Monetization - Kongregate Developers Blog

Marketing Jul 24, 2018
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 CPMs. But will they? The answer is that it very much depends on whom you ask and your approach to ads. We Have All Been Getting Screwed... I recently saw a few studies about how programmatic (or header bidding/RTB, same things) boosted CPMs for advertisers by up to 30%. On one hand, that is great news! A new tech (albeit one that has been around on the web for years now) is helping to make the mobile marketplace more efficient and competitive. That is always a welcomed sign, right?

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Talks Jan 18, 2018
Clicker Cadences: Limited-Time Event Design in Idle Games

In this Casual Connect USA 2018 talk, Lead Product Manager Drew Levin discusses how three of Kongregate's idle games have designed different styles of limited-time events to satisfy a range of player motivations. The talk touches on the major business outcomes that each game's live operations strategy has driven and outlines how their business strategies for limited-time events align with their core game's design. Slides Video

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Monetization May 25, 2017
GDC Talk: Lifetime Value and the Long Tail of Mid-Core Games

Our own Tamara Levy spoke at this year's GDC about maximizing lifetime player value in mid-core games. Using genre-specific predictive models developed from the Kongregate portfolio, we demonstrate how and why post-D30 retention can be key to increase your revenue. Through case studies, you'll learn strategies to boost both early and late revenue, as well as game core loop modifications to drive better player investment in the long run. GDC Talk: Lifetime Value: The long tail of Mid-Core games from Tamara Levy

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Monetization Mar 02, 2017
'Little Alchemist' Adopts Offerwall & Converts In-App Goods into Gold

ironSource recently published an article explaining how Chinzilla boosted Little Alchemist's in-app economy with the ironSource Offerwall. The goals were to provide an alternative payment method for paying users and obtain incremental revenue from non-paying users. Through a fully opt-in ad experience, offerwalls present users with engaging offers in exchange for free virtual currency. Here are some highlights of the results: Non-paying users who interacted with the Offerwall were 4.5x more likely to convert to paying users than non-payers who didn’t engage with the ad unit. Paying players rewarded with gems through the Offerwall had a 26% higher Average Revenue per User and made 19% more purchases in comparison to paying players who didn’t engage with the ad unit. Check out the full article here!

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Monetization Oct 20, 2016
From a Dev: Optimizing Ad Revenue Through Gameplay Experiences

The following article is meant to highlight Ultrabit’s experience with ads and how we integrated them into our core gameplay to drive meaningful revenue. I will be speaking primarily about our latest title, Pocket Politics (iOS and Android, July 2016). Although Pocket Politics sits in the idle/incremental genre, we believe ads can drive meaningful results in almost any game category. This will not be an exhaustive examination of all ads ever; instead, it is a single illustration of how we’ve found success with our current approach. If you haven’t thought about how ads might help drive more revenue from your products, we hope the below encourages you to explore ads as a secondary means of monetization. If you are already seeing gains from your current ad implementation, we hope you come away with ideas on how to further optimize. Why do we care so much about ads? Ads serve as a major pillar of revenue for Pocket Politics. At any given time we make 40-50% of our daily revenues from ads, which has proven especially significant

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Monetization Sep 08, 2016
eCPM Decay in Rewarded Video Ads

Some of you have heard the term "eCPM decay." Let's first understand what it means. If you are a publisher, CPM is the revenue you are getting for 1,000 impressions. If an advertiser is paying you a CPM of $5 and you show your users 1,000 impressions of that ad, you will receive $5. The advertising world is slightly more complex, however; most of the advertisers are actually paying CPI -- in other words, they are paying for installs. This means that unless the user clicks on an ad and installs the app, the publisher doesn't receive any revenue. What eCPM decay means is that if you take a certain user and show him more ads, he is not necessarily going to install more apps, so you wouldn't receive more money as a result. Simple Example of eCPM Decay Let's think of this scenario: You have a single user in a given day He wants to get 1 life for free, so he watches a video -- you as a publisher don't get paid for that

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Monetization Aug 04, 2016
5 Tips to Improve Game-as-a-Service Monetization

Written by Moonlit Wang, Partner Development Manager at Google Play Games, & Tammy Levy, Director of Product for Mobile at Kongregate Free-to-play games are essentially games-as-a-service. The lifetime value of these players is much more complex to calculate than it was when a game’s player LTV was simply the purchase price of a game. We understand that the LTV is directly related to how much time players spend in the game, since long-term players spend more money, but how do we design a game to retain players and monetize effectively? Google Play and Kongregate teamed up to answer this question with 5 tips to improve monetization in F2P games. To learn more, please visit this post on Google’s Developer Blog.

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Monetization Jun 30, 2016
Kongregate's Rewarded Video API

We're excited to officially announce Kongregate's Rewarded Video Advertising API, now available to all game developers on Kongregate.com! This type of advertising, also sometimes called "incentivized ads" or "opt-in ads," has gotten particularly popular on mobile recently. It allows developers to give rewards to players who choose to watch an ad. It's a great system that's a true win-win-win: Players appreciate the control over their experience and the rewards they can choose to earn. In fact, when ads run out or have a bug we get complaints from players, which is a great sign: "Hey, we want to watch more ads!" Advertisers have found that due to the opt-in nature these ads get far better performance than interstitial, banner, pre-load, or any other ad type. Thanks to that great performance, these ads have the best payout of any ad type, which is a win for the developers who use them. We've been using this model of ads in some of our mobile games (AdVenture Capitalist in particular has done extremely well with them)

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Ads 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 or your mediation solution. Developers should be looking at both the revenue generated from ads and IAPs in order to determine ARPU, as we do at Kongregate. If you are running paid marketing campaigns for your game, this is essential to acquiring as many new users as possible. Most ad networks will rank your offers against other advertisers' offers based on the CPM cost of your ads (the cost per 1,000 impressions). Even if you are bidding on a cost-per-install (CPI) basis, ad networks will always optimize your campaigns based on the CPMs you generate for them. Demand

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