From Virality to Scalability: Influencer Marketing

How do other apps collaborate with influencers for performance marketing? 📱💥 Are you missing out on something? Well, there's a whole spectrum of strategies out there, and they can even complement each other! And some miss the bigger picture. Let's dive in. 👇 1️⃣ Grow Organically with Influencers & Content Creators 🌱 Creating a community of influencers & content creators can be a game-changer. They share what they create for you on platforms like Instagram stories, TikTok, and Instagram Reels. This approach leverages the trust their followers have in them. But, there's a challenge—scaling the magic when you hit a viral video. Creating a community is valuable, and time-consuming, so it better scales. But how? 2️⃣ Combine Organic Growth with TikTok Spark 🚀 One way is this: Take the first strategy up a notch by adding TikTok Spark Ads. This […]

Samet Durgun October 23

Journal

How I Research Ad Ideas on TikTok

New ad concept production takes time. In this article, I will talk about exactly how to make the best of your time to maximize impact. That includes: 3 approaches to creative concept creationWhy thinking like an artist is the way to goAnd how I utilize tools for research 3 Approaches to creative concept evaluation There are two types of approaches I observe when it comes to ad production: number 1- usually, a freelancer: “Look at this random app that started making money, and here are the random ads I collected through their ads library. Please get inspired.” number 2- usually, an agency: “Here is an endless list of customer emotions and motivations chart. We will pick 5 combinations among 12.000.000 possibilities and create something that (hopefully) works.” These approaches are distinctly different, but they have one thing in common. ---- […]

Samet Durgun October 10

Journal

Tile Match: The new Match-3 or the new Merge?

It’s hard to keep secrets in the gaming industry. Once players show interest in something you've created, many game developers worldwide quickly become "inspired" by your game. While finding the blue ocean is the enduring hot topic for game developers, staying relevant as that ocean turns red is a rare and more valuable skill to possess. Some of those oceans are extremely hard to enter once they turn red. It's not necessarily due to the exceptional quality of existing games or the lack of potential for improvement within the genre. Instead, the audience interested in the genre is not sufficiently large enough for late entries. This heavily contributes to what we call the first mover advantage. Merge was a great example of a genre that appeared to be “the new Match-3”, but eventually evolved into a smaller genre dominated by […]

Ahmetcan Demirel October 9

Journal

Marketing Success Through Individualization

My work producing and hosting weekly podcasts, frequent webinars and masterclasses feels a little like speed dating. Every interview and interaction - from martech pioneers to marketing wizards - starts with a short briefing call where I listen to their story and help them shape a narrative that will make the content we create together shine. Sometimes, I discover a diamond in the rough and then feel committed to making that individual stand out. (I am over the moon when I can unlock that potential.) Other times, I hear a cool idea that sparks a fire in my brain. On the best days, I get both -- and reinforcement of the hard truth that marketers have to grasp. Demographics are dead - to borrow a phrase from my esteemed friend and colleague David Allison. He literally wrote the book on […]

Peggy Anne Salz October 2

Journal

The App Growth Phases

The App Growth PhasesFrom $0 to $5M MRR. Each phase has its own unique challenges and opportunities, and it's important to understand them in order to grow your app successfully. * $0 to $100K MRRThis is the early stage of app growth, where you're focused on acquiring your first users and building a loyal base. Some key strategies for this phase include:ASO: Make sure your app is visible in the app store by optimizing your app title, description, and keywords.App Store Ads: Use app store ads to reach potential users who are searching for apps like yours.Influencer marketing: Partner with influencers in your niche to promote your app to their audience. * $100K to $500K MRRAt this stage, you're starting to see some traction and your user base is growing. Now, you need to focus on increasing retention and engagement. Some key strategies […]

Doruk Kasoglu October 2

Journal

AI generated content will become very popular in Game Dev

AI generated content will become very popular in game development, considering the current AI developments! 🎯 Images here were generated by me in just minutes. Just needed proper prompts and a couple of iterations to the input! Any style and direction was achievable, with some iteration cycles. All of this can be done very FAST - which is pretty amazing! 🚀💯How can this evolve the industry? Here are some thoughts:- Outsource work for AI- Small teams can take over challenging genres with improved content output/pipeline and challenge big players- Concept art without concept artists- Character designs generated by AI- Reference art that you could use straight-forward- Assets directly ready for implementation- Board game developers, e.g., create games with just designing them and putting in AI art- Etc.Potential challenges?- Legislation?- Ownership?- What else?There are also high opportunities for other industries:- Writers […]

Antti Kananen September 14

Journal

Monopoly Go: UA, Non-gaming vs. Gaming, CPI vs. CPA

Thoughts Bidding for CPA is better than bidding for CPI. That’s how I always believed, and it repeatedly proved itself. Until this week. One of my partners has a lower CPA with a CPI-optimized campaign, and this has been going on for a few weeks now. The identical campaigns deliver vastly better results in install optimization. 🤔 One can speculate many things as to why. And I couldn’t pin down any solid reason yet. Speaking of bidding for CPA, one of the biggest -not talked about- phenomena is Google driving fraud traffic for the top of the funnel. Example: Install-optimized vs. Registration-optimized campaigns. What sorcery is this 🧙🏻♂️ Speaking of fraud, I stumbled upon sound research by Lunio , IAS & Scope3 this week. There must be a way to hold these corporations more accountable. Yet to be discovered. Source: […]

Samet Durgun September 11

Journal

Hypercasual solved a novel problem for all mobile titles

Hypercasual solved a novel problem for all mobile titles: marketing. Like web3, hypercasual always seems to be caught in its drama with recurring reports of death or life on top of wash trading driving genre GDP. But beneath all the bullshit, hypercasual discovered something profound: how to get BILLIONS of players to download games at sub $1 CPIs. In 2022, hypercasual accounted for 29% of ALL app store downloads and cleared over 1 BILLION monthly downloads. The numbers represent real player action - they see something in hypercasual ads they don’t see in others. On a rough click-through basis, players might be 5 to 10 times more likely to tap on hypercasual ads then mid-core ads.Hypercasual’s IP playbook hammers on reducing cognitive complexity; gameplay and art are straightforward to digest. Navigating a medieval fantasy game teeming with knights, dragons, and […]

Phillip Black September 10

Journal

The Reverse-Blizzard Thesis Has Arrived

The reverse-Blizzard thesis has arrived. Firms like Blizzard, Supercell, Valve, and even Apple thrived on popularizing but not inventing mechanics and genres. Blizzard's next fresh franchise, a survival crafting game, draws heavily from predecessors like Ark: Survival Evolved and Rust. Those titles failed to scale to mainstream adoption; if players need a server browser for play, it's not ready for the mainstream. But both Supercell and Blizzard have struggled to scale their studios to meet modern content demands, and that's left them open for a sort of reverse thesis: drop production values and win on the supply side. No game exemplifies this better than Path of Exile. Blizzard's failure to establish and maintain a live-service team for Diablo III gave birth to Path of Exile, a game that recently reached an all-time high of 1.5 million DAU and is nearing […]

Phillip Black September 9

Journal

How IAPs Fuel Player Retention and Growth in F2P Games

Consider an experiment on a given game; IAP is turned on in one version, and in another, IAP is turned off. After one year, which version has more players? It's the one with IAPs on! Monetization increases engagement; far from a tax, it's a subsidy.In a rush to emphasize the unique low conversion and hyper-skewed nature of F2P, evidence rarely is presented as a time series. We often lament that "less than 1% of players pay!" but this isn't true on a time series basis. The retention rates of players who choose to pay are significantly different from those who do not. Over time, the share of DAU that's made at least one payment rises; it's also why we see ARPDAU rise. With enough time, payers outnumber nonpayers. Top games like Galaxy of Heroes or Summoner's War likely maintain 60-80% […]

Phillip Black September 4

Journal

How to analyze your Monetization Metrics?

How to analyze your Monetization Metrics? 📊Similar to acquisition, engagement, and retention, monetization performances can be analyzed through cohort views.By doing so, you can see how changes in your pricing or product affect your revenue over time.Analyzing cohorts for monetization would represent groups of users who made their first payment in the same period.Customers with different characteristics (like how they were acquired, user behavior, and location) may have various monetization performances. This can help you understand which types of customers are the most valuable and tailor your monetization strategies accordingly.🔔 But remember: no single metric tells the whole story. In Growth, metrics are interconnected.The most meaningful insights often come from understanding how different metrics relate.A great acquisition is not meaningful if most users churn quickly.Retention will not power revenue if you don’t acquire users.It’s the sum of each metric and their relations […]

Doruk Kasoglu September 1

Journal

My Perfect Hotel: $3M IAP & $4M IAA in Last-30

Interesting to see another monster hit come out of SayGames! My Perfect Hotel in the last 30 days has made $3 million in IAP revenue and we estimate another $4 million in ad revenue. The game was in soft launch for over a year but recently clocked in 18 million downloads in the last month! It's safe to say that SayGames is building a Habby style of game framework for the Idle Arcade genera.. and wow is it working!Comparing My Perfect Hotel with DreamDale you can see many similarities in how SayGames’s hybrid casual framework is starting to evolve. From an ads perspective, they monetize with Banners after 20 min of gameplay that is on a 15-second refresh rate. Compared to 10 seconds on hyper-casual titles. Interstitial ads are delivered with increasing frequency based on how far through the game a […]

Felix Braberg August 29

gamingindustry

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