The Mobile Ad Monetization Newsletter #15
Ad El Dorado - Inside the Incentivized Ad Platforms Quest for Gold
Gold Diggers, Welcome! The number of Incentive Ad Platforms or offerwall solutions has significantly increased in the last couple of years. I remember that back in 2017, the only options for publishers looking for offerwalls solutions were relegated to two choices: Fyber and Tapjoy. Now, it’s 2025, and according to Paul Bowen’s Data Base on Incentivized ad platforms, you can choose from 19 companies. That’s 8x more companies in 8 years. So, this week, I want to break down the different types of offerwalls available to publishers and break down common pitfalls publishers face when chasing these golden gains.
🤔What is an Offerwall?🤔
Easy - A publisher integrates an offerwall where their users go and see a list of offers they can complete for ingame currency. The offers can range from completing surveys, watching a video, and reaching a particular level in another game. Why would publishers opt to have an offerwall in their game? That’s also easy. eCPMs for offerwals are usually $350+ and sometimes go closer to $900🤯. You can see an example below from Treepla’s Office Cat.
What’s in it for the advertisers?
In the Office Cat example, 1 gem is about $0.003, meaning that playing Serei Gensouki: Spirtit Cronicles to level 120 is about a $45 reward for the player. You’re likely thinking that level 120 will take a long time to complete, and you’d be 100% correct. Mostly, games that advertise on offerwalls tend to be on the hardcore end, where the aim is to get the player hooked on the long-term game. This is why you see many web-based games and ads from the likes of Superplay, Scopely, and Playtika spending tons in offerwalls. They’re betting that a user from your game will see the generous price and that the gameplay after reaching level 120 is so compelling that you will stick around and make purchases🤑.
What about Publishers?
Besides, the high eCPMs offer walls are quite clever, as you’re given an award inside the original app for completing tasks in another. This means that users will have to return to redeem their premium currency in the original app and thus, in theory, will not churn. There is a constant battle between publishers and offerwall companies that can best be summarized in one sentence: “How to increase LTV while retaining my users.”
I’ve managed games with Offerwalls, which usually means showing the Offerwall only to non-payers and gradually rolling it out to payers to ensure incremental revenue. Usually, from my experience, showing the Offerwall to payers is incremental about 50% of the time. But I’ve always had to block direct competitors from advertising.
Where do Offerwalls tend to work best?
Obviously, only Games and apps with strong economies work — who would want to do tasks for nothing? Generally, what I’ve seen is that Offerwall can add 12-18% of incremental ad revenue if implemented correctly and run with events.
💵Bonus Bonanza 💵
Remember how I said that Offerwall companies had 8x? More companies competing for publishers means one thing... The integration bonuses💰 for Offerwall have absolutely gone nuts in the last 12 months. What used to be $100k integration bonuses are now $400k.
Incentivized Ad Platforms
I’ve talked a lot about the growth in Offerwall, but there’s also been explosive growth in the number of Incentivized apps that offer rewards or cash for users. These apps (Mistplay, Benjamin, and Exmox) have started to become serious UA players. Matej, on his brutally honest Substack, is preparing a breakdown of how to run UA on those next week if you’re interested in learning more.
💰Great Content 💰
Without great games, there can be no great content. This is why we must be mindful of the games of the future. This is what Softlaunch Sonar is all about - we keep a watchful eye on the games that are looking promising for tomorrow and that have yet to go global. 2.5 Gamers are a bit like Batman 🦸.. Anyway, check out the episode.
🎯The Cinderella of the Week🎯
Miracles still happen! Despite the uber-competitive landscape in mobile, solo developers can still scale their IAA monetized games to crazy levels. This section is to salute you. Why? Because everyone loves a Cinderella story… that’s why.
After two weeks, Cinderella Drought Zain Abideen has rocketed in the downloads chart with his game Annoying Uncle Punch Game, which has racked up 5.8 million downloads and 1.5 million active daily users in the last 30 days. The game does what it advertises: you punch the annoying uncle discussed in pop-culture references. While watching a lot of ads.
The user base mainly consists of T4 geos. I estimate that this title currently earns between $12 - 18k/day, depending on fill rates and ad monetization setup. Maybe Hypercasual is not dead after all?
For More Incredible Insights
Try 2.5 Gamers on YouTube!
