How Many Ads Are Enough?

The Mobile Ad Monetization Newsletter #60

I've gone full ad monetization nerd again over the last couple of weeks. I’ve been asking myself, “Is there such a thing as enough ads?” Before you think I’ve taken a deeper philosophical turn in newsletter topics, I haven’t. I’ve been asking what the data shows about the optimal number of ads to maximize retention and revenue. Here’s what I found.

Before we start stuffing apps full of ads, there’s one important thing to know. The first ad you show a user is usually your most valuable one. By the second, third, and fourth impression, ad networks assume the user is paying less attention, so the bids get smaller and smaller. Every extra ad has diminishing returns. Most developers miss this point because mediation dashboards only show the average eCPM, hiding what each individual impression is actually worth.

So how big is the drop in eCPM? Bigger than most people think.

On one game I manage, the eCPM declines after every single impression. Here’s the average drop per additional impression:

• $3 to $6 first eCPM cohort: 3.9% average decline per impression

• $100 to $200 first eCPM cohort: 5.1% average decline per impression

The cumulative effect is even more striking. By the 12th impression:

• $3 to $6 first eCPM cohort: 39% lower than the first impression

• $100 to $200 first eCPM cohort: 52.7% lower than the first impression

In other words, the more valuable the initial impression, the faster its value deteriorates as you continue showing ads.

The next question is the interesting one: when does this reset?

At what point do ad networks stop treating a user as “ad fatigued” and start paying top dollar for that first impression again? Is it after 30 minutes? An hour? A day?

After a break, a user’s eCPM does recover, but it never fully resets. Even after 48 hours, it only reaches around 1.3 to 1.7x the value of consecutive impressions. It never comes close to that golden first impression. Think of it as a recovery, not a reset.

The good news is that most of the recovery happens within the first 24 hours. eCPMs climb between 6 and 24 hours rapidly, then largely plateau on iOS while continuing to creep upwards on Android. If you’re designing a frequency cap, a 24-hour rest window captures most of the available uplift without sacrificing two full days of monetization. 6 hours gets you about a third of the recovery.

But the biggest surprise wasn’t about time. It was about platform. Android recovers further, and for longer, than iOS. iOS plateaus around 1.27 to 1.38x after one to two days, while Android continues climbing to 1.48 to 1.67x after 48 hours. I’m assuming it’s because there’s more tracking on Android. Your ad pacing strategy should be different for Android and iOS.

What surprised me even more was what didn’t matter: user value. I expected whales to behave differently from lower-value users. They don’t. The $4 to $5 cohort and the $100 to $250 cohort follow almost identical recovery curves. On iOS, the lowest-value users even recover proportionally more than the highest-value users. eCPM turns out to be a poor signal for frequency capping.

One final caveat before anyone rewrites their ad logic. This is correlational, not causal. The data measures how ad networks respond to naturally occurring gaps between impressions, not what happens if you intentionally withhold ads. Before changing your frequency caps, run an A/B test on a small percentage of users first.

The pattern is compelling; run the numbers, and maybe you find your optimal point of “enough ads”.

*On a final note: all of the data presented in this article comes from a single mobile game running on AppLovin MAX with hundreds of thousands of users. To respect the publisher's wishes, all identifying information has been anonymized.

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Colony Flow's monetization is built around intentionally slow gameplay. Progress is deliberately throttled, creating constant friction that encourages players to either watch rewarded video ads to speed up their ants or spend premium currency to skip the wait. There is no problem that a Rewarded Ad can't solve.

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