Analyst platform deltaDNA conducted a study on how its clients, mobile game developers, work with ads in their products.
Methodology
The company interviewed 284 developers and publishers/studios.
Participants data
- 94% of respondents use in-game ads;
- 62% of respondents make casual games, 38% are focused on midcore and hardcore titles;
- Match-3 is the most popular genre among respondents;
- 10% of those surveyed boast projects with DAU of 1 million people.
Ad formats
- 68% use several ad formats in parallel;
- 33% of respondents use three or more ad formats at once;
- the most popular format is rewarded ads, 82% of respondents use it. Devs often combine rewarded ads with interstitials;
What types of ads do you display in your game?
- the only ad formats that are more common in hardcore and midcore games than in casual titles are playables and offer walls.
What types of ads do you display in your game? (segmentation by genre)
Impressions
- Most companies try not to bombard users with lots of ads. 27% of respondents said that they display no more than one ad per session;
- very few (15%) adapt the number of impressions to the behavior of non-paying users, the same small number of respondents blocks ads if the user starts paying;
Which of the following statements could be used to describe how you do F2P in-game ad serving?
- most of all, developers are concerned that ads might result in player churn. 27% of respondents expressed this worry;
- this concern is most common among casual developers. Creators of hardcore and midcore games are more afraid of impairing gaming experience and losing IAP revenue.
Which of the following factors concerns you most when setting the frequency of ads in a game?
Ad revenue
- Half of casual game developers said that ads generate 40% or more of their total revenue;
- 13% of casual game developers rely almost exclusively on ads;
- the share of hardcore and midcore games in which ads generate over 20% of all revenue over the past three years has grown 15%.
What is your estimate of the approximate revenue split between Ads & IAP in your highest-monetizing F2P mobile game?
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Download the full version of the study here.