The Smaato Blog

When embarking on the journey of developing a mobile game, the topic that every app developer has on their mind is monetization. How will this game make money?! Creating games isn’t cheap and with the majority of mobile games on the market being free, developers are having to turn to alternative mobile game monetization strategies outside of just selling access to their product.

In-game advertising is one of the most straightforward ways to quickly begin generating revenue from your mobile game. With a variety of ad formats and sizes, it is easy to build a custom in-app advertising strategy that fits both to your game and your business goals. To get you started, here are our top tips for creating an effective mobile game monetization strategy.

The Smaato Demand Platform (SDX) is a particularly powerful tool for mobile advertising that enables demand-side platforms (DSPs) to manage sophisticated, self-service targeting.

Now, we are pleased to offer yet another exceptional feature to aid in the targeting and retargeting of verified end-users: device ID targeting.

Games are the most underestimated advertising medium in the mobile world. Besides attracting a huge and diverse audience of engaged players (2.3 billion, to be exact), mobile games also offer an engaging environment that is conducive to a positive advertising experience — a feature that we explored in The Mobile Games Playbook. Unfortunately, many advertisers continue to misunderstand mobile games and their popularity among smartphone users. In this post, we try to dispel three myths pervasive among advertisers in order to prove how safe and attractive these apps are for discerning brands and advertisers.

Over the past year, I have been faced with a dilemma as a Product Manager at Smaato: Should we extend our support for VPAID on the client-side? This dilemma arose from statements floating around that range from predicting the end of VPAID to highlighting its growing demand. Let me take a step back from the rumors, define the purpose of VPAID as intended by its creators from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and then move on to explain how we at Smaato chose to resolve this dilemma.

Smartphone users spend nearly one hour per day on average playing mobile games — that’s over 25% of their total mobile time! Meanwhile, only 7% of mobile ad dollars are going to mobile games, leaving a huge gap between consumer engagement and ad spending. This gap represents a massive opportunity for advertisers to get noticed in mobile games and harness the power of this large and diverse audience of mobile gamers.

The Mobile Games Playbook uncovers what makes mobile games score so high with consumers and how advertisers can get in on the mobile in-app game. This guide focuses on four features that in-game advertising so attractive: innovative environment, high-scoring reach, engaged users, and top ad formats.

Apple's App Store seemed like a staggering success when it first launched in July 2008. With 800 apps and 10 million downloads in its first weekend of existence, the App Store offered enormous choice to owners of the iPhone 3G. Still, few could have predicted the enormous impact that the App Store would have. The App Store created a multi-billion dollar industry and ushered in the app ecosystem that's so dominant today.

School is out and summer is in session, but don’t think this means it is time to relax. Now is high time for brands to begin planning their advertising strategy for the upcoming back-to-school season.

Last year’s back-to-school spending in the US totaled $27 billion, with the average US family spending $501 per child. With an increasing amount of back-to-school shoppers researching, browsing, and purchasing on mobile (and, more specifically, in apps), investing ad dollars into an in-app campaign is a great way to get A+ conversions this back-to-school season.

China is increasingly recognized as a global powerhouse in technology and innovation — and, more recently, they are becoming a hub of creativity. It is for this reason that Cannes Lions launched China Day, a program featuring China’s thought leaders and pioneering practitioners, that will be held again this year.

Once thought of as an imitator, China is now paving its path as an innovator. And as the country continues to lead the way with major developments in areas such as mobile technology and AI, China is quickly becoming the country with which western companies are trying to keep up.

Here's some good news for anyone who's created a weather app — eCPMs for weather apps are the highest of all the app categories on the Smaato platform. However, making money with a weather app doesn't happen automatically. To best monetize a weather app, there are some best practices to follow in order to maximize revenue potential.

Since Mary Meeker released the 2018 Internet Trends Report last week, the digital realm has been abuzz with what these 294 slides have to say about the future of our online world — including us here at Smaato. 

Meeker is a renowned venture capitalist, and her annual Internet Trends Report is eagerly awaited each year across many digital industries. To break this data-packed presentation down for those specifically in the mobile advertising industry, we have identified the most relevant data points for mobile publishers and advertisers, and we will look at what these trends mean for the mobile advertising industry as a whole.