80% of a mobile app’s users contribute as much as 20% of total ad revenues, according to a report.

A Q2 2017 Mobile Monetisation report by mobile measurements SOOMLA analysed more than two billion impressions across 25 different apps in over 200 countries.

The study suggested that this 80% of users could sometimes even contribute as little as 1% to total revenue. Generally, however, an ’80-20’ rule is said to apply when it comes to ad-based revenue.

The report claimed that if a mobile app's users were segmented by the top 20% and the rest, the eCPM of the former could be as much as 19x higher.

It should be noted however that different kinds of ads can bring up different results. Rewarded ads, for example, could see the 20% generate up to 18x more impressions than other users.

Flawed data

According to SOOMLA CEO Yaniv Nizan, the finding show that since ad networks only report average eCPM levels, it paints a picture that all users monetise at the same level.

“We have seen app publishers who made fundamentally wrong decisions by relaying on the average eCPMs reported by ad networks” says Yaniv Nizan, the CEO of SOOMLA.

“These average eCPM figures are reported via the ad-network reporting APIs, they are making their way into the publisher’s mediation platforms, attribution platform and BI. Once the data coming in is flawed, all these powerful data tools provide the wrong analysis.”

You can find more details on the report here.