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IQzone's Patrick Petty on why ads could be your missing puzzle piece

Ad speak

IQzone's Patrick Petty on why ads could be your missing puzzle piece

Given the level of its success, many developers will be tempted to focus their efforts solely on IAP part of the free-to-play market.

However, according to IQzone's Patrick Pettay, who was speaking at Pocket Gamer Connects 2014, that would be a huge mistake.

Petty believes there are three ways for developers to make money, and, if they really want to hit the jackpot, they shouldn't shy away from using any of them.

"There are three primary ways to make money as a mobile game developer, freemium, incentivised, and display advertising," explained Pettay.

"There are certain companies who have made huge amounts of money, as in billions and billions of dollars, such as King and Supercell by going freemium.

"The key takeaway here is that as a smart app developer you should segment out your users and use all three types of advertising or monetisation."

Ad revenue

Advertising, suggests Pettay, is a highly lucrative, but shockingly underused form of monetising mobile games.

To many developers fail to educate themselves about that particular monetisation model, and by doing that they're only succeeding in shooting themselves in the foot.

SLDIESHO

"The majority of my time is going to be used to look at advertising, as unfortunately I don't think game developers look at that enough."

"It can be a significant revenue channel for you, and it's probably the one you guys know the least about.

"So, there are three types of advertising. You can either use banner, interstitial, and video, and there are pros and cons to all of them."

Understanding those pros and cons is essential if developers hope to wield ad power effectively.

"While banner has been around the longest time and gives you the most fill, it's not the best user experience, and depending on how you built your game it might be a really bad user experience," continued Pettay.

"Interstitials have really grown over the last couple of years, and they have a much higher eCPM than banner. However, if you have a high clickthrough rate you're actually sending your users out of your game and into another game.

"Video has really made a strong gain over the last year, with companies doing some really good incentivised videos. Of course, if you're forcing players to watch videos, and doing it two or three times a session, you might be ruining the user experience."

You can see all the video presentations from Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki 2014 here.

Pocket Gamer Connects is the biggest mobile games show in Europe, which brings together the best speakers and delegates from across the industry and from all over the world.

To-date, Pocket Gamer Connects has been held in London and Helsinki, and the show will be heading back to the UK in January 2015.

To find out more about the latest show, head on over to www.pgconnects.com.


What do you call someone who has an unhealthy obsession with video games and Sean Bean? That'd be a 'Chris Kerr'. Chris is one of those deluded souls who actually believes that one day Sean Bean will survive a movie. Poor guy.