How Much Ad Revenue Mobile Games Make Per 100k DAU?
How much ad revenue should a game generate per 100k of DAU?
“Quiet wealth” or “quiet luxury” emphasizes privacy and discourages overt displays of wealth that cause attention. In Mobile, once you earn IAP revenue, it’s akin to firing off a giant flare gun to the development community. Anyone with Sensor Tower access can, in real time, track your progress and if your project is worth copying or not. IAP revenue is loud, brash, and easy to track. Whereas ad revenue, the second income stream for mobile apps, is opaque, concealed, and difficult to estimate. In mobile, Ad Revenue is “Quiet Revenue”, and IAP is “Loud Revenue”.
I estimate that the mobile ad monetization market pays mobile publishers between $38 and $55 million per day to show impressions in their apps. This means mobile publishers collectively receive between $14 and $20 billion in ad revenue annually. Sure, that is a far cry from the $142 billion the Play and App stores are estimated to have generated in 2024 in IAPs. However, ad revenue is not subject to the 30% Apple and Google tax, and ad revenue generation is done away from prying eyes.
Ad revenue is notoriously difficult to estimate because of fluctuations in the eCPM between publishers (see here for why). So, let me offer you this rough guide on how to estimate ad revenue.
The things you need to estimate ad revenue:
- An Apps Daily Active Userbase (DAU)
- Amount of the DAU in USA, and non-USA DAU (eCPM is waaay higher in USA)
- A rough idea of how many impressions of the different ad units per DAU a mobile app generates
eCPMs fluctuate a lot depending on the reasons I outlined in newsletter 10, so you can generally assume:
This is simplified, obviously, so eCPMs can be outside of this range. But we’re looking for something simple and easy to use for everyone. I included the ad viewer metrics from some puzzle games that generate IAP revenue below.
That would mean that per 100k users on iOS in the USA with the following metrics, the userbase should generate around $6k from rewarded ads, $6k from interstitial ads, and about $500 from banner ads per day. This is simplified, but depending on the ad metrics, I reckon it’s relatively safe with a 20% error margin. I used 100k DAU because it’s simple to scale down to 10k or 1m DAU and apply this whenever you want to estimate ad revenue.
It’s not perfect, but at least with this, you can estimate some ad revenues when you can access a game’s or app’s DAU. Let me know if you have questions?
💰Great Content 💰
The mysterious buyer of Applovin’s gaming division for $900m is UK ad Monetization giant Tripledot. Who is Tripledot? What do they do? Don’t worry; the Two and a Half Gamers Podcast is here to offer you insights. Join us for our deep dive into Tripledot’s portfolio. I estimate their ad revenue and profit margins for your pleasure. Hint: The numbers are big, and yes, I used a version of the method above to bring you the estimates.
🎯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.
Hmm, it turns out Cinderella stories don’t happen every week on Mobile anymore. So this week, I want to highlight a new entrant into the Match 3 arena from Turkey: Match Villians by Good Job Games, which has scaled to $30k in IAPs per day. It’s a Match 3 title, but the core is based around a Vampire Family that you help to complete heists. I really thought that this genre was locked down, but you know.. Good Job!
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