This year at Gamefest, we set some time aside during the second night to record podcasts with attendees. If you can picture it, we sat in a circle on the floor of a massive tent in the Negev desert, with music blasting behind us, people dancing around us, and with slices of meat and pita bread in our hands.
We spoke about in-app bidding and the future of monetization with Andrew Stone from Random Logic, Jane Anderson from Gameloft, Shainiel Deo from Halfbrick, and Sofia Gilyazova from Social Point. Here are some highlights from the conversation:
Sofia: “In-app bidding isn’t just for monetization. It solves a big problem for our UA team too - giving them transparency into which impression they want to bid on. ”
Andrew: “Until we get to a point when a large number of the main networks provide in-app bidding, we won’t see the full effects of it. Hopefully it happens in three months.”
Shainiel: “I think it’s going to be longer than three months. We’ve been waiting two years for this. I’d say it’s one year before enough players come on board, we have enough trust and confidence, and enough people really competing.”
Jane: “I think everyone will eventually shift to in-app bidding, but only when UA starts buying on CPM. That’ll be the ultimate end of the waterfalls.”
Shainiel: “We’d love to integrate ads from the start but it generally never happens. It’s something we’re trying to bring closer to the initial inception.”
Sofia: “We had a success story with one of our games which we integrated monetization before the global launch. In comparison to all other games, where we add our placements on top, this one saw amazing results.”
Jane: “At the end of the day, ad monetization is monetization. You don’t integrate IAPs at the end of development. To do it properly, you need ads from the beginning.”
