A very logical question for any game developer after developing a game is how to I acquire users and, most importantly how do I make decent money from the game. In my previous posts, I have covered what game developers should expect to generate with Rewarded Video Ad in 2020 and 2021.

Following past year traditions, I will share what I have seen in the past few months and what the trend looks like in 2022. A quick look at Reward Video Ad adoption reveals – (source ad push)

• 90% of gaming apps employ rewarded video ads and call it as the “hottest revenue generator” on the market.
• 71% of video game players prefer in-game video ads over the in-app purchases
• 62%of developers saw user retention increase after introducing rewarded video ads
• 52%of mobile game developers call rewarded ads to be their most lucrative type of in-game advertising
• Rewarded video ads can be 2X more effective than interstitial videos.

Overall, game developers are heavily relying on Reward Video Ads as a major source of revenue… but how much do game developers get? What CPMs and fill-rates are considered decent, how do you calculate your earnings potential?

I hope to answer those questions in this post. Few points

• Revenue from Video Ads depends on various variables (ex. popularity of your web property, traffic, geography, quality of cookie matching etc).
• Ad payout price is measured by CPM while availability is measured by Fill-rate.
• eCPM is the amount one gets paid per 1000 video impressions. CPM calculation considers several factors such as engagement rate, click rate, view complete rate, Player size, Video quality, Content quality, Audience quality, Month of the year, Day of the month etc.

As I have mentioned above, the main factor determining CPM / payout is geography of your user base. Demand for first-tier markets (North America and Western European countries) is 10 times higher than demand for third and 4th tier markets. Here is what one should expect when serving video ads in different geographies.

To illustrate, let’s assume your Web Game has 100,000 Daily active users and you serve 300,000 video impressions to these users every day. If all users are based in North America, you will generate approximately $2,400/day. If all your users were coming from mobile devices, your revenue per day will be $3,000.

Fill-Rate: Fill rate largely depends on geography. As I mentioned on previous paragraphs there is a lot of demand for North America and Western Europe audience. As a result, advertisers are willing to pay more in these geographies as compared to other locations. Here is what we are seeing in our network of clients that have integrated AppLixir Reward Video Ads.

Assuming you have 100,000 daily active users in the US, you will receive a video ad 90% of the time due to the high level of demand from advertisers. In South America, you will only get a video ad for 45% of your requests.

By combining the two factors of CPM and fill-rate, you can get a pretty good idea of what your revenue will be with AppLixir Reward Video Ads (Note that results may vary depending on various factors so make sure to read our other articles regarding ad revenue).

To illustrate, let’s assume you have a web game that has 80,000 daily active users (see user geo composition)