It’s easy to feel instinctively optimistic about in-game advertising. In recent years there’s been a powerful sense that in-game ads aren’t simply an increasingly valuable means of income for developers and publishers; perhaps they’re now understood and embraced by more consumers and industry figures than ever before. Furthermore, there is an ever more diverse spread of games, markets and consumers where ads are fitting. And now it feels like there are a greater number of platforms, approaches and tools through which [...]

Earlier this year mobile monetisation platform outfit Fyber launched a significantly reworked version of its Fyber FairBid technology, having celebrated 10 years in business in the previous months. But what have the team learned about the changing in-game advertising landscape over that decade? And what does it mean that Fyber FairBid offers a unified auction technology for app bidding ‘built from the ground up for the in-app programmatic era’? TheGamingEconomy caught up with Fyber president Offer Yehudai to learn more about the [...]

TheGamingEconomy Daily Digest brings you the trending business stories in gaming. In today’s edition: gamescom attracts 373,000 visitors; Steam business model ‘unrealistic’ according to Ubisoft; and Tik Tok adopts F2P-style video ads. gamescom attracts 373,000 visitors The 2019 edition of gamescom attracted record visitor numbers of 373,000 to Cologne from over 100 nations, according to figures released by organisers Verband der deutschen Games-Branche. This represents a rise of 3000, or 0.8%, on last year’s conference. A total of 1153 companies held exhibits [...]

Whether your mobile app is ‘just’ another extension of your long-owned and monetised media property, or a brand-new, standalone product that you are launching as a new developer, you have a few immediate choices to make – choices that, while not set in stone forever, will chart the course of your app’s life. Writing exclusively for TheGamingEconomy, Ryoksuke Izumi (pictured below), VP – Japan, Korea, SEA, AdColony, outlines the key considerations for monetising your app. The first is – to be free, [...]

A report released by Liftoff and Leanplum on the state of mobile app marketing suggests that app marketers are coming under increased pressure to improve ‘deep-funnel interactions’, specifically around usage and in-app purchases. While CPA has dropped around installations and usage, the cost of getting users to make in-app purchases has increased by 56% year-on-year.   Compounding this increase in the CPA is the drop in the conversion rate to 2.8%. This is a huge concern for a lot of big gaming publishers, [...]

Awareness campaigns are a critical tool for new and established brands alike. The focus of these campaigns isn’t immediate click throughs and conversions; instead, it is on building brand recognition and consumer retention. Traditional awareness campaigns might include TV advertising or print media. While these avenues put information in front of thousands, it can be nearly impossible to track direct ROI, writes Sandor Jones (pictured below), product marketing manager, YouAppi, exclusively for TheGamingEconomy. The same can be said of rewarded video; however, [...]

Arguably, one of the most crucial aspects of performance advertising for in-app gaming is creative. From leveraging the correct ad format – depending on your user acquisition, retention, and reactivation strategies – to multivariate testing of creative across those different target segments, gaming developers need to place a lot of importance on creative output. TheGamingEconomy speaks exclusively with Jeff Marshall (pictured below), CEO, CrossInstall, about its newly launched Creatives as a Service (CaaS) platform, to help gaming developers do just [...]

TheGamingEconomy visited Casual Connect Europe this week, where we interviewed Simon Spaull, managing director, EMEA, AppLovin, about the challenges and opportunities of in-app monetisation for gaming developers both big and small. TheGamingEconomy: How do independent mobile gaming developers gain traction in such a competitive environment? Simon Spaull: Financially, it’s a challenge. If you want to get to the top of an app chart, the predominant way is to buy users; and when you’re competing against the larger companies, it’s difficult, as you [...]