Free-to-play gamers expect they’ll have to watch or interact with ads while they’re playing. It’s part of the deal and they get that. But there is a point when the frequency of ads outweighs the benefit they derive - it’s a point of diminishing returns that all publishers should be aware of.
Of course, it’s not just game publishers who think about increasing ad frequency (aka - ad load) to maximize revenue. YouTube recently experimented with an expansion of ad load. You can read more about it here.
It got us thinking about what do mobile gamers think about the ad load in the games they play. So using our Market Insights tool, we did a little research of our own.
Screening for YouTubers we asked 1,050 mobile gamers (balanced to the US Census) how acceptable or unacceptable the ad load was for YouTube and compared the responses to the same question for mobile games.
Mobile gamers find ad load less acceptable than YouTubers do. That may be due to the perceived value being higher for videos (tv shows & movies) than the perceived value for mobile games.
Additionally, of the 1,050 survey respondents, only 31% said mobile game ad load was acceptable.
Among mobile game genre gamers that find ad load more unacceptable than others, clearly and probably most predictably, Casual and Hyper-Casual gamers are more likely to find ad load unacceptable.
There’s a fine line between letting acceptable ad load become ad overload. It might be tempting to increase ad load when revenue drops, but you could be doing more harm than good.
A great way to know how your players feel about their ad experience in your game is to ask them and then segment the results by tenure, source, geography, demographics etc. Continuously measuring player experiences this way over time will give you more insight into potential churn drivers.
TapResearch makes it easy to collect real-time player feedback from all players – not just the loud ones – so you can make better product decisions, with more confidence. If you're interested in learning more about player experience measurement, visit our Rewarded Research page here or reach out to our player experience team here.
