15 years ago in-app purchases were introduced to mobile games and free-to-play mobile video games were born. This industry has come a long way and is estimated it will generate 49% of overall revenue in the games industry, with a total of almost 93B USD, according to NewZoo. During this time, games have evolved tremendously and so did the monetization models.
In this article, we are going to cover an important part of the monetization of mobile games - ads monetization with a particular focus on interstitial ads and any in-app purchases (IAPs) connected to them.
Read along if you’d like to learn more about the latest practices of the top-performing games.
We started off with a list of the top 100 downloaded games in September 2024, according to AppMagic. Among these 100 games:
The rest of this article will focus on these 34 games and their implementation practices for interstitial ads and relevant purchases.
Virtually all of them (but one!) started showing interstitial ads on Day 0, meaning on the day of the installation. This means that 97% of the games we analyzed decided to monetize their players by showing them interstitial ads very early into their playing experience. This is an important decision, especially taking into consideration two aspects:
We split the games we played depending on the dynamics in the game, specifically, whether or not games have levels/matches which are most commonly used to trigger interstitial ads, upon completion.
Unlike rewarded video ads, there are not so many different ways to show interstitial ads. Or are there? We found several interesting examples that possibly have a good impact on performance and/or player experience. In this section, we are covering these in great detail.
Truly unique interstitial ad implementation. Every 3-5 minutes a pop-up appears. This pop-up appears regardless of what the player is doing at the moment. The pop-up offers a small reward (30 - 50 of in-game Cash), however, the trick is - the player has no option but to click on the button to claim the reward (they cannot exit this screen, reject, skip, or similar). Once the player clicks on “Get 30$”, the interstitial ad starts. After the interstitial, the player gets their reward. The pop-up itself comes in several forms or contexts, fitting natively into the gameplay. Some of the messages appearing:
This game too rewards its users for watching interstitial ads but the implementation is very different compared to Pizza Ready! Here, the experience of watching an interstitial ad is a typical one - the ad pops up, the player watches the ad and that’s it. However, after every 3 interstitial ads played, a new song will be unlocked, as a gift. The daily limit for unlocking free songs by watching interstitial ads is 7. The player can also unlock songs by watching rewarded video ads but Amanotes here decided to offer some reward for those that get interstitial ads too.
Here is how this looks in the game.
Another interstitial implementation going in the direction of the rewards. Seeing a trend here, are we?
In this game, first, a small countdown timer shows on the top-left side of the screen. It starts at five seconds and once the time runs out, the pop-up appears. This screen offers an option to watch a rewarded video ad. For a moment, this is the only option, and then, smaller, less-prominent, “No, thanks” words appear. If the user watches a rewarded video ad, they get a reward and that’s it. If they decide to click on “No, thanks” they will get an interstitial ad without a reward. Here is a screen recording.
Another game by Voodoo is on the list. This time, no reward but the player is prompted with a 5-second timer before the interstitial ad appears. This might help for the player to feel less surprised and cut in the middle of the action.
With the timer prompt, we seem to be onto something here, a trend, I dare say. As a sign this might be more and more commonly adapted by developers, comes AdMob’s announcement about Countdown interstitial ads: The format features a 5-second timer to prepare the user for the gameplay interruption, before pausing the game experience and serving an interstitial.
On this parameter, the games are almost equally split.
16 games doesn’t have this option, while 18 does. Upon analyzing closer the type of games within these two groups we could see that 9/16 games that don’t have the “No ads” option visible on the Home/Main screen could be categorized as casual, not hyper or hybrid casual. On the other hand, in the group of games that did have the “No ads” option highly visible, the vast majority of games were indeed hyper and hybrid casual (16 out of 18).
This certainly makes sense since casual games will have a more significant portion of revenue coming from IAPs and are more likely to have less aggressive forced ads setups, making the importance of the “No ads” IAP option less important for their monetization strategy and for user experience, for that matter.
Only 7 games had a pop-up offer for ads removal that was only that - “No ads” IAP purchase, without any additional items. Six of these games were either hyper-casual or hybrid-casual. Two of these showed the “No ads” option not only as a stand-alone offer but also showed a pop-up with a wider variety of items, that included “No ads” among others.
On the other hand, if we count in games that had pop-up offers that featured “No ads” among other items, such as in-game currency as part of a bigger IAP pack, this number increases to 17 games. So, half of the games we analyzed showed some sort of a pop-up offer to remove ads (among other benefits).
The table below shows in detail what will be removed after making a purchase of the “No Ads” pack. What’s astonishing is that a quarter of the games do not clearly communicate to players what will be removed, even though the vast majority of them belong to the hyper and hybrid casual group, which means that this purchase is very important for their overall revenues. Not communicating clearly what will be removed can cause confusion among players and can lead them to the wrong conclusion that purchasing this pack will also remove rewarded ads that they actually want to watch.
Another thing that draws attention is the fact that 4 games say they will remove all ads but it’s also interesting to note that 3 out of 4 can be considered casual.
Lastly, as listed in the table, 5 games say they will remove both interstitial and banner ads when the No ads purchase is made, while the biggest group of games is the one that offers to remove only interstitial ads with this purchase (although 6 out of 16 of them don’t have banner ads in the first place).
Again, it was an interesting finding that half of the games (17 of them) didn’t communicate at all for how long ads will be removed.
What’s worse is that all of these games seem to be offering ads removal forever (concluded based on the price, context of remaining offers, and entire Shop) which is actually a best-case scenario for the player - and developers didn’t even bother to communicate this.
This might seem like a little detail, in which case:
Moving on. Only 3 games offered to remove ads forever. Out of those 3, 1 didn’t really do a good job to actually communicate this very clearly, without any room for misunderstanding. The second one is offering ads removal forever for 25 cents (USD) which is You can check out the screenshots below.
Out of the remaining 13 games, most of them offered a no-ads subscription (standalone or as part of a subscription deal that includes other benefits) for 7 or 30 days or even a lifetime subscription.
There were some exceptions:
There’s a wide range of values here.
It certainly seems that pricing ads removal options has become more complex and that days when players could remove ads forever for 0.99 USD are behind us.
Interstitial ad serving and related IAP options have become more sophisticated than before. The biggest learnings from this research:
