App monetization insights: What can we learn from 24 trillion in-app ad bid requests?

App monetization changes from genre to genre of app and across different countries. Globally, casual games almost exclusively monetize via rewarded ads and interstitials while hypercasual games lean more on banner ads, and social apps monetize across a wide range of ad units but at a much lower scale.

But the data varies significantly from country to country.

I love data. I’m a sucker for reports that tease insights based on massive gobs of evidence about what’s actually happening across our digital ecosystems.

So when I saw a recent report by Kayzen citing insights based on …

• 24 trillion mobile ad bid requests
• For 630,000 apps
• Touching 1.4 billion people
• Built via 10 billion machine learning decisions

… I had to have a chat with one of the authors. Click play on the video above (and subscribe to the Growth Masterminds podcast), then keep scrolling to see what I learned from Kayzen’s Tomas Yacachury.

App monetization varies from country to country

One of the super-interesting parts of the report is the app monetization profiles of different app types. Globally, games offer vastly more inventory than social apps or tool and utility apps and monetize better from rewarded and interstitial ads than banners or native ads.

But the profile changes from country to country.

“You see those radar charts in different countries and they are completely different, right … India and the U.S. are completely different,” Yacachury told me.”

USA vs India vs Germany

In the U.S., casual apps monetize largely via rewarded ads and interstitials, with a bit of banner thrown in. In India, banner is huge, followed by native, with a very little bit of rewarded and interstitial as well.

From the advertiser perspective if you’re looking for the biggest possible audience, casual games let you access about a third of all daily active mobile users in the U.S. In India, however, focusing more on tools and utility apps will capture almost two-thirds of daily active users.

In terms of ad formats banners and interstitials will cover 70% of the India market, while in the U.S. advertisers need to select a more balanced portfolio of ad unit types, and app publishers need to enable that broader portfolio to be able to ad space.

In Germany, it’s all about weather.

“So German users are very much concerned about the weather because you see, you see a lot of weather apps amongst like those apps that actually provide the highest reach,” Yacachury says.

Germany is also an exception to the global rule that iOS inventory is more expensive. In Germany, there are plenty of high-end Android phones, and Android inventory for banner ads and native ads are often more expensive than iOS inventory, so app monetization strategies need to adjust.

Interestingly, programmatic reach is highly atomized in the German market, Yacachury says. No single app reaches even 7% of the total available daily active users.

SKAN support, IDFA, and IDFV

SKAN support currently sits at 85% of all iOS bid requests, which is significantly high and, of course, likely to only continue trending higher. But almost all of that is SKAN 3, as we’ve repeatedly shown.

Interestingly, about 25% of bid requests have IDFA availability.

“What we see there is that IDFV … on non-IDFA inventory, it’s available on 75% of those bid requests, whereas it’s only available on 39% of IDFA traffic,” Yacachury says. “So it’s actually useful that … the coverage of IDFV is quite high on non IDFA inventory.”

Of course, beware of using the IDFV in France, where use of the IDFV now requires end-user consent.

App monetization: Singular can help

If ad monetization is a significant part of your revenue, Singular can help. Not only is ad monetization now available in Singular’s free tier, Singular’s admon solution provides quick and highly accurate insight on ad monetization, offering a much better picture of your LTV and ROAS.

Check out the full ad monetization solution, and let us know if we can help.