User Acquisition reports and market data
Documents
Privacy vs. Ad Monetization with Google's Ross Brockman and Kwalee's John Wright
The mobile advertising industry is undergoing a fundamental structural transition, moving away from legacy waterfall ad-buying models toward real-time bidding (RTB) systems.
- The mobile advertising industry is shifting from legacy waterfall models to real-time bidding (RTB) systems to reduce latency and increase market efficiency.
- Developers should anticipate a manageable 10% to 20% decline in ad revenue throughout 2024 as the ecosystem adjusts to ongoing privacy-centric mandates.
- To maintain access to personalized ad demand, developers must implement standardized consent management platforms in response to EU and UK regulatory pressures and Apple’s App Tracking Transparency.
Product Madness’ Piyush Mishra On Smart Questions For Smaller Studios
Smaller mobile game studios must transition away from expensive, traditional soft launches toward a model of strategic, low-cost concept validation.
- Marketing must be integrated into the product development process from the start, as marketing teams provide essential data-driven feedback on target demographics and user retention that product teams cannot identify in isolation.
- When evaluating game viability, studios should benchmark against current genre standards—such as 30% D1 retention and 7% D7 retention in the Social Casino space—rather than relying on historical performance or internal success metrics from older titles.
- To minimize early-stage UA costs during soft launches, studios can test in lower-cost markets like the Philippines, Malaysia, or India to validate basic retention metrics before moving to high-value markets.
Drive Profitable Business Growth With Meta’s app ads & Audience Network, Toby Wilkins.
Meta’s strategy for driving profitable growth for app developers centers on three pillars: optimizing user acquisition through AI-driven automation, improving attribution accuracy, and evolving monetization capabilities within the Audience Network.
- Meta has removed campaign limits for Advantage Plus app campaigns, allowing for unlimited creation to support high-liquidity, AI-driven performance optimization.
- The Meta Install Referrer for Android, which integrates with all major mobile measurement partners (MMPs), has demonstrated a 20% increase in attributed conversions by capturing edge cases missed by Google Play's standard referrer.
- Meta is transitioning toward privacy-resilient ad serving solutions for iOS and Android (via Google Privacy Sandbox) to move away from the traditional one-to-one user match requirement.
The D2C Iceberg: How top Games hit Record Profits Despite the ATT Crash (And how you can Too).
The gaming industry is currently undergoing a structural shift toward direct-to-consumer (DTC) models as developers seek to bypass the limitations and costs associated with traditional third-party app stores.
- Top-tier developers are bypassing 30% platform fees and mitigating the impact of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) by shifting toward proprietary direct-to-consumer (DTC) web shops.
- Huuuge demonstrated the efficacy of this model by increasing its DTC revenue from 3% to 10% of its total intake in 2023, enabling record profits despite an overall decline in revenue.
- Major publishers including Scopely, Krafton, Tencent, Rovio, and Playtika have adopted web-based distribution to reclaim margins and gain ownership of first-party customer data.
Seizing the First Party Data Opportunity in Mobile Games Advertising, Fernando Pernica, Nefta.
The mobile gaming industry is currently navigating a challenging transition into a privacy-first era, characterized by stringent regulations and the widespread adoption of opt-out mechanisms.
- The mobile gaming industry has seen a 35% decline in in-app purchase revenue following the implementation of recent privacy-first regulations and opt-out mechanisms.
- The loss of traditional identifiers has caused significant drops in advertising revenue and eCPMs, forcing advertisers to struggle with effective user targeting.
- Large industry conglomerates are responding to privacy shifts by creating siloed, opaque data environments that prioritize their internal optimization over publisher transparency.
ASA & CPP Playbook for Mobile Game, Ian Pernia, AppTweak.
This analysis examines the strategic application of Apple Search Ads (ASA) and Custom Product Pages (CPP) to optimize mobile game growth.
- Aligning Apple Search Ads (ASA) with Custom Product Pages (CPP) significantly improves conversion rates by matching ad creative directly to specific user search intent.
- While default product pages often yield higher tap-through rates due to broad appeal, CPPs consistently outperform them in the critical transition from impression to install.
- The analysis is derived from a large-scale dataset encompassing over 20 million keywords and 6 million applications.
Gamelight: Power of Game Recommendation Apps, Valentina Bailly & Kathleen Sherman, Gamelight.
Gamelight operates as a rewarded game discovery platform, functioning as an ad network that connects mobile game publishers with users through personalized recommendations.
- Gamelight’s AI-driven recommendation platform delivers an average 40% increase in day-seven retention and return on ad spend (ROAS) for its publishing partners.
- The platform functions as a rewarded discovery engine that utilizes behavior-based incentives, such as coins for reaching milestones, to drive sustained user loyalty rather than short-term extrinsic motivation.
- Gamelight operates as a first-party data owner, requiring explicit user permission to track app usage data to ensure compliance with privacy standards like ATT and IDFA.
Delivering Performance Advertizing Outcomes at Scale Beyond Traditional Media Platforms.
The advertising landscape is shifting as hardware manufacturers, or original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), emerge as significant alternatives to traditional big tech platforms like Google and Meta.
- Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are emerging as a major alternative to traditional big tech platforms, with the OEM software industry projected to reach $600 billion within five years.
- Affinity Global acts as a strategic intermediary, providing a unified layer to manage ad delivery and technical integration across fragmented OEM ecosystems like Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo.
- The platform provides access to one billion global users, including 500 million daily active users on the web and over 100 million on mobile apps.
Bringing Discovery Back to Mobile Games, Jong Woo, Samsung Electronics.
The current mobile gaming landscape faces a significant challenge regarding discoverability, as traditional organic growth strategies have largely been supplanted by high-friction, paid user acquisition models.
- Samsung is leveraging its Gaming Hub, which has 160 million monthly active users engaging three times daily, to bypass traditional app store discoverability challenges.
- The platform utilizes Android-native cloud streaming to allow instant gameplay, eliminating the conversion friction caused by lengthy app store downloads and large file sizes.
- Samsung’s cloud streaming technology functions by hosting pre-loaded APKs and resource files on virtual machines, enabling immediate access to games without traditional installation.
AI is helping drive game monetization, player retention and UA for Games. John Kavanagh, Scuti.
Scuti provides a rewarded g-commerce platform designed to enhance game monetization, player retention, and user acquisition by integrating a non-intrusive, Amazon-like shopping experience directly into game lobbies.
- Scuti provides a g-commerce platform that integrates an Amazon-like shopping experience into game lobbies, allowing players to purchase physical goods and branded in-game packs without interrupting gameplay.
- The platform currently supports over 120 games and is projected to reach 150 million players by the end of the year.
- AI-driven analysis of player spending habits and demographics enables personalized product recommendations, helping developers monetize non-spending players and increase overall user lifetime value.
How to Advertise Hybrid-Casual Games in 2024
The hybrid-casual gaming sector has emerged as a strategic evolution for developers transitioning from hyper-casual models, which often suffer from low lifetime value (LTV) and retention challenges.
- Hybrid-casual games should target a revenue split of 40% to 50% from in-app purchases (IAPs), with the remainder derived from in-app advertising to balance monetization between spenders and casual players.
- Success metrics have shifted from hyper-casual CPI benchmarks to long-term ROAS and LTV, with day-30 and day-60 ROAS serving as the primary indicators of sustainability.
- The Asia-Pacific region is projected to dominate the market, accounting for approximately 64% of total ad spend revenue in 2024.
AFK Journey: A Highly Polished & Innovative RPG Game, captivating storytelling with stunning visuals
AFK Journey represents a significant evolution in the idle RPG genre, building upon the foundation of its predecessor, AFK Arena, to capture a substantial global audience.
- AFK Journey generates approximately $1 million in daily mobile revenue, demonstrating the commercial viability of high-production idle RPGs in Tier-1 markets like the United States and France.
- The game utilizes a resonance leveling mechanic and simplified equipment structure to eliminate inventory management friction, successfully bridging the gap between mobile accessibility and PC-level depth.
- A cross-platform strategy featuring a dedicated PC client and a web-based monetization ecosystem serves as a core pillar for the game's user retention and revenue scaling.