As part of the recent UK budget, the government confirmed that it is pressing ahead with its somewhat controversial Digital Services Tax. As reported by the Financial times, the UK plans to raise £500m a year by applying the tax primarily to large US tech companies. It is being seen as a means to secure money in relation to allegations that many large tech outfits are not paying enough tax in the areas in which they operate, instead using low tax [...]

In this special contributed feature by Wilhelm Voutilainen, senior game analyst at GameRefinery looks at what we can learn about mobile gaming by looking back to the previous year, pulling insights from the company’s considerable pool of data. — So here we are in 2020 – not just a new year, but the start of a whole new decade. We’ve returned to our desks full of heady optimism, and focused on the future. Looking back at the past year can often be [...]

It’s easy to feel instinctively optimistic about in-game advertising. In recent years there’s been a powerful sense that in-game ads aren’t simply an increasingly valuable means of income for developers and publishers; perhaps they’re now understood and embraced by more consumers and industry figures than ever before. Furthermore, there is an ever more diverse spread of games, markets and consumers where ads are fitting. And now it feels like there are a greater number of platforms, approaches and tools through which [...]

In this guest post by the CEO of the mobile game insights and market data specialist GameRefinery, Markus Ramark considers a new way to build your targeting, and looks at why understanding player ‘affinity’ with given games might unlock new levels of success.   At its heart, the mobile games industry is a multi-billion dollar battle to find the highest spending, frequently playing, most loyal new players. Top-performing games are supported with marketing spend in the tens of millions, and app stores [...]

Late last year mobile marketing platform AppLovin acquired in-app bidding start-up MAX. The AppLovin team has since built out the MAX platform, and integrated the real-time mobile header bidding solution into its wider ecosystem. Now MAX has had a little time out in the wild in the hands of mobile developer and publisher customers, we caught up with Carl Livie, MD EMEA of AppLovin, to talk in-app bidding. Could it be that the long-promised in-app bidding revolution is finally underway? And [...]

‘Mixed reality’ content will see 10 billion app installs by 2024, up from 3 billion in 2019, says a new report. The prediction comes from research and analytics outfit Juniper Research, which has published the results of a new study titled ‘Consumer Mixed Reality: Emerging Opportunities, Vendor Strategies & Market Forecasts 2019-2024’. ‘Mixed reality’ – or ‘MR’- is a term defined slightly different in different places; particularly since it’s deployment as marketing jargon when hype around virtual reality spiked in the wake [...]

Twitter isn’t a gaming platform. The social network may have seen a major uptake in gaming engagement in recent months, but while the likes of Facebook, WeChat and Kakao Talk have become homes for hyper casual, the micro-blogging platform has not. Still, there are lessons to be learned for game ad-tech providers – as well as game makers and publishers of ad-monetised games – after Twitter had a somewhat bad week. As reported by the BBC, on Thursday shares in Twitter fell by [...]

Earlier this year mobile monetisation platform outfit Fyber launched a significantly reworked version of its Fyber FairBid technology, having celebrated 10 years in business in the previous months. But what have the team learned about the changing in-game advertising landscape over that decade? And what does it mean that Fyber FairBid offers a unified auction technology for app bidding ‘built from the ground up for the in-app programmatic era’? TheGamingEconomy caught up with Fyber president Offer Yehudai to learn more about the [...]

Game development sometimes has a complicated relationship with ad tech. Advertising solutions might help pay the bills, but they are often seen as something ‘other’; an entity that is separated from the technology that is used to actually make games. It’s a less than elegant oversimplification, but game developers use development tools, middleware and engines to make games. After that ad tech is applied or employed to monetise games. As such you’d be forgiven for thinking there were two very distinct [...]

In this special contributed piece, Erick Fang, CEO of AI-driven ad platform Mintegral, considers the need for the programmatic sector to make the case for its responsibility, or risk imprecise regulation becoming the dominant governing force.   From time to time, I hear about a revolution in the online advertising business. Occasionally, I’ll listen in to conversations talking about how programmatic is up-ending the industry – changing ad buying habits, how consumers interact with adverts and transforming the industry with it. I do, [...]