Why Most Mobile Games Still Get Ad Monetization Wrong

Hello everyone, welcome to Gamigin podcast. It's been quite a while since our last shot. And now Katerina Malayaran brought the chain. So, today we will talk about of course monetization, but we will also get the details how she has been suffering in events from MAU to Gamesforum, Pocket Gamer. So, the biggest and the most challenging question would be, Katya, how are you?
Doing good. I wanted to say going to the second conference, but I understood that it's third.
So, Katya, of course we know you from screens with all of these events speech, but one small question, who are you?
Katerina Malayaran, head of monetization at Burning Games, a Ukrainian mobile game dev company. And the last 8 years I'm working in digital marketing, six of them fully focused on monetization and building in-house ad tech solutions. So, I'm happy to be here. And I hope it will

be very interesting podcast.
So, how are you feeling joining all these events and talking about AdMon? How how was it going for you in AdMon world?
Can't say no to people who want to listen about AdMon. That's why I'm good at in planning, so I'm trying to hold work and conferences at once.
That's nice. So, like now you are even the more prepared because you are speaking there. So, then number two question would appear, how do you think this AdMontization evolved? Like because we were talking a lot about game game game like waterfall, and then there were like lots of rumors and reality to bidding, and now many more stuff. So, like I want you to actually depict the shift. Like how how is it going actually?
It shifted a lot. Like I think lots of stuff changed, lot of stuff happened. We're evolving together. Uh definitely we are not now scared of

beating. I remember how people were not ready to this. We still We still have a bit of problems with game. So, yeah. We need to do all this waterfall stuff. But, a lot of ad tech solutions are now in the market. The mindset changed how you approaches to to monetization strategy. And uh to be honest, I'm more satisfied now how industry looks than it was earlier.
Interesting take. Why? Why is it like more comfortable, more clear? Why?
We became less aggressive. We start thinking about player. We care about his retention. We care about his engagement. We care more. We still think about money. And of course, there are different approaches to meet business goals because we need to to work anyway. But, yeah. Mainly you realize that your long-term retention, your LTV, is a

goal. And you need to keep player as long as you can and put all efforts to not frustrate him and think about how your monetization strategy affect his behavior.
And actually, in terms of that, especially hyper-casual time, like it was so so aggressive with
And it was horrible.
freezing.
I'll work there also.
And right now, like you say it's much better, but still like many publishers are still so aggressive. Like, how do you think about it? Because there is also like big cost behind this. Like, how do you feel?
In fact, it was It is a disaster when you see this. Most of apps in 2025 start showing interstitials from day zero. From day zero, like from sixth level, you got your interstitial. On top of this, you got ad breaks, disruptive ads. And uh they interrupt gameplay directly. So, also they needed rewarded ads to continue playing. So, player was

completely overwhelmed with all this and uh ad pressure is quite high and then I call the strategy revenue extraction because here ads exist just to generate money and because of this huge quantity of ad placements, the value of reward get inflated. So, yeah, they the experience is not tolerated, not designed. That's why it it was like this and now if you will download a few apps that were on monetization, uh you will understand that you can't catch interstitial during first day. It's People widely start thinking about player and postpone ads and try to care about retention and I see this more and more and it it is great because we all understood finally that if you don't have retention, you don't have people in your game, no one to monetize. Monetization should be multiplier to your retention. And this is the biggest shift for me in 2026 that I see.

That's actually interesting because like, you know, when you try to improve it, you are kind of also losing a bit money. So, like you have to find the perfect balance.
It hurts first, but when you see retention uh better.
You know, in user acquisition side, you have to burn some money to make more money in the end and like from your side on monetization in this topic, you have to lose some money first to make more money in the end.
Uh still these different strategies, approaches, still you can be aggressive from the start. Uh if you have short paybacks, but usually the way how you can keep these people playing is wise ad frequency and control of their behavior, how it affects how your ad pressure affects your players and you think about LTV first and retention first everything.
And do you think like even today many hybrid casual or puzzle games have that problem like the monetization let's say wrong monetization stack or this type of

issues?
A lot of them. A lot of them. Not so many companies are operating in ad design strategy I will say. Like they usually it's very common situation monetization is added on top. So product team created a game, bring it to monetization department and they just add ads, connect everything and finally it completely reshapes the product. Uh and what should be done is ads should become mechanic into a game. So the question is not how often we should show interstitial. The question is does this moment interrupt your gameplay? Or for instance, rewarded ads won't won't be transactional. You shouldn't use transactional approach. Just watch an ad take coins, find spend upgrade resources. No. Use implement this rewarded ad implement them as a

contextual trigger. So give specific resources at a specific time when player needs this in your game and it works better. It boost opt-in rates immediately like from average 30% up to 60% and all this means that you need to start designing your ads in your game from the scratch when you start developing game. You need to put the same amount of efforts into your monetization strategy as you put this efforts into creating this game. So like this is for me is approach that will work the best and I see a lot of top titles who operate specifically in this approach.
Actually because like what you mentioned is more like a system core loop of this integration of ads. Like basically, who who is using this How do you see it?
Ad design strategy. It's approach when you add ads and ad became a mechanic. So, if

you will delete ad from your game, core loop maybe will collapse. For example, let's talk about Block Blast. 60 million of DAU. Huge quantity of people are playing this game. Biggest one. And they have exactly one ad placement for rewarded ad. No hint currency, just revival after game over. And players' motivation to watch it is extremely high. So, the idea is you implement rewarded ad as a contextual trigger. You offer a specific clear value to your player. He can upgrade your skills. He can open He can get additional minutes. Uh player can get additional rewarded ad while loot box is opening. So, it's natural for him. He feels control and he feels clear value. In exchange of watching ads, he get not coins. It's not about transactional approach. The easiest way how to add one more rewarded ad in the game on top of what was designed. So, you need to think

about this approach because it grants smooth flow for your player and longer retention in my personal opinion.
Okay. So, like if it's the kind of ideal scenario, how about game studios hates ad monetization? How do you think about it?
part. Yeah, those studios that hate ads. And very often they have they have strong in-app purchase backbone. So, for them showing ads to their players is something sounds crazy. But after I call this naive product protection, by the way. That's a minimized low-cost formats, low-intrusive formats, or they don't exist in this game. Because they protect. In fact, in my opinion, they just don't want to invest, put enough efforts to implement ads properly, to segment, and to do this implementation, and to diversify their revenue streams, or meet other business goals. For

instance, as Dream Games, everybody know. And everybody are talking about this. They added ads, but not everyone understands that they extremely segmented. They were not chasing ad revenue. Yeah, they will get it, but they did this to grow, to scale blended growth campaigns. And this very important moment, and very important signal. And in my opinion, in Q4, we'll see big number of huge titles will be doing the same.
So, it's then more connected to user segmentation, right? The big picture, basically.
Yeah, segmentation is I can't even say very important, it's crucial here. You should do segmentation. And unfortunately, here we need to add You need to find your approach. But it's true, you need to find how it's better to segment your auditory. What I can advise, you definitely need to segment. If we are talking about ad monetization titles, you can't use same ad frequency

over all your user base. You can't do this. If your user need to build a habit, user who was playing for months in your game, he is already He is not so frustrated with ads. You can increase your ad frequency a bit. But you definitely not apply one on all user bases. It's huge mistake. It can lead to very serious consequences.
I'm actually also like curious about how many different segments are we talking about? You know, like guess even be millions of different segmentations.
It's hard. Yeah, it's hard to manage. No one No one tells that AdMon is easy, you know? We call it hell mon in our company.
And like when a random guy in the event comes to you and say, "Come on, it's already being automated. You are not doing anything." How do you feel?
I I I love this question. They people ask me, "What we will do? Everything is working on B. What are you doing there? Why are you so tired?"

I usually just have no answers on this. Just look and yeah, also don't know why I'm so tired.
That's that's nice. And like actually, you know, AdMonetization people are watching us right now. So, what would you share with them? Are you like suffering from something or happy about something? Your feelings.
I won't share destiny or some huge AdMonetization predictions. I will say that according to my experience, the the biggest the greatest advice that I got and that I can give to people is you should never think that you know everything. At the point when you think that you are super professional and you know everything, you lose your option to grow.
That's very wise. Is it from Albert Einstein?
I don't know, but it works for with me.
That's that's really nice. So, I would say let's finalize it with one last advice for new studios going for, you know, hybrid casual, etc. So, what

should they care? Because not everyone is, you know, Katya or Felix. So, what would be the number one number two stuff they should care a lot?
If they implement an ads, if they are doing monetization strategy.
Yeah. Hybrid casual game.
They should care about ad pressure. They should measure all metrics that can show them how player base affect AdMonetization strategy on deeper level by cohort, churn rate by a trigger, interstitial to next session conversion rate, impressions per day you not total but by cohorts. So, you should be more detailed and data-driven in this because the more data you collect, the more you understand how it works. Especially in the moments, you need to understand the nature of eCPM. If you can't do all this alone, start from professional consultancy because you'd better not invent new wheel. Take your wheel and make it go faster. So, start from professional consultancy. If you don't

have a big team, give it outsource. We have a lot of great companies that can help with monetization. But, yeah, if you start doing monetization, you should understand that you shouldn't be greedy from the start. Uh think about player and concentrate on the retention and use the monetization as a multiplier to retention. And start designing your ad placements. Think about creative on prototype stage. You need to find spot, space where to put ads, not after you finish soft launch. Not soft launch, but I'm reading.
Okay. So, thank you very much and of course very, very thank you. We are very happy to host you here and bye-bye.
It was a great pleasure.