Monetization - Kongregate Developers Blog

Getting Started Nov 10, 2022
Throwing Spaghetti at the Wall - The Ideation Process

Ideation and Process from Drew Hambke, Director of Marketing, Kongregate. I’ve been thinking a lot about what brought me to Kongregate back in the day and the content that kept me around. I was an avid user of Kongregate when Gamestop owned it, and becoming an employee reminded me of those things. Our audience has a lot of nostalgia for the good old days when we could spend a lot of time enjoying new games and having community interactions you couldn’t find anywhere else. Sites like Kongregate

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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

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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

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

ironSource recently published an article [http://www.ironsrc.com/success-stories/little-alchemist/] 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-

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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 [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pocket-politics/id1106002394?mt=8] and Android [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kongregate.mobile.pocketpolitics.google&hl=en] , July 2016). Although Pocket Politics sits in the idle/incremental genre, we believe ads can

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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 t

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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 t

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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

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