There has been a fundamental shift in the way users consume content today. Mobile users have gradually moved away from using their mobile browsers to focus on a wide range of apps across various verticals. This affinity towards in-app has changed app developers’ perception towards different monetization strategies. App developers who keep up with the evolution of the best practices will definitely tap into a fast-growing revenue stream in the future.

We, at Chocolate, recently released our report ‘App Monetization Secrets To Help App Developers Stay Ahead Of The Curve’ in association with Apptopia. The report analyzes top 1,000+ publishers and 1,700+ free apps across Google Play and iOS store covering The Americas, Europe and APAC.

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Even after putting the best efforts in app development, why many app developers are not able to generate revenues successfully? The report addresses this question by looking at the following aspects:

Current State of App Monetization

• Advertising is the most effective monetization method among app developers. By end of this year, it is predicted that mobile games will generate $39.8 billion in ad revenue globally.
• App developers are starting to rely on in-app ads to generate higher revenues. 24% prefer Advertising as compared to 13% who prefer Consumable in-app purchases and 9% who prefer Non-consumable in-app purchases.
• More and more app developers will move away from traditional ad units to new and more lucrative ad formats like native, rewarded ads and interstitials.

Primary Concerns of App Developers

• App developers end up spending a lot of time on monetization-related procedures such as integrating and managing multiple ad network SDKs, managing billings and payout from different partners and optimizing waterfalls. Thus, leaving them with less time to focus on creating better app features and improving app experience.
• Though ad mediation is a great step to achieving ad revenue nirvana and maximizing app profitability, less than 20% of top free apps use an ad mediation SDK (74% top free apps have more than 20 SDKs integrated).

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Key Revenue-Generating Secrets

In this report, we delve deeper into finding out what factors are causing a drop in revenues and how app developers can maximize it using the right ad monetization solution.

• Latency, render rate and real-time yield optimization are three major factors that impact ad decisioning — the better it is, the higher is the revenue and fill rate.
• There are methods by which latency can be reduced, render rates and yield optimization can be maximized, which are explained in detail in the report.

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Here are some interesting highlights from the report rationalizing the fact that a smarter approach is needed in mobile ad monetization: