Successful In-Game Ads: The Secret Sauce for Monetization

Tammy Levy spoke this week at Casual Connect Europe, sharing Kongregate's experience on how we've been able to successfully monetize in-game ads. Using case studies from AdVenture Capitalist, Bullet Boy and Epic Skater, she shows good and bad ad implementation.

Successful In-Game Ads: The Secret Sauce for Monetization from Tamara Levy

How Ad Networks Take Advantage of Blind Environments

20 Buzzwords & Other Crap Ad Networks Get Away With Buzzwords are abundant these days. In pop culture it is all about crypto, blockchain, and ICOs. The mobile ads space is no stranger to buzzwords either. A few years ago it was all about "the brands" that were supposedly coming to revolutionize the mobile ad landscape and boost CPMs (they have not). Now we’ve moved onto terms like header bidding, programmatic, flattened waterfalls, and RTB, which will be the next big things on mobile to drive up

May 03, 2016

Ads Count, So Count Your Ads

Ads in mobile games are more popular than ever. Ads can come in the form of interstitial banners, non-rewarded video, rewarded video, offerwalls, and other native forms. Some games, often casual, can be solely supported by ad revenue. Even for games with options for in-app purchases (IAP), Kongregate typically finds that in-game ads can account for 10-50% of all revenue. This “ad”ded revenue is nice but often lives independently of IAP revenue, typically in the dashboard of various ad networks

Apr 21, 2016

A Simple 10-Minute UI Litmus Test

About a year ago, I gave a talk to a small group of mostly indie and small-studio game developers about how to incorporate the UI process into their games, and one of the pieces of advice I haphazardly slapped on an ending slide was, “Think like a player [when looking at the UI for your game].” Essentially, I was asking developers to remove themselves from the game that they had poured their blood, sweat, and tears into. To the surprise of probably no one, the first question I got was, “How do