😱 Only 14 of the TOP Grossing 100 Games use Ads by Felix Braberg
Felix delivers a 30-minute solo masterclass on how the top-grossing mobile games use ads, revealing the real truth:
Only 14 of the Top 100 IAP games use in-game ads.
This is shocking considering the category earned $2.6B in the last 30 days — likely over $3.6B when counting D2C webstores. Yet only 55M of the 660M DAU are exposed to ads.
The episode breaks down each of those 14 games, but uncovers three major meta-shifts.
This episode reveals how Candy Crush, Coin Master, Gossip Harbor, Merge Mansion, Homa, June’s Journey, and more use segmentation, boosters, energy, timers, SkipIt tickets, Remove Ads bundles, and hybrid strategies to unlock millions in incremental ad revenue.
This is the most practical breakdown of how ads work at the highest tier of mobile gaming.
What you’ll learn
• How Candy Crush earns $200M+ yearly from ads
• Why only 14 of the top 100 IAP games use ads (and why that’s changing)
• The difference between Western “premium illusion” mindset vs Chinese “data-first” mindset
• SkipIt tickets → now invading midcore and puzzle (June’s Journey)
• Remove Ads Bundles (iKIM, Capybara Go, Merge Prison)
• Why merge, match, and puzzle rely on energy boosters & timers
• How to segment ads by GEO, payer probability & time since last IAP
• The next wave of hybrid monetization
The future isn’t “ads OR IAP.”
The winning studios are mastering ads + IAP, using segmentation, bundles, SkipIts, and hybrid models to grow revenue without hurting payers.
Get our MERCH NOW: 25gamers.com/shop
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This is no BS gaming podcast 2.5 gamers session. Sharing actionable insights, dropping knowledge from our day-to-day User Acquisition, Game Design, and Ad monetization jobs. We are definitely not discussing the latest industry news, but having so much fun! Let’s not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.
Panelists: Jakub Remiar, Felix Braberg, Matej Lancaric
Join our slack channel here: https://join.slack.com/t/two-and-half-gamers/shared_invite/zt-2um8eguhf-c~H9idcxM271mnPzdWbipg
Chapters
00:00 — intro
02:00 — Candy Crush & Coin Master: The Segmentation Masters
05:20 — Merge & Match: Energy, Boosters, and Rewarded Moves
10:00 — SkipIt Tickets & Remove Ads Bundles Take Over
14:30 — Chinese Studios vs Western Studios: Mindset Split
19:10 — Subscriptions, Ad-Free Bundles & Perk Stacking
23:30 — The New Hybrid Meta: Ads + IAP → The Future
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Matej Lancaric
User Acquisition & Creatives Consultant
https://lancaric.me
Felix Braberg
Ad monetization consultant
https://www.felixbraberg.com
Jakub Remiar
Game design consultant
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakubremiar
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Please share feedback and comments - matej@lancaric.me
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Press play and read along
Transcript
Speaker 1 How many of these games do you think have in-game ads? The answer is actually
Speaker 1 14 games. So, only 14 games in the top 100 IAP earning category actually have in-game ads.
Speaker 2
It's 4 a.m. and we're rolling the dice.
Mate drops knowledge made of gold and ice. Felix with ads making those coins rise.
Jackup designs, worlds chasing the sky.
Speaker 2
We're the two and a half gamers, the midnight crew. Talking UA adverts and game design too.
Mateish, feeling shaku, bringing the insight. We're rocking those vibes till the early daylight.
Speaker 2
But KUA master eyes on the prize. Tracking data through the cyberspace skies.
Felix stacks colors like a wizard in disguise. Jackson crafter realms, lift us to the highs.
Speaker 2
Two and a half gamers talking smack. Slow hockey stick, got your back.
Ads are beautiful, they like the way. Click it fast, don't delay.
Uh-huh.
Speaker 2 Uh-huh.
Speaker 2 Uh-huh.
Speaker 2 Uh-huh.
Speaker 2 Uh-huh.
Speaker 1 Hello everyone and welcome to a very special episode of the
Speaker 1
Two and a Half Gamers podcast. Today it's only me, the half a gamer of the two and a half.
Two and a half lore is either Matty is really short or I'm the half a gamer in the two and a half gamers.
Speaker 1 So the reason I'm half a gamer is essentially I'm an admon person, right? And that's kind of the joke. But today I want to talk about something really interesting to me.
Speaker 1 Yesterday I came out with a blog post that basically broke down all of the ad placements in Candy Crush.
Speaker 1 And I got a fan mail that asked me, hey, Felix, how many of the top 100 IAP earning games have in-game ads and monetize with ads?
Speaker 1 I have no idea, I said to him, but I kind of the question stuck with me.
Speaker 1 And luckily for you, since I have a broken foot and I haven't really left the house in three days, I kind of set out on a little bit of a quest to find this out.
Speaker 1 So, today, I want to go through all the top 100 IAP games, see what their ad placements are, and see if we can find out any trends from that.
Speaker 1
So, this wouldn't actually be possible without a little help from our friends. We're going to be looking a lot at sensor tower and game analytics to answer these questions.
But let's start.
Speaker 1
So, let me share a screen here. Good news here is Jakob and Mati are not here to stress me when sharing the screen.
So, here we go. Here we have the beautiful list.
Speaker 1
This is the list of royalty in mobile gaming, right? This is the 100 largest apps or gaming apps in the last 30 days. So October 22nd to November.
So here we have the list.
Speaker 1 If you ever find yourself on this list, this is a very coveted list to be on. And it's a very hotly contested list, right? So this 100 list I've been through.
Speaker 1 And before this, ask yourself, how many of these games do you actually think have in-game apps? The answer is actually
Speaker 1 14 games so only 14 games in the top 100 iap earning category actually have in-game ads i might have missed one or two when going through the list but i definitely haven't missed 10 i can guarantee you that right so the games here right so in the top 100 list in the last uh 30 days according to sensor tower here right they have earned about 2.6 billion.
Speaker 1 I think that this number you can probably increase by at least a billion because essentially there's a lot of these companies that are now going direct to consumer with web stores, right?
Speaker 1
Look up Fastprint, their sponsor or our podcast if you're interested to find out more. But essentially, I think this number is a lot bigger than 2.6 billion.
But to break it down even further, right?
Speaker 1 So out of this, the user base, according to Censor Tower of the top 100 games, is 660 million average daily active user base.
Speaker 1 So, a lot of users, and they're not watching a lot of ads, but they're spending a lot of money. So, to the actual list we're going to be looking at today.
Speaker 1 So, this is the list of the 14 mobile games in the top 100 IAP category that monetize with ads. So, we have Candy Crush, CoinMaster, Gossip Harbor, Tomb Blast, some of these old school titles, right?
Speaker 1 And collectively, the active user base of the games in the 100 IAP category that actually monetize with ads about 55 million active users every day, daily active users, right?
Speaker 1
So let's start by looking at Candy Crush. So Candy Crush, eight and a half million downloads in the last 30 days and a whopping 93 million in IAP revenue.
So this game has been around forever now.
Speaker 1 I think it's been out since 20% even here.
Speaker 1 So this game, I think, really personifies what I think is one of the biggest trends we're going to see with a lot of these games that have been out for this long, right?
Speaker 1 So the issue is that if you keep optimizing and doing a lot of stuff on the revenue side, so let's just go to the revenue metrics here, right?
Speaker 1 If we look here at all time, revenue is kind of stagnating, right? It's increased and they're doing a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1 And I'm sure if we go to the active user base, it's kind of maintaining but decreasing a little bit, right? So the interesting thing here is, right?
Speaker 1 I think at some point there was a product manager that basically went like, hey, you know, it would be a lot easier for us to actually just add in-game ads to monetize the probably 95% of the user base that doesn't actually pay with IAPs.
Speaker 1 So these are the ad placements that I wrote about in my blog post, Shameless Plug. I think these guys are earning anywhere between $580,000 to $600,000 per day in ads.
Speaker 1 But the interesting thing about Candy Crush and what they do extremely well is their segmentation, right?
Speaker 1 So what they're trying to optimize for is not scaring away any purchasers because i've worked in a lot of match three games with their ad placements and the ad placements that always convert the best is the pre-level a booster and the post-level booster right and usually that's also one of the main monetization mechanism moments in match three games right so you don't want to scare away the user base so it's important to actually do the segmentation so what i've heard on the grapevine how candy crush does their segmentation is that they look at average purchase time windows in tier one geos if you've been in a category let's say from the uk and you haven't made a purchase for a year, then essentially that's when they start rolling out the rewarded ads.
Speaker 1 But they also look at this on a geo level, right?
Speaker 1 So what they also do at the same time is that they look at, hey, if you are based in Indonesia, the historic purchase rate of that country is a lot lower than the UK, for example, right?
Speaker 1 So we roll out ads quicker then because, yeah, it makes sense, right?
Speaker 1 Then also, what I've heard as a rumor is that actually with some DSP partners, they actually pass some data to them on historic purchase rates. If people have actually made purchases.
Speaker 1
I heard this late night at a conference. I don't know if it's true.
But here, let's look at the quick ad placements here.
Speaker 1 The first ad placement that I think is really cool in Candy Crush, right, is a thematic floating placement, right, between the levels.
Speaker 1
So before you get in the level, this thing just floats like a balloon and you can open it and you can actually watch it for boosters. Very clever placement.
I've seen it quite a lot.
Speaker 1 You have, I need to rush these through a little bit because I know we have to go through 14 games.
Speaker 1 We also have the Sweet Cinema, which is a grid where where users can watch ad that essentially get some rewards.
Speaker 1 You have the fail, which remember what I said before, is actually one of the main drivers for ad impressions in match 3 games, right?
Speaker 1 So if you fail a level, then you can watch an ad to essentially get more moves, right? So then you also have the level enhancement ad. So this is the one that's before.
Speaker 1
So the other one that tends to convert extremely well. So you can get an extra booster for the level you're about to start.
It's a good prompt here that it's also a super hard level, right?
Speaker 1 Then if you run out of a life, you can either purchase that with the gold, which is the hard currency, or you can actually watch an ad to get one more life.
Speaker 1 Magic hat upgrades, then you also have the daily treat machine. And when you're finishing some of the race events, you can also double the payout by watching an ad.
Speaker 1 So the interesting thing also is that Candy Crush in tier 3 geos also show interstitials, right?
Speaker 1 So I've actually seen a lot of videos when Indian players, Indonesian players, before they start a level, they see an interstitial. then after a level, they also start an interstitial.
Speaker 1 So I probably would care to wager that Candy Crush might be the single largest standalone gaming application that gets the most money every day from mobile advertisements. Hard to prove these things.
Speaker 1 Probably only the mediation platforms could tell you and they could only tell you what that is in the little wall garden, but that's just my estimate. So Candy Crush gets a gold star.
Speaker 1 They had they didn't have ads before, but they added them. And now probably they're earning anywhere between 200 million to 230 million a year from ads, which is quite impressive, right?
Speaker 1 But then still, when you put that next to the billions they're earning from IAPs, yeah, it's all relative, right? So next game we're moving down the list is CoinMaster.
Speaker 1 So CoinMaster, as well, in the last... 30 days, we talked about this game so long, they've never pretty much earned under 75 mil a month in IAP revenue.
Speaker 1 So if we look at this on a longer timeline here, you see that they've been earning between 70 to 80 million a month for literally five or nearly going on six years.
Speaker 1 But the interesting thing here is, if you look at the active user base, it's kind of the same, a bit more drastic looking than you have on Candy Crush, right?
Speaker 1 But it's going down, even though revenue is staying flat, which is why also in another blog post that I wrote, there's rumors that there's currently being A-B test for actually rolling out rewarded ads.
Speaker 1 So, the rewarded ads they're rolling out is for potions, purple tokens, and food for pets.
Speaker 1 I got some messages after I posted this, but essentially, they also got some reports of people telling me that they used to have ads, but they rolled them back.
Speaker 1 But they are now actually thinking about doing it on the main spin function in CoinMaster, which is quite interesting, right?
Speaker 1 So, here's another example of a game that has a large user base, and they're adding ads when they can no longer sustain like growing the DAU, right?
Speaker 1
So, a logical like choice here is to start monetizing usually that 95% of the user base that otherwise doesn't convert. So two games down.
Let's move here.
Speaker 1 So now we have Gossip Harbor by Microfun, which is also earning 76 mil a month according to Sensor Tower and a whopping 4.4 million downloads every month.
Speaker 1 So Microfun is this really interesting merge dominating
Speaker 1 studio from China. And kind of their plan is not to have the top performing game in the category, but is to have many games and to dominate the category, right?
Speaker 1
So looking at the revenue here, right, it's pretty much also increasing still. And look at the active user base, assuming that's increasing as well.
Wow, they're really on a tear.
Speaker 1 So I would say this is one of the biggest things about what I see about Chinese studios and Western studios, right?
Speaker 1 So where Western studios, they tear to kind of look down on in-game advertising and look at it as some sort of second-class citizen because they have this illusion, which I don't agree with, that it makes games less premium.
Speaker 1 And when you go to China and you have a conversation, they go like, I don't know, let's test it and see if the revenue is incremental.
Speaker 1
And more often than not, if you implement ads in a clever way, you can actually implement them. So they actually add to the revenue in an incremental way.
Candy Crush proves this, right?
Speaker 1
And Gossip Harbor shows this as well. So let's take a look at the ads that they have.
So in the merge category, it's all based on timers and energy, right?
Speaker 1 Those are the biggest conversion points for revenue, right? So here we can see that Gossip Harbor has a skip time.
Speaker 1 So either you have to pay three gems or you can watch an ad to basically cut down a timer. And then you have our shop refresh, which is kind of a classical placement, right?
Speaker 1 So you have sales in the shop, and these sale, the sale always refreshes on a fixed timer. And you can either pay gems here or you can watch an ad to refresh the timer quicker so you get better sales.
Speaker 1 I really like this placement because it doesn't really give anything away. It just cuts the timer, right?
Speaker 1 Then you also have a daily gift by watching an ad, so one time a day or one time every 12 hours. And then you have the biggest one in merge, right?
Speaker 1 Which is when you run out of energy, you can watch an ad for refill. I have a feeling that most likely they're segmenting this quite a lot because it's the biggest monetization point in merge games.
Speaker 1 But yeah, well done to them. I think when we ran this game, it was making about 15 to 18% from ads.
Speaker 1 And I would probably say that it's all incremental ads, but I think the main benefit from having this type of of ads is that you can run other types of UA campaigns as well.
Speaker 1 So, probably they're running a lot of ad ROAS and blended ROAS, probably more blended ROAS, which basically means you can spend more.
Speaker 1 This is a conversation I have a lot with all-time Western developers that I've been around, and sometimes they don't think about this.
Speaker 1 That actually, if you have in-game ads, you can increase the overall UA spend that you have in your game. So, then we have another old-school giant here, Toonblast, so out of Turkey.
Speaker 1
So, Peak Games, probably one of the OG game developers that started the whole Turkey wave. So still, this game is quite old.
Let's say in the last 30 days, they earned $30 million
Speaker 1
in. Let's look at this trend for a longer period of time.
Wow, they're actually coming back. And let's look at the active user base.
Speaker 1 It's also decreasing, which is probably why when someone went like, hey, you know, instead of having 24 million and we're going down, how can we also increase revenue?
Speaker 1 So they're probably doing a lot of stuff on the event side and optimization, but also they've added in-game ads which is another trend for i guess the match i guess is match two right but yeah anyway so toon blast like i said they're monetizing the extra move here so when you're out of moves after a level that you can basically watch an ad to actually get more moves makes complete sense same as the king placement right so candy crush placement moving forward we have another merge game by moon active right so these guys have been i guess the de facto leaders in the merge category for quite a while, not in terms of downloads, but in terms of revenue.
Speaker 1
This is by Magma. Ah, they've been overtaken by Gossip Harbor.
Interesting. So let's look here.
So in the last 30 days, 23 million in IAPs. Let's look at what's going on with the game.
Speaker 1 It's kind of plateauing, which is, I'm sure, why they've looked at microfun and started to go like, hey, maybe we should add ads as well.
Speaker 1 How much do you want to bet that it's all going to be energy-related placements, right?
Speaker 1 So if we go down energy like we thought and also unlocking items so it's not really the same ad strategy as microfun and this i think also when we analyze this game on the podcast they only had about eight percent of ad revenue so i guess they're not leaning in as much to ads as in microfun but still quite interesting to see then we have heyday by Finnish super gaming giant Supercell, right?
Speaker 1 And Supercell has been one of the studios, I guess, that historically has been quite against ads.
Speaker 1
Heyday actually has some ads in it, right? So in the last 30 days, it's made 12.6 million. Is it growing or is it shrinking? Let's have a little look here.
So it's having a comeback.
Speaker 1
It started to come back. I guess it's getting a lot of competition from PlayRex.
Let's look at the active user base. But here, according to Reddit, you can actually have ads inside of Heyday.
Speaker 1 You've seen I've actually gone through this on a timer reduction. And I know they also have a cinema here, right?
Speaker 1 But like most likely here, what's going on is they're probably heavily segmenting these users and not showing ads to everyone, probably like you're also seeing in Candy Crush.
Speaker 1 So moving forward, I just need to take a second here to stop and just admire June's Journey by Wuga, right?
Speaker 1 So I just want to give a massive compliment to this game because I think it's probably one of the more innovative games. So Candy Crush is quite innovative on the segmentation side, right?
Speaker 1 But June's Journey, I would say, is probably one of the most open-minded and willing to test studios for ads that i've actually worked with or not worked with but actually talked to right and usually i i lived in germany for seven years that's not words that usually you say about germany or germans but here i gotta say that the admon strategy in june's journey is super interesting right so let's just take a look at the top line numbers first so 11 million in the last 30 days how is that trending i probably think it's down right so the interesting thing here is, right, it's down because it's an old game, it's kind of accepted, right?
Speaker 1 Active user base
Speaker 1 is also decreasing. But here, we can talk quite probably a lot about the in-game placements, right?
Speaker 1 Because June's Journey is the game, the only game, the game that earns the most on the IAP side every month that also has implemented skip-it tickets.
Speaker 1 And this is also what I think is one of the trends that I'm starting to see from the kind of hyper or hybrid casual or the casual space and the puzzle space is that some of these ad monetization things that these games are doing is actually moving upstream and being adopted by the large IAP heavy games and it's actually working in a clever way.
Speaker 1 And I think we're going to see a lot more of this trend actually happening. I actually have another example of that later.
Speaker 1 But the trend here is started by Voodoo a couple of years ago, where essentially they have skip it tickets, right? And what do they actually look right? So here we we have the ad placements, skip it.
Speaker 1 Here it is, right? So the skip it tickets. So what is a skip it? A skip it is a ticket that you buy that essentially means you can skip a rewarded pack.
Speaker 1
And yeah, this was done a lot by the hyper casual companies when they moved to hybrid. Voodoo pioneered this.
And now it's found its way to Woogo.
Speaker 1 So I'm sure what happens when a game like June's Journey is they take a little bit of a hit on the ad revenue, but they make that up massively in the IAP sales, right?
Speaker 1 So, the more tickets that you buy, the less per unit cost is a ticket. But probably what they're also doing here is bundling these tickets, right?
Speaker 1 So, every time, oh, you can also give it out as award, but probably what they're doing in the store is also bundling this with high IAP purchases.
Speaker 1 That's what I've done on some clients, and it works super well. So, what are the other ad placements that they have?
Speaker 1 So, reduce, they have the reduce required energy amounts to enter a level for 30 minutes. So, yeah, makes a lot of sense because it's an an energy-based game.
Speaker 1 Secrets to watch an ad to help you play more.
Speaker 1
Then, also, you have the daily ads progression, so you can actually skip it quicker, which makes complete sense. And then refresh your help-wanted ad.
Okay, makes complete sense.
Speaker 1 So, actually, having skippets here actually probably increases the immersiveness of the game.
Speaker 1 And I think this is probably one of the most underutilized ways of actually delivering an ad-free performance or increasing the appeal of actually IAPs even more by actually bundling it with skippets.
Speaker 1 And to think about it, right? You're making such good margins on the IAP sales here, right? So why not just bundle it with actually skipping some tickets to make it better? All right.
Speaker 1
Well done, June's journey. Well done for being open-minded.
So let's look at you here. We have another
Speaker 1
merge game. Oh, so many merge games.
So many merge games. Tasty Travels by Century Games.
I don't even think these guys have ads. 10 million in the last 30 days.
There's no way they have ads.
Speaker 1
Oh, Oh, they do. That tree game has ads.
Well done. Oh, who'd have thought it, right? Chinese game studio thinking with first principles thinking instead of looking down on ads.
And what do we know?
Speaker 1 Watch ads to get more energy. So probably here, oh, only one placement for ads.
Speaker 1 So probably here, they're earning anywhere between probably one to two million a month from ads, from that one ad placement. So don't need to talk too much more about merge games.
Speaker 1
I think we talked that already a lot. But now we move to the Vietnamese darling, which is Screwed Em by ICAME.
So, this is a Hanoi-based studio I visited last year.
Speaker 1 Very clever people working in this game, and these guys have pulled themselves up from making pretty much hyper-casual games to their first IAP puzzle hit, which is Screwed Em, right?
Speaker 1 And you can see the numbers here. Yeah, 10 million in IAPs in the last 30 days and a million downloads, right? So, the interesting thing here is that this has scaled so much in the last year, right?
Speaker 1 So, from
Speaker 1 March 2005 to July 2005, they pretty much nearly quadruped, no, more than like they increased their IEP revenue from 2.5 million to 12.5 million, right?
Speaker 1 And they also managed to do this by still having about 30%
Speaker 1 coming from ads, right? The ad placements, right, inside a scrudom is pretty much just all related to boosters and interstitials between the levels and ads between them, right?
Speaker 1 So you have the booster ones here.
Speaker 1 You have refilling a life, these things, right? So these are kind of the standard ones that we've been through.
Speaker 1 We have an actual video going over all this, but here is where I think we're starting to see another trend that I think is super interesting, right? And that is the bundling.
Speaker 1 to remove ads with IAPs, which started in kind of the hybrid game category, right?
Speaker 1 So if we take a look here, right, what iCame does is that they have a remove ads offer, which anchors how much it is to remove non-intrusive ads right and then they also have a remove ads bundle that bundles in coins and boosters for slightly a higher price right and this is probably what i think is going to be the next major trend that's making it from the hybrid casual space and puzzle space into the large iap category so i'm also seeing this happen quite a lot on yeah the chinese studios right so one of the biggest ones doing this I guess is Capibara Go where they kind of do a similar thing where you can actually have a subscription that's bundled in with a lot of usability factors which actually gives you access to all the rewarded ads for free so next we have color block jam which is another one amazing game from rollick and probably they add placements here so 10 million in the last 30 days and here yeah what's actually happening with this game let's take a little look so Decreasing a little bit on the IAP side.
Speaker 1 That's kind of normal for puzzle games. They're probably already working on the next one.
Speaker 1
Yeah, active user base on DAU. Let's take a look.
Yeah, 2.3 million. So, guarantee you the ad placements here are all going to be related to puzzles.
So, yeah, banner ads, rewarded ads.
Speaker 1 Yeah, we actually analyzed this game as well, but it's actually doubling the coins after a level and getting extra lives and for boosters, but mainly the boosters are through IAPs.
Speaker 1
So, we don't need to go through that too much. And we have another match three game, right? So, project makeover, 9 million IAPs in the last 30 days.
I guess this is a triple dot game now, right?
Speaker 1 Yeah. So you can see the revenue days, the high revenue days are long gone when they used to be earning
Speaker 1 30 million a month. But now, yeah, they're down to about 10, which is still amazing.
Speaker 1
So let's look at how much do you want to bet that these are pre-level boosters and post-level boosters that they have. So two ads before a level for boosters.
Very standard in match three.
Speaker 1
And ads after failing a level. What do you know? Right.
And then a gift in the main menu. Yeah.
There we go. Thematic gift option, which also Candy Crush use.
Speaker 1 Then we have another Finnish studio, right? Metacore Games, right? So this is merged in the merge to category, right?
Speaker 1 Which we've covered also in our epic merge episode on this channel, where we've talked about merge games for two hours and went through all the history of it, right?
Speaker 1 But merge mansion used to rule the roost in this category. The revenue is still doing quite good on it, but it's just been kind of overtaken, I guess, by the micro funds of the world.
Speaker 1 To combat this, they were also open-in-minded enough to hey, let's add some ads.
Speaker 1 So, you can see here they have the shop refresh, they have the energy, exactly the same as microphone, and some shop items are refreshing as well, right?
Speaker 1 So, getting some shop items, I guess that's the other difference you can do there. So, low coin value amounts of offers, right? Which is quite cool.
Speaker 1 We're almost at the end of our exhaustive list, but now we're moving to France, right? And this is Homa all in whole.
Speaker 1 So, this is another, I guess, is a hyper-casual game that got repurposed as a puzzle game and they're making 8 mil a month in IAPs and probably another 20 or 30 percent of that on ad revenue, right?
Speaker 1 So, what's going on here? Increasing, they're working super hard. This is their flagship title for HOMA games, right? And let's look at the active user base.
Speaker 1 So, I can already tell you here without even looking at it that it's all for the boosters because we're also reviewing this game on the podcast.
Speaker 1 But here we can see ads, worst ads after winning or losing levels. And yeah, you can actually bundle it to get rid of it, which is also one of the trends, right?
Speaker 1 Last game on our 14 games in the top 100 IAP games list that actually have ads is Empires and Puzzles.
Speaker 1 According to game analytics, they don't have any ads. I know they do, which is why my list is longer here, right? So, seven and a half million.
Speaker 1 I know these guys must have decreased somewhat in the last couple of months because I used to work at a game that actually competed with these guys.
Speaker 1 So, they're down to about 10 mil a month, down from about 20 mil a month. And I probably think there's another 15 or 20 percent of ad revenue on top of this because they have a lot of ad placements.
Speaker 1 And the ad placements are usually related to what I can find here is just getting benefits, I guess. And here, I guess, probably is the game that could probably do the most on ads, right?
Speaker 1 So generally, when looking at empires and puzzles, it's just, I don't think they're doing the segmentation as hard as probably a Candy Crush could do, even though they probably could benefit a lot from complete overhaul of segmentation and basically showing more ads.
Speaker 1 But that concludes the list, right? So the two predictors here that I said is basically that the ad, removing ad mechanics on the skippets and the bundling is actually moving more and more upstream.
Speaker 1 And I have a game here that I just wanted to include as well, which is Merge Prison. And it's a game I've actually been playing because I've been working a lot in the merge space.
Speaker 1 So just wanted to show here, right? So this is one of the things that they do, which I think is super clever. So they have the energy placements, they have everything, right?
Speaker 1 But also what they do here, which is super clever, is that they have a ad-free subscription, which is also what we see on like Cappy Bar and Bill, right? So you can remove for one day for $2
Speaker 1 or remove it for 30 days for $7, but it's also bundled together with more energy and bubble pops and free, like, yeah, boosters.
Speaker 1 They also have the clever thing with Merge Prison is that they also have a mini game.
Speaker 1 uh in that game right uh which means that let me stop sharing here so they also have a mini game that's actually a puzzle game where they actually share uh or actually have a lot of ad placements that they try also to bundle into the main thing, right?
Speaker 1 So,
Speaker 1 that was me talking for 30 minutes about
Speaker 1 the 14 games that have ad placements in the top IEP category. If you have any questions on how to implement that, you can always message us.
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Thanks for listening to me going in this rant. Hope to see you next time with Jakub and Matthier.
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