Ad Frequency: Balancing Revenue and User Experience in Free-to-Play Games

Free-to-play gamers understand that watching or interacting with ads is part of the experience. They accept it as part of the deal. However, there is a tipping point where the frequency of ads outweighs the benefits, leading to diminishing returns. This is something all publishers should be aware of.

It’s not just game publishers who consider increasing ad frequency (also known as ad load) to maximize revenue. Recently, YouTube experimented with increasing ad load, which you can read about here.

This led us to wonder: what do mobile gamers think about the ad load in the games they play? Using our Market Insights tool, we conducted some research to find out.

Methodology
We screened for YouTubers and asked 1,050 mobile gamers (balanced to reflect the US Census) how acceptable or unacceptable the ad load was for YouTube compared to mobile games.

Mobile Gamers vs YouTubers
Mobile gamers find ad load less acceptable than YouTubers. This could be because the perceived value of watching videos (such as TV shows and movies) is higher than that of playing mobile games.
Furthermore, only 31% of the 1,050 respondents said that the ad load in mobile games was acceptable.

Chart: YouTube Ad Load vs Mobile Game Ad Load Acceptability
Genres vs Genres
When examining mobile game genres, Casual and Hyper-Casual gamers are notably more likely to find ad load unacceptable compared to other genres.

Chart: Mobile Game Genres and Ad Frequency (Ad Load) Acceptability
Conclusion
There’s a fine line between maintaining an acceptable ad load and crossing into ad overload. While it might be tempting to increase ad load to counteract revenue drops, this approach could be counterproductive.
A great way to understand how your players feel about their ad experience is to ask them and segment the results by tenure, source, geography, demographics, etc. Continuously measuring player experiences in this manner will provide more insight into potential churn drivers.

Ad Experience Survey Question: Scale of 1-5
RelevanceResearch makes it easy to collect real-time feedback from all players – not just the vocal ones – so you can make better product decisions with greater confidence. If you're interested in learning more about measuring player experience, visit our Rewarded Research page here or contact our player experience team here.