Gaming

How Adtech Platform AudioMob Is Changing The Mobile Game Monetization Through Amazon Web Services

Published

2 years ago

November 29, 2021

George Miller

Reading Time: 5 minutes

AudioMob was founded after we spotted a tremendous monetization opportunity for game developers.

Rewarded video ads in mobile games have made developers and publishers money, but always at the expense of interrupting games. Yet these interruptions don’t just irritate players, they can even push them away from a game entirely, thereby damaging retention. This can be incredibly frustrating for game developers, who have put time and craft into building games that they want to have thrive, both creatively and commercially.

In considering the solution to this challenge, the core AudioMob concept was born. We let advertisers reach their consumers and game developers monetize their games without interrupting gameplay by using audio ads. ‘In-game audio ads’ are what we do, and we’ve seen developers implement them in truly interesting ways.

Larger tech companies, such as Facebook and Google, already offer ad platforms. This begs the question – why create a new platform?

The answer is straightforward. Existing Demand Side Platforms (or DSPs) cannot deliver audio ads in-game. Our Ad Platform enables advertisers to serve In-game audio ads with banners while users play their game. Therefore, players are given something to click on to head to a landing page or another app, should they feel engaged by the ad.

That potential is most powerfully demonstrated through an active example of AudioMob. Grammy award winning artist Nas and his label Mass Appeal created the following audio ad in order to promote his new album, King’s Disease II. They were confident that mobile games would expose them to wider audiences. This also presents an example of how personal and direct audio ads can feel.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) suite has proved to be a powerful tool in helping us achieve our vision for in-game audio ads as an option that is better for players, advertisers, and game developers.

Why Amazon Web Services?

What we’re doing is unique, so we needed to build a unique stack, and AWS matched our vision and ambition. Be it hosting everything from our user interface to providing a Content Delivery Network (CDN), AWS lets AudioMob serve audio content worldwide in milliseconds.

Meeting AudioMob Privacy Requirements with AWS

On the subject of digital advertising, undoubtedly you will notice the privacy conversation occurring around the world. We believe audio advertising makes it possible to respect the privacy of our users while ensuring the games and apps we love remain free to play.

We’ve deliberately built privacy-first adtech that places contextuality at its core. This approach allows for the ‘best of both worlds,’ letting ads find relevant audiences without utilizing personal data.

However, ad campaigns inevitably generate large amounts of data. This includes the data about a campaign’s success as well as aggregated contextual data held for 90 days and more. And that means we have data to keep safe beyond the data that is processed and stored so that it can be analyzed for insight.

AWS infrastructure aligns with our privacy stance and has achieved numerous internationally-recognized certifications and accreditations. It has demonstrated compliance with rigorous international standards, such as ISO 27017 for cloud security, ISO 27701 for privacy information management, and ISO 27018 for cloud privacy.

Meeting Advertiser Demand with EC2

Choosing the AWS product line started with building our own DSP. A DSP ultimately lets advertisers buy ad space within websites and apps. Ours is known as the AudioMob Ad Platform, and it lets advertisers create, manage, and set the targeting criteria of their advertising campaigns, thereby delivering the right ads to the right people, optimizing, analyzing success, and much more.

When artists or brands want to start a campaign through the AudioMob Ad Platform, they upload an mp3 file and a banner image that is instantly compressed through our internal code hosted on AWS. Compressing those larger file assets to a global average of 35KB, AudioMob can later distribute those ads without latency concerns and into countries with slower mobile data connection speeds. Rendering and content load issues become non-existent.

AWS Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) provides instant access to server space, computing power, and various databases. Purpose-built to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers like us, EC2’s accessibility in 25 regions and 81 availability zones globally allows for an efficiency never seen before.

As a leader within the adtech industry, we couldn’t build our own equivalents to what AWS offers. We’re motivated to deliver player-centric ads that impact equally well for advertisers and game developers. To do that well, we have employed the AWS stack knack for scalability and elasticity, global reach, and intelligent data storage options.

Delivering Ads with CloudFront

Over 2.8 billion mobile gamers spend an average of 26 minutes per day on gaming apps. This provides AudioMob the unique opportunity to quickly serve audio ads to around 40,000 games. Based on the last three months of internal data, this allows an average impression rate of 372,908 per day, leading to a 1,000% increase in click-through-rate as compared to traditional banner ads.

We let advertisers reach users based on age, gender, location, language, mobile device, and mobile carrier through our Ad Platform. The process works as follows: ad slots open in games and are filled in a fraction of a second, as multiple advertisers make a bid for the opportunity to connect with a player. This makes a Content Delivery Network essential, as our audio content must reach the end user in any location defined by our advertisers without delay.

Wherever we deliver an ad in a game, AWS’ Cloudfront’s vast geographic spread puts us anywhere globally, thereby ensuring that AudioMob fills the available advertising space extremely fast, and with minimal latency. Furthermore, this ensures that we fill ads in a timely manner, and can continue to deliver the non-interrupting audio ads into mobile games anywhere that advertisers have specified.

Before these developments, we handled many of these processes in-house, which was pretty costly to our bottom line. AWS’s Cloudfront integration allows data serving capabilities without transfer fees for origin fetches, and it offers custom Transport Layer Security (TLS) certification at no charge. Most importantly, the highly secure Content Delivery Network provides both the network and application comforting levels of security.

Meeting Reporting Requirements with S3, RedShift, and Glacier

Measuring creative engagement and providing campaign reporting is critical in advertising. We have built volume detection with selected partners, so that brands can be sure that players hear ads rather than mute them or set the volume extremely low. Furthermore, we can track whether users mute, close, or click on an ad. However, all of this requires data processing, storage, and reporting.

At AudioMob, we utilize Amazon S3 to store our campaign serving logs and RedShift for analysis. That lets us keep our data secure, while giving advertisers the power to optimise their audio ad campaigns based on the insights we provide using RedShift.

RedShift is a column-oriented DBMS database management system (DBMS) that stores data tables by column rather than by row and utilizes parallel processing to enable fast execution. This makes querying large amounts of data extremely fast and lets our advertisers query campaign data within milliseconds (0.7 seconds).

In addition, we utilize the AWS cold storage solution S3 Glacier. For data inquiries older than five years, this yields slower but reasonable query times (around 100x our RedShift query times). This is achieved by using Amazon Redshift Spectrum, which lets us query data from older campaigns directly from our log files stored on Amazon S3.

AWS facilitates the potential of audio

Ultimately, AWS has provided AudioMob with backend tools and services that greatly aid the performance of the ad format we’ve created. It’s been a perfect accompaniment to our rapid growth, helped us stay elastic and scalable, let us meet the needs of real-time international bidding, and support our data values and strategy. As well, of course, it lets our tech empower advertisers to reach wider audiences.

“The team here at AudioMob are extremely proud of everything we built ourselves, from the in-game audio ad concept to executing and expanding our company. We did those things ourselves – but AWS has facilitated our progress in myriad ways, and ultimately been a tremendous help in letting us deliver on our vision of in-game audio ads as a more user friendly and seamless advertising experience.” – Wilfrid Obeng, Co-Founder & CTO, AudioMob

Gaming

Flexion Enters into Partnership with Jam City

Published

1 week ago

May 9, 2024

Niji Narayan

flexion-enters-into-partnership-with-jam-city

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Flexion, the games marketing company, has partnered with Jam City, a leading mobile entertainment company behind some of the world’s highest-grossing and most enduring mobile games, to bring a selection of the publisher’s best-in-class games to the Alternative App Stores: Amazon Appstore, Huawei App Gallery, Aptoide, ONE store, Samsung Galaxy Store, DT Hub and Xiaomi GetApps.

“We are always looking for new opportunities to build our network of global players, and Flexion is a proven partner that will help introduce our award-winning titles to new audiences in the alternative stores,” Curtis Barnes, Senior Director of Publishing Operations for Jam City, said.

“We’re all about helping developers like Jam City reach the full potential of their games. We’re delighted they have chosen us to add revenue and audiences for their games on the alternative app stores,” Jens Lauritzson, CEO of Flexion, said.

The post Flexion Enters into Partnership with Jam City appeared first on European Gaming Industry News.

Gaming

Mobile Games Index: Analysis of 95M Game Interactions Reveals Shifting Engagement Trends, Available Now

Published

2 weeks ago

May 7, 2024

George Miller

mobile-games-index:-analysis-of-95m-game-interactions-reveals-shifting-engagement-trends,-available-now

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The anticipated fourth edition of the annual Mobile Games Index, powered by adjoe and Statista, is now available.

The latest report offers a clear look into the current state of the mobile gaming sector, analyzing the past 12 months of the first-party data from 95 million app interactions across 27 million users. The MGI 2024 reveals what people choose to play on their mobile devices, filling the gap in industry knowledge and enabling game developers and user acquisition specialists to benchmark their products and ultimately target the right audiences with the right content.

Moving forward, it is up to the industry decision-makers to analyze the findings and promptly adapt to the newly-emerged engagement trends from MGI 2024, effectively engaging desired audiences.

A Peek at Shifting Engagement Trends to Capitalize on

Based on predictions from Statista, the overarching trend in the market is its robust growth with a forecasted expansion from $166.1 billion in 2024 to $227 billion by 2028.

Remarkably, Card games are expected to grow the most dramatically at 13.8% a year, nearly doubling their global revenue by 2028. Judging from the engagement charts of MGI 2024, the main driver of growth in this category is Solitaire games. The audience is showing a clear preference for Solitaire – these games hold 7 out of 10 positions in the top list of card games worldwide by time spent with titles from MobilityWare, Gimica, Scopely, and Playvalve, among others.

What allows the market to show revenue growth is the positive changes in global daily time spent. After the dip in engagement highlighted by the last year’s Index, adjoe confirms that average daily sessions have rebounded to 21.5 minutes from 17.3 minutes reported last year, marking a 22% increase.

The most engaged demographic of mobile gamers globally is the 40-49 age group, which has experienced a remarkable 33% increase in daily gaming time, now at 23 minutes daily. The strategies targeted at older demographics over the past 12 months can be deemed successful. However, this has led to a loss of focus on engaging Gen-Z, which has shown only modest growth in time spent.

The MGI also reveals that women are outpacing men in daily gaming time across most genres – as reported for the 4th edition in a row. This consistent and high performance makes the female audience a continuously safer bet when it comes to user targeting.

Another continued trend is the dominance of top publishers such as Supercell, Garena, King, and Playrix, while there’s still space to occupy for smaller publishers. For instance, ForgeGames tops the engagement charts with their game Special Forces Group 2 – capturing over 43 minutes of average daily engagement.

The insights continue in the MGI 2024, going granular to segment and visualize global mobile game engagement data from adjoe by genre, region, and demographic. At the same time, Statista’s extensive market research provides a macro-view of the current and future industry, offering figures for global downloads and revenues with forecasts extending to 2028.

Mobile Games Index 2024 Is Available in Open Access

The MGI 2024 goes deep below the surface of market data and creates a comprehensive snapshot of the mobile gaming industry today. Inside are

For developers and marketers, this report is the green light to benchmark performance against industry leaders and align their products with the rising expectations of mobile gamers. This comprehensive tool is now available for free to inform decision-making and help optimize strategies for short- and long-term actions.

The post Mobile Games Index: Analysis of 95M Game Interactions Reveals Shifting Engagement Trends, Available Now appeared first on European Gaming Industry News.

Gaming

The German Games Industry Association congratulates all winners of the German Computer Game Awards 2024

Published

4 weeks ago

April 22, 2024

George Miller

the-german-games-industry-association-congratulates-all-winners-of-the-german-computer-game-awards-2024

Reading Time: 3 minutes

• “EVERSPACE 2” by ROCKFISH Games is ‘Best German Game’ 2024
• Pixel Maniacs from Nuremberg wins in the ‘Studio of the Year’ category
• ‘Best International Game’ is Baldur’s Gate 3
• ‘Player of the Year’ is Maurice Weber

High-quality games, great entertainment and many well-known personalities from the games industry and the cultural, societal and political spheres – the German Computer Game Awards 2024 (DCP), presented this evening in Munich, featured all that and more. Numerous guests celebrated the best games from Germany and the creative minds behind them in person at Eisbach Studios in Munich. The award show, which was hosted by Katrin Bauerfeind and Uke Bosse, was additionally followed by hundreds of thousands of viewers via live stream. A total of 800,000 euros was awarded in cash prizes. “EVERSPACE 2” by ROCKFISH Games was chosen ‘Best German Game’. The ‘Studio of the Year’ award went to Pixel Maniacs from Nuremberg, which has made a name for itself with successful games like the party racing game “Can’t Drive This”, its multifaceted involvement in the game industry and its promotion of young talent, as well as with its innovations in the area of marketing. The ‘Special Jury Prize’ was awarded to the project “Gaming ohne Grenzen” (Gaming without Borders), an initiative that enables young people with disabilities to participate actively in game culture – for example, by assessing in inclusive game testing groups the accessibility of various games as well as the ability of certain technologies to help overcome barriers in video games. In voting by the community and the jury, Maurice Weber was selected ‘Player of the Year’. The games editor and Twitch streamer regularly analyses current developments in the games industry and takes a critical look at them, while at the same time formulating a clear stance for more diversity and against extremism in games and society.

The German Computer Game Awards, which honour the year’s best German-produced games, are hosted by the German Federal Government, represented by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, and game – The German Games Industry Association.

‘Congratulations to all winners of the German Computer Game Awards 2024!’ says Felix Falk, Managing Director of game. ‘Even in these very challenging times for many German firms in the industry, German games companies have created high-quality and successful games that have deservedly been honoured on the big stage of the DCP. Around half of these outstanding games were developed with the support of federal game funding. This once again demonstrates the potential that we can leverage when the underlying policy framework for game development in Germany provides for truly predictable and internationally competitive conditions – conditions that allow games from Germany to shine even more brightly all over the world and achieve even greater success on the national as well as international stage. We must make this our goal!’

Overview of all winners:
Best International Game (not endowed)

Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios)

Best German Game (endowed with 100,000 euros)

EVERSPACE 2 (ROCKFISH Games)

The other nominees will each receive 30,000:

Atlas Fallen (Deck 13 Interactive/Focus Entertainment)
Fall of Porcupine (Critical Rabbit/Assemble Entertainment)

Best Family Game (endowed with 40,000 euros)

Spells & Secrets (Alchemist Interactive/rokaplay)

Newcomer Award – Best Debut (endowed with 60,000 euros)

Ad Infinitum (Hekate/NACON)

The other nominees will receive 25,000 euros each:

Fall of Porcupine (Critical Rabbit/Assemble Entertainment)
Lose CTRL (Play From Your Heart)

Newcomer Award – Best Prototype (endowed with 50,000 euros)

Misgiven (Symmetry Break Studio)

The other nominees will receive 25,000 euros each:

Bloodletter (Katharina “Mikey” Müller, David Cafisso, Marvin Braun, Alica Schneider/Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin)
EcoGnomix (Lars Hinnerk Grevsmühl, Lars Eble, Bahy Nguyen, Marcel Zurawka, Alec Shae)
Footgun: Underground (Eduard Dobermann, Theo Lohmüller, Georg Nimke, Robert Pistea, Lukas Salewsky)
REPLICORE (Sarah Inés Roeder, Rody Nawezi, Leonhard Gläser, Maximilian Götz/ HAW Hamburg)

Best Innovation and Technology (endowed with 40,000 euros)

Marble Maze (Fox-Assembly)

Best Serious Game (endowed with 40,000 euros)

Friedrich Ebert – Der Weg zur Demokratie (Playing History/Stiftung Reichspräsident-Friedrich-Ebert-Gedenkstätte)

Best Audio Design (endowed with 40,000 euros)

Ad Infinitum (Hekate/NACON)

Best Game Design (endowed with 40,000 euros)

Lose CTRL (Play From Your Heart)

Best Graphic Design (endowed with 40,000 euros)

The Bear – A Story from the World of Gra (Mucks! Games)

Best Mobile Game (endowed with 40,000 euros)

Cat Rescue Story (Tivola Games)