covers uh gaming and Tech stuff looking at Google Trends and seeing that nfts and metaverse keywords are kind of flying the direction towards the ground let's say yeah which means exactly

nothing by the way of course could mean exactly nothing but we'll see because I'm I'm already seeing some of the games like if you if you see the this really really nice website called web3 is going great yeah that I recommend checking out yeah that's you can see a lot of nice developments in the web three space that's been happening sure well it's uh it's definitely good website to to check out every other day with a lot of realistic comments about what's happening at the moment like uh with The Bard abat Club buying the the crypto punks and the meats like uh there was the comment like okay so this is how the decentralization looks like which is obviously true but uh you know well who cares okay well uh the trends yes you can see that um people are losing interest in um finding out or

like not finding out like searching for the terms nfts and meterse because they already know what is what is this all about so you know when it was like two or three months ago nobody knew about like okay so what the [ __ ] is nft and this is this is actually the trend then it doesn't say anything else just the search volume okay as you say as you say as you say Mr kripto skeptic oh my God I'm going to come in there and separate you to all right guys I think it's time to move on to our favorite seent and basically talk about ad monetization fundamentals so exactly like the last two weeks when Remo and mati have been doing their sections uh I'm going to do the same I have prepared some questions on ad monetization that I will ask each and one of you and then I will answer at the end basically I'm going to test your guys's ability on how much you know

about inup ad monetization you guys excited nervous excited I I see you're excited as well you even changed your tone of voice amazing different person nothing more beautiful than Ina ad Revenue period oh wow okay amazing I think we're going to get more more and more mushrooms oh yeah I hope so that was amazing analogy all right let's start with uh an easy one what would you guys say is the most important ad Revenue metric to look at well uh money obviously so just the revenue outstanding move outstanding move I want to earn as much as possible nah but if if you're just looking at the money you don't know how much you should be earning man okay that's the problem that most of the companies struggle with nice

the money is good but they don't see how much more money they could get how how can I how can I see that from the from the numbers because you need to know the metrics and the metrics then you compare with industry benchmarks y pan oo okay amazing Remo knocking it out of the park yeah yeah exactly what you said it's like the main issue with looking at money it's it's a very satisfying metric dollar value seeing how much money you made yesterday uh but the main issue uh of basically just looking at the revenue it doesn't give you a clear indication of how good your UA for example is so let's say that you Ma you're running UA and then you see a spike and then ad Revenue went from 50k a day to 70k a day if you look just at the dollar amounts you're like yes I killed it my UA is super profitable I'm going to spend more but the issue with that is you don't know essentially per user basis if

you're actually earning more per user which is actually the true metric that you should be looking at so actually the healthiest metric that you should look at if it comes to ads is AD arpal so add Revenue per daily active user because that gives you kind of a clear cut metric that cuts out all the UA fluctuations and organic fluctuations so basically by looking at the adarp though then you know that if you are doing a good job on UA or not and getting good users start watching a lot of ads okay and then is that arbow is that money it is money so go [ __ ] yourself Mone but it's not the revenue it's not the revenue I didn't say Revenue I say money ah okay okay I said money oh man yeah he greased himself up and weasel your way out of that well done M seriously you should consider politics after yeah or I I should become a sales person well no not really not really okay but it's like it's very interesting so then what can what can I do to increase the AR Dow if I'm you

know trying to maximize the the ad revenue for my UA the money yeah the money the money yeah so that's a very good question so the way you can actually increase ad ARP uh the main things is it's quite simple if you break it down you could either make users watch more ads so Impressions per da you can make basically change placements to make that basically go up uh you could have a larger pool of your users watch ads so usually like a good opt-in rate of people that watch ads is somewhere around like 55% with the rewarded ads and above so if you can put on better ads better rewards you can increase the ad arow and then of course there's also increasing the ecpm which you can do through either yeah usually yeah the best way of doing that is just having a solid like mediation setup and that will increase your ecpm the most so that's the Holy Trinity of how you improve AR though okay okay yeah let let me just

say that I usually look at it through like this kind of dual perspective like either internal or external internal means you're touching the game and tinkering with the metrics through like the ad placement design whatever you can come up with yeah pretty much product and game design and then external which is the waterfall mediation and talking to those mushrooms on the ad networks okay but then then you can also um increase the ad ARP Dow by um running a like more efficient UA in terms of the the ad optimization so not running like the basic mobile app install campaigns but actually optimize for either add Revenue um value so raas ad Ras or just some um events so placement events uh you know you have one what daily reward and uh that's the the placement for your um rewarded video so you can um optimize

for uh for players that are actually more likely to watch this um this placement so would that help with the ARP Dow eventually absolutely yeah uh usually like you see that as a like viable solution more in games that see Impressions per duu above like five uh unrewarded and that tends to be like the Idol idol type of genre games where you actually have that like large Reliance on ads so usually if you have above five Impressions per du you with rewarded you tend to make at least 40% uh of your revenue from yeah ads and that's when you can really like yeah scale those type of campaigns successfully depends a lot also on the game genre of course yeah that's that's a big cave like of course everything depends on game genre everything depends yeah one thing maybe to not is that uh you are trying to to to make make as big of a portion

of people to watch ads rather than make one person watch as many ads as possible that's important distinction there yeah okay and then um there's the um always the question about um if one person watches 10 ads where is that that point that you are not making that amount like that big amount of money out of like all these ecpm degradation line yeah okay called yeah actually yeah 100% true uh all ad networks all ad networks work on a bidding model that's called a recency model which basically assumed that first view is worth more than like the eighth view because you assume that people will have better attention span on the first View and the cutoff Point uh at least most like networks tend to have a big fallof after the fifth impression so you really need to make people like after the fifth impression like the value of getting someone to watch the sixth impression is not going to be new near as much um as it would be like from 3 to

4 okay but then how how people become like the Ed Wells because that's like the term that's flying around like okay so this is the Ed well which is like what someone who watches like 50 ads what does it like how does how players became one yeah I mean there's this sheer amount of like frequency as well like when the share amount of number is super high of course you're going to earn more money uh it's just like the per view is going to be less so yeah so usually see like are we talking about some meaningful amount of money like how much percentage of like an N wh you would get from those first five and then the rest like isn't it like 7030 or something like that you mean the portion of the their LTV yeah yeah that like from the ads like I mean aren't those first five ads basically 70% of their whole Revenue anyway and then just like all the additional ads are within that 30% okay but if you're talking about 30% is still like meaningful money yeah it is but

yeah just kind of so let's say you know let's say we have an adwell which uh makes you $100 so yeah you're saying like the first like the $70 is made in the first five views and then the $30 is made in like 20 afterwards yeah I know but yeah that also keep in mind that people are getting something for the ads that usually you are discounting your economy on those hats sure but if you're a good game designer you won't discount because yeah if you do it kind of from the start if you're a good game designer you can create anything like even the game that pays you to play of course and we are back in last week episode well session not episode all right so next question for you guys how's ecpm calculated H let me by the article by ad networks by ad networks Yeah by ad

networks like yeah CPM like yeah you should raise ecpm but like what how do you guys think ecpm is actually calculated by all ad networks what actually decides on what they're paying out traffic like the type of traffic first one then uh clicks per thousand views yeah well honestly well it's true that if we are buying a different type of users into the game the ecpm is higher obviously which is more which was always translated in in like value optimized campaigns from Facebook and the purchase optimized campaigns from Facebook as well and the same thing for the ad networks but how exactly is calculated not sure okay well kind of close Remo uh so essentially like ad networks is like they all keep kind of

secret exactly how they do it but it's kind of generally known how generally you would calculate this and what you do is you take the last seven days data and then you take the install rate the CPI click-through rate and usually something like amount of unique users that you're actually seeing and basically those factors and then basically you do an average over a th and that's how you get the ecpm decided so it's done on a rolling basis every seven days like taking the last seven days data if there hasn't been like a last 7day data they're can to do a guesstimate and that's why when you first launch a new ad Network it tends to go up like crazy and that means that pretty much the ad networks are testing out your users to see actually how valuable they are and then it kind of goes down after that okay so they pretty much threw all those ke into a black box and come up with a number after seven days yep yeah yeah yeah yeah and that's how work trying to he trying to

understand what's uh what's happening on the so is it is it prone prone to change than if you are let's say going through different UI phases that you either scaling up scaling down or having a featuring or something like that yeah 100% so featuring tends to bring down your ecpm uh quite a lot cuz basically they're not really known when you get featuring they're not known as like the most valuable users because these users tend not to be very valuable yeah uh and also like yeah if you're getting a lot of high valuable users uh like through quality UA your Adar and ecpm will rise and basically you'll start seeing that roughly like a couple of days after when you start getting them in mhm okay is there anything you can do to like willfully make it better from your side what do you mean like ecpm or yeah of course yeah yeah like your ecpm other than media no and like outside of mediation like there's not that much you can do I mean

like in the odd sometimes like you can demand fill like from some networks if you're like in some kind of fight and you've been slighted you can also always demand like a force fill for a couple of days and that increases ecpm but it's like quite rare you're in a position where you're able to strong arm an ad Network enough to kind of do that mhm okay yeah all right any any other questions no the next one is pretty good already so which ad networks are the most trustworthy are we talking about applovin why is like why everybody has a problem with oving because they make games oh wow okay and iron swords yeah they don't make games they make also games though okay Unity have Unity has this like uh growth program for games as well so you know like nobody cares anymore Al now has is also like MMP but I heard that multiple times that don't

soft lach on games on these networks because they'll see your numbers immediately well all these like rumors come on it's just everyone these days can uh can get numbers or like also um if you launch a game every and each of your competitor immediately knows that you launch the game because of the Bots they are scraping the the app stores like that's that's okay because you know they're scraping the surface level data but these guys don't get surface level data they get the inside of the games but what exactly which exactly insid like what do what do you think they they see retention for instance and what okay because they have their SDK in the game I mean like if you have a successful games you're going to get clones no matter what it's just like it's just a bit like couple weeks down the line like that's how our industry works all like Illuminati I know Mr Jr but explain I'm really curious like

you know like if you have a hit game you're going to get a lot of clones anyway like what's the big deal butlin will you know check your your data through their SDK and they're making their gam let let me explain uh it depends again heavily on what's what's the complexity of the game and how much time it will take to actually clone it means hyper casual is the first in line that's of course and then uh yeah people just you know why for instance supercell soft launches their games under a different company for instance the last one why do they supercell and it's you know if you launch a game under supercell it's going to spoil your numbers always that's that's always what happens and don't tell me it's not the truth because you know every time you you la a supercell launches a game everybody plays it everybody immediately how is that like statistic statistically significant data for anything you you have it's like the whole whole industry immediately gets it

no like I'm okay I'm I agree with that but the thing I'm saying that you want to hide it as much as possible that's it like if if you're this big you don't want to get people heads up that's it nothing else yeah but you don't need uplo for for for that depends okay okay then well yes so tell me which one do you think is the most trustworthy one most trustworthy uh the one that doesn't have a gaming division yet well um I would say well Facebook or uh well Audience Network or or ad mop there you go and why why well you know because they're big companies yeah like I I agree a lot with you're saying like usually what I would say like yeah the bigger the company the more trustworthy because the least less they have to rely on do doing Shady stuff right but the thing you need to know about ad networks is like you need

to understand that you know they're not your partners with your own interest right like they earn money when they get people to leave your game and download and play another game right yeah so they're like you know you shouldn't always fully trust an ad Network that's the thing like there's no such thing I think as a fully honest ad Network there's better ad networks than other ones but like it's something that you always need to remind yourself that like the veneer of all these nice dinners and gifts and niceties like you know the business model still rolls around when people leave your game and that's how you get paid right so you just need to keep that in mind that pretty much even if it's admob or whatever like you always need to have your guard up yeah that's a that's a good point that's a good point they make make make money when uh players leave your game and download the other game then they they actually saw in in the ad in your game okay yeah should we move on to the AMA I don't know how much time we've got left I think like 10 minutes yeah

exactly around that exactly so I have a yeah a couple of questions as well like this is um an interesting one like when do you actually hire an internal ad monetization person what is the yeah what is the kpi we are looking for is it scale like a daily revenue or number of Impressions or or number of networks in the in the waterfall or how do that look like so basically like how an ad monitor ation can make a company more money it's a direct function and the only real levers that you can pull on is three-fold so you can do like in terms of like the most effective the least one is like mediation tinkering like placement tinkering the next one above that and like the order of magnitude how you can earn money is striking deals with the ad networks so basically doing growth deals where basically if you make more money on the me like on the supply side you get UA credits or sometimes even cash bonuses the next next one after that is pretty much working with game designers

on optimizing placements getting people to increase like yeah retention by putting intials and things like that so those are the three things that an ad monetization manager can do right but like really to unlock to be able to do all this like you need to have usually I'd say like 30 to 40K a month A Day In AD Revenue because basically below that it's not worth it because like maybe a good ad monetization manager can improve like ad revenues by about like 20% like over about couple of months uh and basically you only have the ability to do that if you already have the scale so if you can improve by 20% Then you can kind of work out how much money you can spend on an Adon person and it only starts getting like a 5x to a 10x return on the salary if you're earning around 20 to 30k so if you're not hitting those levels yet like there's no point of an admon person 20K admon a day is pretty big

scale yeah yeah okay okay so until you get 20K a day from ads there's uh you know no point of hiring a lot of companies are earning that much money like yeah really yeah more than you think I mean yeah okay interesting there's also a question about um well there was a trend uh with hyper ual games there was the UA and an ad monetization really connected and usually that was like one person so why is why why do you think that was like a one person like is it just uh based on what you just said I mean it's a plenty of work when you have 20K a day um revenue and uh I have no idea how that person could actually now manage even like a a multi um well not million but multi um daily budget as well so probably should specify that

like hyper casual is a completely different beast when it comes to adoniz like completely I was speaking for everything except hyper casual so hyper casual they do it differently because they're spending such copious amounts of money and such short bursts that basically like you if you were the UA person you need to you can actually see the returns quite quickly and you need to have the authority to actually change placements and do those updates really quickly so you know with Hyper casual you might spend you know couple of million in 14 days every day true and then basically since you're spending that money you need to know that for example like me my work sometimes is like oh I know there's a big UA push coming in two weeks I'm going to put up higher placements because I know I can get more money because we get higher amount of unique users okay so usually in hyper casual Studios it's like you do both because this hour I'm going to spend more so I'm going to put up the placements so it's like it's such quick turnarounds that it makes sense it's the same person and if it's not hyper casual the kind of quickness is not like as

like you know yeah yeah I mean for hyper casual that's uh what I heard when uh talking about the same person I mean I'm not seeing the same person working on uway and admon for any other genre sounds stressful oh yeah of course and um yeah yeah any any questions from yeah always like wondering about the specific one do you ban competitor ads in your G game CU I think that's especially like relevant to heavy IP games that are also running ads so me personally I don't like to do it because my job is to maximize the ad AR down and maximize the ad revenue and that's usually how I'm like you know incentivized however depends completely on the company so sometimes like you know people who are like director levels or VP levels they get angry and they're like I don't want to see any Disney ads in this game get them out so he's like for me like I'm here to maximize ad revenue and add ARP out and the way to

do that is having as many people like bidding but then basically I need to get that from above being told off or like that that's not the Strategic thing that we want to do so like it's not really up to an ad monetization person because like you need kind of a UA person's like yeah overviewing yeah Ras view to see if it's actually costing us more money than we're actually earning so it's like above my pay grade by the way isn't the is the most valuable traffic that you can get actually like the one that's coming from your competitors so you're pretty much you know cutting down on your biggest thing yeah that's why I say it's like above my pay grd because it's a calculation you can make right let's say if you lose you know 2% of your user based your biggest competitor you know every month but you're earning X like what is that actually worth it's a very easy like arithmetic that you can actually do and I've been in companies where basically people go like yeah turn it off right now and some people would like do the calcul is like oh that leakage is acceptable because we can

offset the leakage with higher UA that we get from advertising Revenue that's the beautiful thing about it you can calculate it yeah well you can you can calculate everything in the in the gaming industry almost everything because I I I would say sometimes I'm kind of more incentivized to do it just temporarily when let's say I remember AFK Arena having these really really big boosting campaigns when they are launching like a Cross promo stuff I think they like ETO from Assassin's Creed or like some of these they just like all over the place so you ban them just for like a you know two weeks and then let them in again or something in that matter at least yeah that's also a solution yeah 100% okay okay okay what else this is also like uh something I'm hearing quite a lot so some companies say so I have a um very good deal with unity uh you know um so I make I make a lot of money exclusive deal yeah exclusive deal with

unity yeah so I'm using only Unity for example Unity applo whatever else uh Network you have so is there a way how can I earn more money uh if I put I don't know like mediation in or like the exclusive deal is so lucrative that I don't need to care about anything else whenever you hear exclusive deal in advertising just replace it with being shafted because basically like there is no way you're getting such a good exclusive deal that you won't get better when you put it on the open market with competition so if someone says yeah we're going to give you 90% like of rev share and set you up with a nice exclusive you'd still earn way more money if you put it on mediation unlike the open market so yeah you're getting shafted maybe maybe another one of these like peculiar questions is it worth to build your own mediation it's so hard to do and you can get such

good Solutions I mean like sure you open yourself up to bit of risk that we talked about before but like I've heard stories with really big companies that have Deep Pockets like building their own mediation and they Benchmark it against like iron Source or app loving and they're like 35% lower and they've put in so much money so the the thing is like you need to actually have a discussion like can you actually build a mediation and put enough like time and resources into it that you actually can make it better than iron source and app loving or do you suck it up that sometimes you're going to get shorted under the stick and just you know go along with that so like a company like Zinga maybe they could put in the revenue the resources to actually like build something that's better but like a company that's Mark cap of like $500 million like it's I I don't think it would be actually be worth it their Solutions are already so good that I don't see why you'd actually would build build your own unless you're a Zinga yeah why not uh why invent the wheel all

over again when there's a lot of Wheels out there yeah all right uh well I think uh I think that's it guys for uh for this week uh was quite valuable actually I learned way more this week uh than I learned last week because this is you know we we make money yakob well you just uh you just uh talk about how to make them and uh and always trying to to cry like how how life is hard I I want to make fun yeah I know there's also that part that we want to sell in the first place I know I know I know yeah okay thank you very much uh our listeners please share feedback uh as um you are frequently doing every week which is um amazing thank you very much for doing that please keep doing that subscribe to YouTube Spotify Apple and wherever else until next time thank you guys see you

see you and we can just uh [ __ ] that's fine until we until we prep it this time it's going to be an agenda so I'm not sure if I'm I'm going to mention M 100% but yeah I'll listen afterwards and make notes so we can do the stamps and also I'm not sure like what he said also like why do we like why do we have the mics in the in the view so I'm like have have you ever spoken to a mic you need to keep it close exact like like like where should I I have a boom I need to sit here and like lean into it so yeah let's see uh these mics are expensive that's why yeah you should apply for I'm going to get the sure gold one next time [Laughter] yeah that that's what I should that's what I should buy that's what I should

buy all right let's uh let's do that and uh all right [Music]