Ad placements & Admon trends in Mobile Games: January 2025

What do you mean? Why do you need this game? On the podcast or in the world?

No, no, no, in the world. In the world.

Like, why would you even play this game for more than like two days?

I wouldn't personally, but basically they got a lot of downloads, right?

There you go.

It's a clever use of like, yeah, how to get a lot of downloads cheaply, right?

Okay.

But don't worry. I know both of you really like Cucid.

And that is why we're going those vibes till the early daylight Matej, UA, master eyes on the prize Tracking data through the cyberspace skies Felix acts colors like a wizard in disguise Jakob's crafting realms, lift us to the highs Two and a half gamers talking smack Slow hockey stick, got your back Ads are beautiful, they light the way Click it fast don't delay yeah yakub we need yakub he's not coming he's not coming no yakub's not coming Oh, I thought he was. No, no, no.
He's in the middle of something. Anyway, welcome everybody.
Welcome everybody. My name is Matja Lanceric.
I'm Felix Brauberg. We are your hosts today.
And we have Katja right here from Burning Games. Can you give us a short introduction? And then we're just going to jump straight in.

I'm Katrin Malaran.

I'm head of Admonitization Burning Games.

And it's been a while.

While I've worked with Admonitization for about five years,

I have economic background.

So my days usually are full of numbers and calculations.

And it's really a good opportunity to take part in this podcast i hope it will be fun and creative break okay thank you i mean you're not wrong about that because today we're actually doing the best segments on our podcast right and it's called the ad monetization review so today we're going to be reviewing six games that have very too little to no IAP revenue and that only monetize with ad revenue. Most of these games came out in the last 30 days and they're getting a lot of downloads and we're going to go through them.
But I also wanted to say special welcome to Katya because basically she can't say this, but I can. So something happens in ad monetization when you basically manage a game that earns more than a hundred thousand dollars a day uh bernie games has passed this metric quite quickly and is earning quite a lot of ad revenue right now and what happens then as an ad bond manager is you know quite a lot of stuff so i'm very excited today because i'm also a bit nervous because i can't bullshit anything because katia will call me out on everything that is very true that is very true you don't need to comment on that but yeah that's the truth all right good so uh before we start you know as you can see today's episode is brought to you by Maldives.
But, well, in fact, actually this episode is sponsored by our dear partners, PVX partners, the ultimate credit line for marketing. Are you scaling your business? Well, you can get fast and flexible funding with no equity dilution, so you don't really need to sell your soul.
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Visit pvxpartners.com and power your growth. So we can talk about your app in the in the next ad monetization trends hey of course all right easy so we have we have six games that we're going to go through today we're starting with the first one called king pin by gamey studios it was launched in in mid-december and the big question before we start talking about this is if, have you ever wondered what would happen if you take, you know, the fake creatives from Lily's Garden or from any PlayerX Games with a pin game and actually turn it into a real game? Because that's exactly what Gamey did.
And as you can see, the daily active user base, which is the most important metric to look at for ad revenue, has basically increased to nearly 400,000 DAO since launching on, I think, December 12th, 2024. And it's growing.
If we take a quick look at the downloads, downloads are about 70,000 to 80,000 downloads a day. And if we look at the countries, we can see here that it's dominated by...
What? I think this already happened when the Hero Wars started doing these pull-to-pin puzzles. There was already some kind of game like this.
This is a game that I'm seeing quite a lot recently. Yeah, let you some of the gameplay, but it's quite brilliant.
Well, the game is a studio from Czech Republic also, by the way. Yeah, you know them, right? I mean, not for sure.
So look at this metagame. What does this remind you of first to start with right so you kind of have the royal match meta game and basically the levels are quite simple you are a king i i wonder where they got the idea of the king from right and basically what you have to do is you pull these pins to solve puzzles is that whoa whoa yeah and the king is happy and then you claim

and this is the game pretty much exactly what you're advertised that's right

see oh click on click on that ad what's that all about that uh that's uh no feel they show this

it's immersive in gamers yeah so basically yeah before they get a fill they basically do

is a cross promotion or basically promotion of their own store right

yeah nice um yeah i like the how they implement this it's not just black screen but they

Thank you. store right yeah nice um yeah i like the how they implement this it's not just black screen but they show the character main character of there click it yeah you can't ah so it's just static while they don't have what to serve in this placement yeah have you ever tried in-game as katya like what's like um what's the dealio there i really liked it and you missed one circle when we when you show the start in lobby it's really nice it's small and also filled with skin when it's no feel but can show some brand ads.
I know that there are lots of vendors who propose immersive in-game ads and they definitely have zero harm on retention rate.

It looks nice and we've checked this that yeah impact of retention is so minimal that it can be

Thank you. It looks nice.
And we've checked this, that impact of new retention is so minimal that it can be zero. For me, it's very serious to choose vendor with who you will work with.
And I know that Google proposes this and it grants regarding their presentations, you can get uplift from 5 to 15 percent you know what the fill rate on google is because usually the the in-game immersive ads right the issue is that fill rate is never above 30 percent in the states if you're lucky on a tuesday It can be higher than 30%. But what I can say is that they are moving to force their demand.
And they are walking in this direction. And it can be better in the end of the year, definitely.
And maybe some of these types of games, maybe they will think about moving banners and going to immersive mode. more yeah so what do you think about this little trick that they have here right oh bonus stage oh so this is exactly the the one from oh this is playrix yeah playrix in any one of these right the bonus stage so what do you think about these use of ads that they have

here in mrec at the end of every level and then they basically have here basically when you finish any level right it shows 2000 is the classical hyper casual trick where basically rewarded ad for a lot and then you don't show the claim uh to skip without an ad uh for a couple of seconds you know me, it's like ideal scenario is having ads from the first start. The player is surrounded by them.
But to be honest, I look how you play and you easily skip everything. So you are surrounded by us, but they don't frustrate you a lot.
And while I was playing, and according to some settings, I got, in the Vardet ads, I got only idle and merge games with very satisfying effect in ads. So I think they use first party data to personalize ad experience.
And they definitely have very balanced structure of adding all these ads. Even now you can, like, it doesn't frustrate you.
Yeah. We see ads, we can skip, we can claim our 100 coins and go like a normal.
Uh, this is how I call this be who you are, show ads. Earn money.
But care about your players. So.
What do we think this game. How much money they make.
Yeah. What do we think this game is earning? So basically I made an estimate quickly before.
And I think Kingpin right now with this GeoMix. And basically.
Because it's a lot of Russia. A lot of India.
A lot of Brazil. But it is a lot of active users like you can't take that away right it's a lot of india russia brazil not that much the us but yeah it's not more than 20 it's not not more than 20k no no no so right now i think this is earning about 8 to 10k per day uh in ad revenue but basically as you can see sorry i also calculated it goes the same numbers about 11 yes good nice so basically what you can see right it's increasing right and uh you know the mobile mobile ecosystem is still very much alive and i thought it was quite interesting because yeah it kind of shows that sad to say but ua kind of just dominates game development uh more so than before right like i'm assuming like yeah what do you think are downloads like are cpis for these types of creatives well uh it's not that much honestly when you don't optimize for purchasers or payers even like match free games and puzzle games with cpi optimization a very low c well very low cpi is in comparison to to pay to the ros campaign so it's like like one two three dollars if you then go for the the premium payers then it's 40 50 60 so this is yeah this is gonna be quite low but anyway and in india and tier four free countries even i would say, 30 cents.
Yeah. Do you think we're going to see any copycat games? Pretty much they just look like, you know, like Last Wars creatives.
It's too late. It's too late for that, I think.
This is just, I mean, it's 2025. These creatives were a hit like four years ago, maybe.
Well, not a hit, but they were introduced by Nextures exactly like four or five years ago. So it doesn't matter that much.
I think that there will be a different trend. What you are talking about always is Satisdom game and this kind of satisfying cleanings, tidying up the rooms and flies.

You're already talking about the fourth game that we're going to talk about today.

There you go.

So moving on

to the next game.

I wanted to say one more point.

It's interesting. They don't

block

Royal King

Dream Gaze.

And it's interesting because I think it can increase their turn rate because it's the same King story and it can be interesting for people and they can go and install that game but they don't block it. So I really wonder about the retention.
Would you block it? Because it's really high ACPM, right? Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

It's high ACPMs, but it's very high risk to lose players.

Okay.

Very valid points.

That's true, yeah.

But how would you balance that?

You can check. You can check if their ads really have big churn and maybe block not bundle fair okay so this is the moment that can harm retention definitely but we'll see yeah I would say this game is not very high retention although it can earn some interesting money because they have a big portfolio of games, right? Gaming has quite a big portfolio, I think.
If you look at the retention... It's too early, man.
Yeah, it's probably too early. Yeah, it's too early.
They just launched, yeah. Yeah.
All right, moving on to the second game. We're flying through the best ad monetized new bubblers basically on the charts and this is super car merge by stike games so this game is actually earning a little bit of iap revenue which you know that's not great but essentially also you can see here it's's since mid-December, basically.
It's gotten three and a half million downloads. Active user base is around 280,000 to 300,000.
It's decreasing a little bit, but it looks like it's kind of leveling off, which means it's not just a one-trick pony. and basically we thought we've seen a lot of games in kind of the merge category, but basically this is the first merge game I've seen that's basically tailored towards the male audience.
Uh, where is it? Uh, super car merge. Yeah.
I mean, it's not the first game towards the male audience, although there are not a lot of them. They're outside of the soft launch.
So I'm starting here at the end of a race, but basically this is the minigame. And what you do is you race your car, and before then you merge parts for basically use in your race game.
So I guess it's taking advantage of pretty much, you know, race games have really cheap CPIs like you always say on the podcast. Yeah.
But basically it's combining merge, which I guess has a bit better monetization characteristic than... Or retention.
Or retention.

I mean,

it's a very simple game.

It's super simple. Most ad

monetized games, I don't know if you've noticed, are quite

simple. Yes, okay.

Like Colorwood Sword is no exception

here, right?

Yeah.

Anyway, let me show you some merch. Yeah, so here basically.
Yeah. They do have interest a bit later on, but yeah.
I mean... Okay.
It reminds me that the Merch Plains, which was, like a gajillion years ago, where you just had planes where they just circled one. Yeah, circled around or just racing or flying or whatever.
And then you were just merging them and that's it. Yeah.
So, yeah, they have banners pretty much visible at all times. they have this here, like before a race, you can get a nose bottle for a rewarded ad, which we're not going to do right now.
And then later on, they actually start with the justitials after each race as well. And pretty much this is it.
You merge to improve your car. And then yeah, you watch a lot of ads.

Okay. That's it it's a bit hard for me to focus on both but basically i made some estimates and i think right now supercar merge is earning five to six thousand dollars per day in ad revenue with these types of levels.
That's not a lot.

I mean, it's growing, right?

It's just a new game, right?

Let's go on over how many downloads is it?

Yeah, well, come on.

Yeah, 3.5 million downloads.

Okay, that's fair.

Did you have anything to add

while I'm playing the game?

Because as we've noticed, it's quite hard to focus on both. For me, it looks like the strategy is mainly to rely on your Arbitals, because players need to use them very often to regress in this merge part and if you can believe sensitive over the length of their session is six minutes it's not too much maybe it's a sign that the value of words is not enough for people to certify their sitting in the water transfer long to wait for 60-75 seconds and just to open one more slot and get another some piece that you already have it's very often situation in this game as I understand why I'm playing because we like just merged something through to the bin something and get it again.

So you need a lot of reward to progress.

And this is main, I think.

Where did you find the game?

Jesus.

Oh, the top charts.

Okay.

Yeah, it was the top charts. The top charts of the downloads but don't worry we will move on because basically what i thought was interesting here is just appealing to you know merge which has better retention and then also kind of yeah uh the charts gets a lot of downloads and yeah three and a half million downloads it is it is true that they're using the the best kind of cpi

theme or uh cars in general and then marrying with the merch which can support a little bit better retention profile okay but honestly if we when we talk about this next month this game is going to be dead.

You think so?

Yeah, that's my prediction.

I mean, it's like,

honestly, I have no offense obviously but why do we need this game what do you mean why do you need this game on the podcast or in the world no no in the world in the world like why would you even play this game for more than like two two days I wouldn like i wouldn't personally but basically clever use of like yeah how to get a lot of downloads cheaply right okay but don't worry i know both of you really like cute and that is why we're gonna look at the third installment of Boo Boo and Mimi.

So basically, this is the third installment of a game that basically is only ad monetized.

And it's been around for 10 years.

And basically, they just came up with a new installment.

And as you can see, one and a half million downloads since launching in mid-December.

And yeah, basically, the big takeaway here is that if you make if you make cute stuff you'll get downloads and I'm going to show you the game and that you can talk a bit about Mimi and Boo Boo but basic Boo Boo and Mimi but basically as you can see this is just a pureness of cutie cuteness available always basically for your younger audience and here basically what you are you're a cute cat that runs around in this kind of fairy tale world what you can do with your cat is you can make it a bit sad sleepy you can make it grumpy you can make it laugh you can make it angry and basically what you do is you choose the cat yes not only cat we have in another corner what do you mean this one oh yeah i have more you have more so basically what you are you're a cute little cat living in a little cat world You can dress it in different fashion attire and different characteristics and stuff like that. And basically what you have to do is you go around in this kind of world collecting stars and gems.
And this, I actually think, has a lot of retention. But basically, this is just pure cuteness UA play right and what they do is why do you think you are you a play into this it's just it's cute you also have home where you can sit all day yeah okay sit all day do different things dress your cat I mean this is basically my daughter My the target audience my son plays this okay yeah yeah oh okay you actually know this game from before or just because it said immediately when i was playing he recognized it and i was looking how he plays and he managed to play about 15 minutes without ads completely.

I wanted to talk about that as well.

Yeah, it's really strange strategy, but they hit games.

Yeah, how would you do it differently?

Like, would you show interstitials earlier or would you basically have banner ads here?

Because that's what's kind of struck me.

Like, I'm sure they're kind of going for a premium feel but basically i haven't watched ads for maybe 15 minutes of gameplay either at all yeah i couldn't see uh to be honest i couldn't see any interstitials i was playing for two or three it's only rewarded it's only rewarded I really don't understand

the really

misrevenue opportunities.

For example, between levels

when she plays these mini-games,

it will be natural.

And rewarded ads,

yeah, you have them, but

in fact, you have so many different options

to play without watching rewarded ads

that it's not obligated to see rewarded ads to progress in this game, to have fun in this game. But also, we need to remember that this is a kids game.
So, COPA saves them, Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, and all GDPR regulations that refers to kids applied to their monetization strategy. You won't find a lot of vendors who can monetize this with high fill rates.
Felix, we can go with Google, Unity, IronSource, KidDOS, super awesome. Who else? That's it.
That's pretty much it. But, for me, we can add more.
Because we definitely wouldn't find any reviews about like we hate ads. I'm sure.
I don't think kids can type. So, that's the first thing.
That's the first thing. And then second, yeah, I mean, I don't think it's actually illegal to put interstitials in between levels if it's a kids game.
I don't know what you mean, because it's not illegal to put interstitial ads. If you still do it, it's compliant.
I'm a little bit aggressive. Yeah, maybe.
Anyway, what I also wanted to talk about was here the cross-promotion. Basically, I want to ask you, Katia.
Like, this is the only way I've actually seen cross-promotion work, which is basically when you have a standalone ad unit like this that you have to make yourself, where basically you show all the different games that are similar. And this is the only way I've actually seen cross-promo work.
And it never works when you do it in the mediation platform. I was just wondering if you had any experience that you wanted to add about this, because this cross-promotion strategy is actually quite good.
I agree with you. I really liked the cross promo.
I even noted it to say

because it really like it really integrated smoothly. You can choose, you can move to another

game, you can come back. So it's brilliant.
And I think it's working for kids, especially.

And I don't know, it's like, for me, surprise was when I was going to the shop and see that they add reward attacks on items in my shop. In my shop.
I have option to see reward and try this item that I'm

supposed to buy

very clever

interesting

this is clever

you can improve your

quantity of rewards

but for kids

like

will they buy after this

your item in the shop

when they can try and choose

one outfit I don't know

Thank you. will they buy after this your item in the shop when they can try and choose one outfit I don't know how much of this game's monetization do you think relies on kids miss clicking and then parents not claiming money back just don't don't give them play from your phone exactly that Play is.
Exactly. That's why my daughter plays

on her tablet without Wi-Fi

because as soon as you have Wi-Fi

she was almost just

replying my emails.

Yeah, my emails.

I was like, what are you doing?

Seriously.

So yeah, no, no way.

And also Felix,

if they try one thing, I your kid is hungry well play Felix play so if they try and they see I'm pretty sure and if the kids like it parents have to buy it there's no other way this want this. Yeah, okay, fine.
Yeah. All right.
I think we can leave Boo Boo and Mini and they're... How much money did they make? 7 euros, man.
I don't think this is making a lot of money. 7k a day, I think.
Well, almost. Katja, do you think the same or do you think a bit less or more?

It's very hard, to be honest, to calculate.

You agree with me?

Because you can't really understand how they play.

Because there are lots of kids who literally stay in home doing this all home stuff.

And they don't move anywhere.

So there you can stay almost without it. I guarantee you they would have double ad revenue if they had interstitials between levels.
Yeah. But you said it's cruel.
Sorry? But you said it's cruel. Well, I said it.
Yeah, absolutely. They would double the revenue but they will double the amount of angry kids.
Not angry kids, angry parents. That's for sure.
That's for sure. Yeah.
All right. So now we're going to go probably talk about the game and probably the game genre category that I understand the least, but it's basically making waves.
And it's pretty much responsible for the whole Vietnamese invasion and basically this is the latest installment from Abbey Games and one of their ultra casual titles called Tricky Twist Puzzle and this is one of these things like I don't really understand it because it's pretty much like Perfect Tidy it's a series of short games and as you can see 10 like nearly 10 million downloads since it launched on december 10th it pretty much like still gets about 130 000 downloads per day but the thing is it's super sticky so the active user base is nearly a million dow right it's gone a bit now, but basically it's like hovering between 800 to 500,000 DAO every day. And for the life of me, I don't understand these games, but I'll show it to you anyway, because it's exactly the same as pretty much the other games that we've covered that are kind of in the same genre.
Wait my thing just freeze oh no no it's fine tricky twist so abby sorry it's called abi not abby but abby abby you start here and you can see it's already focused on the male audience and then here let's just start here right so yeah here they have an app open ad and i don't understand why they just don't load an interstitial instead of doing this but maybe you can shed some light on that katya because i don't know you you guys don't even do app open ads do you don't but maybe the reason is they hope that it will be more easy to go through this. They hope that this app open will close immediately.
Yeah. Okay.
So basically what you're supposed to do is they have an ad. It's pretty much banner ads, interstitial ads between each level.
You can skip level by watching a rewarded ad. It's time limited.
And basically now you have to help the girl finish her homework. and what you can do is you can click a by watching a rewarded ad it's time limited and basically now you have to help the

girl finish her homework and what you can do is you can click a lot of hints and basically different prompts so basically this one is drag the book to the doll so yeah and to the into the grand mine in the picture

Yeah

Yeah and to the grand mine in the picture uh yeah into the no yeah to keep cheese into the hole wow let's go into the hole yeah and now i don't really know how to play and now but no one knows how to play much that's the whole point give this book to the mouse to the i'm trying to give the book to the mouse, but now it's doing it. Now open the window.
Hello. There you go.
Ta-da. All right.
Okay. So it is kind of a puzzle game.
It is a puzzle game. And then you see interstitial odds.
So basically it takes about 30 seconds to complete each level, which means that you can probably show per session at least nine or ten interstitial ads at a natural break. But look, this is the second interstitial, and it's the second time Lords of Mobile.
Lords of Mobile. Lords of Mobile, which is a 4X game.
And you said this is actually a male audience. So yeah, like the ads are absolutely great.

I mean, very tailored to the audience.

Yeah.

On the other hand, what the fuck I'm watching.

Exactly.

So this is the next level.

Saving the beauty.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Trying, yeah.

You don't really know how to play these games no but i'm yeah i can see this take um the room yeah yeah i'm pretty i'm pretty sure this is gonna be in the in the creatives in some way it helps sooner or later. Basically, it's just

what they're doing is they're taking

Perfect Tidy or any of the other

ultra-casual games they've made

and basically just changed the colors

and just changed everything

just a little bit

and just added a bit of random humor

that's really

hanging by the cat. This is great, yeah.
Okay. Yeah.
But basically, how much do you think this game is earning right now, Maciej? Because, you know, there's a lot of DAU, right? Yeah, what's the country mix? Let me show you. I mean, it's not the best countries.

There's a lot of Vietnam, but there's also a lot of US, right?

And that's the thing about these ultra casuals.

They get a lot of downloads in the US

because there's a big audience there that really likes it.

If we remember back to Perfect Tidy,

the US was the second biggest audience after India on that game,

which is quite surprising, right?

And that really does increase the ECPM quite significantly. 40k? No, I think that's a bit too high.
I think that's a bit too high. But right now, I think it's earning anywhere between 10 and 15 a day.
Oh, it should be more. Come on, that should be more.
I mean, look at the Geomix. Look at the Geomix.
Come on, at least 20. I mean, Perfect Tidy was earning like 40k a day, right? So, yeah.
Still. Do you want to say anything about tricky twists? They are quite impressive.
And for me, the quantity of arts is never never ending I don't think use United States have very good retention because they are sensitive to this quantity of ads but I'm sure they have lots of reviews saying they hate people's hate ads but can't stop playing because the plot is ridiculous and fun and it is a trick that you need when you add so many ads to your game and what was irritating for me frustrating for me that inter appears even if i skip the game for a few seconds and answer messenger come, come back and I see it. Like, non-stop.
It's like one of these tricks, right? So basically, I know a couple of studios that I work with that basically have worked out that you can also, if no one interacts with your game for like 30 seconds, you can launch an interstitial ad. and that's like a cheeky way of increasing ad revenue

because basically you're monetizing on someone not being active and that's what they're doing right so you know if you get caught doing that like basically you're not going to have your build getting uploaded but it is a very legit semi-legit way of increasing ad revenue by the way i saw a lot of adpods in rewarded arts. Sorry? I saw a lot of ad quotes in Rewarded Arts.
Sorry? I saw a lot of ad quotes in Rewarded Arts. This is a format that combines two ads in one impression from two different advertisers, and that was, I think, rolled up by Google a few years ago.
It's like,, it's like in your reporting, you see one impression, but in fact your users see this ad code combined from two different ads in one impression. It boosts ECPMs.
And as I remember, you could enable or disable it on account level. But I think now it's rolled up for all in Google demand.
But here I saw mainly ad ports in Google. So they definitely have high VCPs.
Yeah. But there's nothing you can do to encourage the use of the double ads, right? That basically is done by the algorithm.
Just check if they exist in your account, if they are enabled in your account. Yeah.
Anyway. All right.
Now moving on to... Before finishing off, we have two more games, right? But basically we're going to get a bit worse on the game quality oh no get a lot before we get a lot better right uh so next game i want to talk about and i just want to talk about this because basically this is by far the worst game that we're reviewing but i think what they're doing in terms of targeting is actually really clever so this one is called indian car highway drive and what they do is basically they're appealing to india no but yeah but what they're doing is like uh they're appealing to the indian market right to get a lot of organic downloads right uh i don't think they're earning particularly a lot of money but i think it's very clever they have the indian flag next to the car on the icon and as you can see it's 3.3 million downloads most of it is in india obviously uh but basically uh the active user base is nearly half a million but basically like this game i'm going to show you it later as well but i'm just wondering like i'm just wondering like why don't more studios do this but focusing on tier one geos like for example I know that Germans would absolutely love a German car Autobahn drive and you know ECPMs are considerably a lot higher there I don't think this is this is what German audience wants to play not the Indian car drive but basically a german car drive whatever drive i mean these games have high organic downloads from india turkey and some other geos for a reason so it's not not really big game in u.s no this game is not going to be big anywhere else right but basically i basically, I remember back to this.
Basically, I had an encounter with a German once. And basically, he was a crane operator in Berlin.
And I asked him what he does in his free time. And he was just like, oh, I play crane simulator.
So he works in a crane all day. And then he comes home and plays crane simulator.
And then he wakes up the next day and does the same thing over and over again. It's the supermarket simulator game that we talked about a million times before.
So, I mean, yes, I can get it. Loading an app.
Okay, good. Oof.
Lord's Mobile again. Lord's Mobile.
There you go. Yeah, they really want me to download it, huh? Anyway, we don't have to spend too much on this game.
I think it's earning about 5 to 7k a day currently, but basically it's an ad simulator. But yeah, I can't even skip the video.
Yeah, ad simulator with cars. Look, look, look, look.
Lords Mobile Coca-Cola Impact? What the fuck? I mean, I need to, I really need to... Flick it.
I'm not going to download Lords Mobile for a Coca-Cola on click it no come on we need to talk about Lords of Mobile in the next Creative Trends episode because this is the third time you see an ad for a third different creative.

Yeah, it's true. Anyway, do you want to add anything about this game or should we just move on to the

last game, which is actually really

interesting and, you know, a bit

different in terms of quality from the other

games that we've gone through?

Well,

I want to ask you, have you found

Indian Radio?

Indian Radio?

Indian songs and what? No, I did not. Here? Yeah.
Choose it. No.
Yeah, you're driving. At least you know this.
Yeah. Very nice.
Yeah, it's definitely Indian radio. Well, I understand why they add so many ads, because it's really hard to monetize the Indian market, in fact.
Everyone thinks it's easy, but it's not easy. Definitely not.
And it's hard to find a good stack of networks who have stable fuel rates there. So to be honest, you understand why they need a lot of

ads in their games. Yeah.
Hard driving simulators, definitely not my type, despite I can drive a car now. I managed to do this.
But what to say, lots of ads, definitely lots of us, and I wonder about their retention rate. But also, their garage is a great place to add immersive in-game ads.
Don't know about feel. Yeah, it's going to be quite tough.
But usually, like banners on the walls looks nice. Yeah.
All right. So before showing the last game, which is a bit different, I'm just going to show you the first time user experience.
So this is Gold Rush by Say Games. And this is their latest installment of a hybrid casual game.
And Mathieu, just looking right now at the artwork and the first time user experience, what is this? It's Whiteout Survival or Frozen City or whatever you want to say. Exactly.
That's it. It's straight up White Dot Survival Creative.
That is the first-time user experience. Yeah.
Yeah. All right.
So basically this game got launched on Monday, December 16th. And Basing has been downloaded 3.6 million times and earned half a million dollars in IAP revenue outside of the ad revenue.
And as you can see, the active user base is growing and it's basically around 300 to 350k dau but basically this is like another category completely right because this is say games that's coming out with this this is uh they basically came up with three games in in december but this one is the one that's scaling the most uh i don't know if they're doing a global launch yet because most of the users, India, Brazil, and Germany. So I don't think that it's really scaling yet in the tier ones.
And I probably think that's on purpose. Probably they're honing in on something.
But it's still earning quite a lot of IP revenue as well. Because it's hybrid.
It's perfect hybrid. Yeah.
But it's not there yet. So we can talk about it in the hybrid casual segment.
because no no it's perfect yeah yeah but it's not it's not there yet so we can talk about it in the

hybrid casual segment no no it's getting close right yeah but basically what i think is super interesting here is like basically they're taking the um yeah they're taking the um the the creatives from whiteout survival and basically yeah yeah. Using it as an onboarding.
As an onboarding, which is super clever. Frozen CD.
Sorry, go on. I appreciate how they implement rewarded tests.
And you definitely feel control. that you definitely feel control.
You

definitely feel control of all the set pressure. You sit, you stack in this long rewarded ad but you have motivation to do this here because you've got valuable resources to progress the game and you can choose if you will watch shirvart or not.
Any way you can play. And I liked it.
Also, I can mention that they have interns very often, very frequent. This frequency can scare.
Inside. But maybe, yeah, but all interstitials are easy to skip.
So you also don't stack.

And maybe this is a moment to say that keep in mind you can choose different templates,

different templates of showing us for full screen.

You can, here they really need to control the length of interstitials to make them easily to skip and short but they can allow themselves to use the longest rewarded ads template because you really feel the value and you can wait for these resources yeah i mean it's a say games game right it's like a different category right like the the quality is really good it kind of looks like one of the start to games that they used to make but basically it's around the hybrid casual kind of template i guess that they have which is like you move around the character you interact when you come close to it and basically it's a very proven concept they have my My Perfect Hotel, which is kind of similar to this,

but basically instead of being in a hotel, you're outside in the wilderness. But it looks like this game could potentially be like, yeah, one of their new hybrid casual hits.
And yeah, we'll be monitoring it very closely. Do you have an ad revenue estimate for this, Katja? this Katja.

It's fun because of their countries, but I think, do you think they got 100k? Yeah. I basically think that in the last month when they've earned, what is it, 400k in IAP, I think they've earned probably about the same in ad revenue, if not even a bit more.
So 55% ad revenue. And basically that's probably where they're at.
Their revenue definitely have more ad revenue. Whiteout Survival Creative.
Nice. There was also Lords Mobile before, which was definitely very heavily inspired by Whiteout Revival.

There was the bear.

Everything comes back to the Whiteout Revival.

Anyway.

Yeah.

Anyway, that wraps it up for all our six ad monetized games.

Don't forget to like and subscribe.

Any takeaways that you want to say about ads

or implementation of ads since you know everything, Katya?

Can't repeat here about people, but earn money. Cool.
All right. Don't have any things to add.
Please don't forget to like and subscribe. We have more episodes coming out and we are probably going to go to Vietnam, Maciej, right? I am coming for sure you might be coming as well might be, hoping for the best yeah, middle of it looks like middle of April to the end of the April so yeah, stay tuned we'll definitely keep you posted thank you very much coming.
I hope this was the first and not the last appearance on our podcast.

Thank you very much.

Bye.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Thank you.