Advertising Revenue Growth

For years, it has been essentially absurd to tabulate industry revenue without ads. Outside of China, mobile game ads nearly match total consumer spending on PC/Console software

Since 2021, mobile ads have been 37-145% of annual industry growth

Without ads, the market (excluding China) is up only $6.8B or +4.8%, but with them, it's +$35B or +20%

Consumer spend contracted during the period when ads' share peaked at ~150%

20-30% of gross revenue from mobile game in-app advertising is collected by ad exchanges such as AppLovin, IronSource, Google, etc., or ~$15B in 2025

Mobile game in-app advertising revenue (excluding China) will reach approximately $67B by 2025

Tens of billions in ad revenue in mobile games is ad spend from other mobile games

Your ad revenue is my UA; your UA is my revenue (net of exchange fees and non-mobile UA)

Mobile gaming UA expenses have exceeded the app store fees on consumer spending since 2020

By 2027, ad exchange fees on ad revenue will likely pass app store fees on consumer spending

Not all mobile gamemakers spend 32% of net revenues on user acquisition

Not all mobile gamemakers generate a third of revenues from ads

Royal Match, the 2nd highest grossing new game since 2020, had $1.1B in net revenue in 2023 and spent $1.1B on UA

Dream Games achieved $0.13B operating profit despite spending $1.07B on user acquisition

Today, ads remain rare among PC/Console games and services (with the exception of on-device/in-store ad units)

Eventually, ads reach all addressable surface areas

Advertising is starting to come to PC and console gaming

EA is prototyping in-game ads

Microsoft is expected to announce an ad-supported tier of Xbox Cloud Gaming

In markets with decline players, flattened spend, free-to-play dominance, publishers will need to improve the monetization of low spenders and monetize non-spenders

PC/Console and Mobile game content spending trends are very similar in mature markets