• #NotBoring is regularly an interesting newsletter. The episode on The Great Online Game is pure fire. Insert coins!

Apple new ad placement(s)

Last week, Apple’s awaited new “search tab” ad placement was released, and there’s been shots fired from all sides…

Great punchlines…

• “Because the problem with the App Store is that there wasn't enough advertising. 🙄”

• My favorite quote of the week going without a doubt to Eric: “Apple has brazenly, in broad daylight, stormed into the Bank of Facebook, looted its most precious resource, and, camouflaged under the noble cause of giving privacy controls to the consumer, fled the scene” in Apple robbed the mob’s bank.

• Wait, there’s more! (I know you didn’t click.. you should) "The odious specter of ATT: it’s an obvious commercial land grab dressed up as a moral crusade ... If anything is clear from the (protracted) rollout of ATT, it is that Apple’s PR department deserves a pay raise".

• It’s indeed quite of an intriguing timing to sync this with ATT : “Why not let the paint dry on ATT before adding new ad units to the App Store?”

In god we trust. All others bring data

• … but away from opinions, early data shows its performance is absolutely dreadful so far. I’ve tested campaigns on a few apps myself, then talked to a dozen advertisers to see where I fucked up, but everyone had the same feedback: CPM levels to trigger any delivery are really high - even when only early adopters are live , and gambling & dating heavy bidders were kept away. I never really cared much about CPMs (sometimes even seeing high CPMs as a great thing), more importantly, very poor install rate are leading to unsustainable CPI levels. CTR wasn’t too bad, but given we’re charged on CPM, it doesn’t matter much. With almost no lever to pull besides new/existing users, age & gender, I’ve already heard various advertisers pulling out budget, with barely a week in.

• There’s a also a couple of bugs reported, so be careful what total budget you allocate to those campaigns: in various instances, the daily caps weren’t respected. In others, the campaign kept running after being paused…

• Did I ever mention I sell ASA consultancy/training/management? Here we go, the first sponsored link in MADV. But it’s “first-party”, so it doesn’t count, right?

In search of the next ad placements…

• I’m quite disappointed that “search tab” ad placement isn’t going to bring the scalability many hoped for, but there’s more coming soon. Ad placements in own & operated apps (News & Stocks) are already confirmed in Apple’s documentation (although still in beta for the 13th consecutive month).

• Before thinking about where, Apple wasn’t too sure if to add ads to the AppStore initially. In 2015, I made a bet they wouldn’t, I would still bet Steve would be infuriated now. Records reveal some juicy details, such as this quote: "if people are willing to pay [bot nets] to gain position, why don’t we just let them pay us?"

• Interesting stat from the WSJ, 2011 edition: back in the days when the pie was about x200 smaller, Apple had a decent 1/6 slice of it. A year later, alongside its IPO, Facebook introduced mobile ads. The rest is history.

• Many are now convinced Apple will end up opening up inventory within third-party apps and become a full adnetwork - Eric’s reasoning here.

• I felt glorious for a second when I thought I had spotted an alpha version of “iAd 2.0” in the wild! yay! Until I was told this more likely just an SKOverlay instance, which some developers use for cross-promo (but here the advertiser & publisher didn’t deal together 🤔), or even some networks’ (Vungle has it in its SDK for 6 months) - although the lack of an “ad” label is quite intriguing in this context… The mystery is on 🕵️, if anyone can intro me to Adikus, thank you!

• “iAd 2.0” is still probably happening at some point. After the large sales headcount growth in 2020, there are still several dozens other open positions for Apple Ads, some to “improve ad personalization”, others including a mention of a new anti-fraud team, which sounds to me like a final confirmation the inventory will move beyond Apple own & operated scope.

• Some turmoil within Apple Ads HR: I learned last week that Apple had hired Chaos Monkey’s Antonio in April to lead ads product engineering. First, I was a bit surprised Apple even hired people with strong opinions - it’s been a long time this is not a place for the misfits & troublemakers, just like Google isn’t for innovators for a decade. Well, that escalated fast: once the hiring info reached mainstream news, internal controversy arose and he seems out now :/ Personally, I quite enjoyed his book a lot, if you haven’t given it a shot yet, you should. Fun & insightful.

• Apple can use troves of personal data other networks can’t access to “personalize” ads, and still qualify it as first-party, outside of ATT consent (including downloads & purchases in third-party apps…). Not exactly in-line with “"what happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone”… But then, I’m wondering: will Apple report third-party ads inventory through SKAdNetwork? Or will we instead get the deterministic, granular detail sof AdServices, which would be an unprecedented level self-preferencing…

• Talking about self-preferencing, I also wonder what’s the general perception on this “detail”: SKAN view-through requires 3 seconds, but ASA view-through just one second... Curious how Apple PR department would react to that one.

• If the third-party tricky questions aren’t solved in time, the internal battle between editorial/curation and ads sales team will get heated. Let’s hope the latter won’t reach that point:

ATT stats controversy explained

“96% of people opt-out of tracking!” claim mainstream tech media clickbaity headlines (as seen on ArsTechnica, FastCompany, Mashable, Business Insider & many others), all quoting very early data from Flurry (which is updated daily, now around 5-13% opt-in).

“40+% opt-in rates!” say MMP benchmarks (Appsflyer, Kochava…), as well as Adcolony

”20-30%ish IDFA availability on ad requests!”, say a few other networks (Kayzen, Bigabid, Blis, Ad4screen...)

The reality is slightly more complex, between methodology details, users’ iOS14.5 adoption, developers’ ATT adoption, and varying sample bias (The stage, maturity and monetization model of apps using Flurry differ quite a bit from those using Appsflyer). I had a draft explaining why those numbers can all be true, but Alex Bauer did the job for me on AdExchanger (with additional perspective on his twitter timeline).

At least I discovered that Flurry was still alive (now part of Verizon), I hadn’t heard about it being used for years. With Facebook Analytics shutting down soon, and Firebase analytics module being what it is, I guess it’s nice to hear there are still other solutions out there for whom can’t afford proper professional analytics software.

The way I see it, public ATT opt-in benchmarks are a distraction. Advertisers have bigger fish to fry. Don’t get distracted and focus your attention where it deserves.

More ATT & SKAN content

For those who can still handle it… Not my #1 topic choice, but 🤷. Or maybe I love it after all.

• iOS14.5.x adoption should reach an inflexion point imminently. Buckle your seatbelts

• “SKAN three point .. doh!” Maor wrote more details about the next iteration where various networks may receive conversion values. Watch the space to see who’ll be transparent enough to share if the did-win parameter is true or false, instead of trying to hijack attribution, à la SAN… I’ve said it countless time, I’ll repeat: raw postbacks need to be sent to whom they belong to. No idea why Apple would entitle networks trust.

• Crafting prompt & pre-prompt copy, do & don’t by Appfigures

• Appsumer has started a quite solid weekly news summary on ATT & SKAN, this week featuring the stats I mentioned above, some ranting about Facebook obfuscating the very few parameters SKAN discloses & more.

Elsewhere…

• Leon Sasson’s podcast on Subclub had brilliant tips about onboarding (summarized in a twitter thread) This is aligned with the “good friction” theory I mentioned in MADV 007.

• The “Content Fortress” theory keeps proving true, adtech & gaming merging into one, and in the latest move this month, Spanish-founded Chartboost was acquired by Zynga. Who’s next? I heard the name Adikteev, Tenjin & Tapjoy fly. For more on content fortress, follow me as an MDM groupie.

• Not specifically apps related, but HeartCore shared a great list of consumer tech resources centralized in a wiki

• Also not apps, but Randfish’s slides on the duopoly were so good an event organizer denied him showing them. 🤐

• Have hypercasuals peaked already? I know at least 2 of them moving towards subscription apps, another good motive for Apple’s ATT enforcement.

And that’s it for today! How many links did I manage to make you click on?

⚔️ Store wars

The 30% standard fee on app stores is under pressure from multiple fronts, and the 15% PR stunt may not be enough to put off regulators. We might be closer than ever to see a change in the fee structure Steve Jobs was so adamant to enforce.

• I discovered an edge case of IAP exempted of store fee through Clubhouse first monetization attempt: as per a rule created for WeChat in 2018, donations/tips aren’t subject to commissions if 100% of the proceeds go the creators.

• Some new information surfaced from the Epic/Apple legal battle, among other an interesting glance at the review process within Apple.

• EU commissioner Vestager: “Apple is in breach of EU competition law .. Apple charges high commission fees on rivals in the App store & forbids them to inform of alternative subscription options. Consumers losing out.” Another useless fine incoming years later, or real action to follow this time?

• Benedict Evan’s take in Resetting the App Store: “ it’s extremely likely that apps will be able to use their own payment systems, that Apple’s 30% will change, if not necessarily disappear, and that Apple will have to give third party apps the same kinds of hardware and integration access as its own services”

• On non-app stores, Microsoft decided to lower its PC games fee to 12% (excluding the juicy console market) in attempt to compete against Valve. Interestingly, Steam has the opposite logic of the recent Apple/Google change: the fee goes down for the biggest companies (25% from $0m, 20$ from $50m).

• I’m looking for apps who are selling both digital and physical goods, thanks to MADV readers to point out to me cases such as TheEconomist, Revolut, Sweat or Fishbrain, but I still failed to identified bundled in-app digital+physical examples that would help a promising early-stage startup I’m advising.

💀 iOS14.5

You may or may not have noticed I avoided mentioning any of it in last MADV, as I felt we were all on overdose and it was best to wait for real, post-launch data. We’re there, and it’s easy to get distracted on tactical level: fighting to get releases approved while using first-party only, digging into yet another ATT prompt optimization test, losing hair & nails trying to figure out what those partial if not random SKAN conversion values compare to our beloved deterministic values… Better than adding to the pile in-depth webinars I participated to (with Singular, Appsflyer, MobileAction among others), here are a few bigger picture perspectives or recent datapoints I found interesting:

• iOS14.5 was finally released on April 26th. First week adoption seems slow so far (2 to 8% across accounts). Apple is rolling out notifications differently across version, as shown by recent Flurry data.

• I had fun times with David on the SubClub podcast, going back to fundamentals and the role of paid advertising in mobile, especially early stage. We discussed some of iOS14.5 consequences in the last part. As usual, if you can’t spare 80 minutes in such a busy week, head to growthgems for a “blinkist” of the episode (17x 💎 on the #gemometer). Eric Seufert posted a thread completing my comments about UA at early stage

• I found MMPs to have some of the best content around the iOS14/ATT changes. But if there’s anyone independent who’s helped developers navigate the chaos, that’s Eric Seufert. His 2h workshop on “iOS 14: How to prevail” for just $199 is a steal, and giving some karma back is just fair for all the countless free resources he’s released. In any case more actionable than this SKAN mechanics amusing description.

• “No IDFA, more problems”: here are 5 hard questions about app marketing measurement (by Vungle) which are a good exercise to measure your level of prep. Good luck providing easy answers to your CEO.

• Eric debunked the myth that “Mobile advertising spend can’t just disappear”, arguing that “Like a glacier receding into arctic waters, mobile ad spend can disappear: unable to recoup enough money to fund growth, the DR advertiser simply has to spend less than it previously did in the face of a step-change in performance”. That’s a real possibility, although I believe the app economy is more resilient than that, not fully dependent on ads, and not entirely rational (isn’t it why VC money is for?). Taking a more optimistic stance, we might see a V-recovery within a couple quarters and get back on trends, which would show up this way:

• To look at one of the few bright sides of SKAN, SANs inventory for app installs is about to grow significantly as app advertisers finally will be able to reach IDFA0 users, a long term frustration I raised in Q4 without much exposure.

• Not enough attention is given to alternative measurement approaches. Hopefully we won’t have to rely on those unreliable “how did you hear about us” screens that might be directionally helpful, at times, and in complement of other attribution proxies. I’ve mentioned emerging startups to deal with those headaches, like Algolift or metric.works. Maor Sadra from Incrmntal just released an interesting whitepaper on 5 incrementality methods that don’t rely on IDFA (signup walled). From another of their resources, that pix was very much on point:

• It’s great to see Apple iterating on SKAdNetwork quick. With 3.0 incoming on iOS14.6, Apple is opening a window on the unicorn of mobile, multi-touch, but I’m slightly concerned about additional mess of multiple networks getting the same postbacks…

• App events maestro Louis Tanguay wrote about a “rotten fruit in a lush garden”

• Fed up of iOS14 by now? Here’s some swag for you (h/t Niko)

• A research on the meanings of “14.5” outside of mobile led me to interesting considerations, between a heavy Russian machine gun caliber, Barnes’s take on Job14:5, and this karmic number interpretation “14/5 is telling you that there has been a pretty hefty abuse of freedom through being irresponsible and shunning any sense of responsibility.” #food4thoughts

🎪 The ATT circus

• We’ll start seeing what those opt-in rate look in practice… There’s hope if we read Appsflyer’s benchmarks (data before April 26). It’s less in the wild, says Flurry, reporting just 11% opt-in and 4% in the US last week (not even factoring restricted devices). Or somewhere in between, based on Kayzen data (20% or non restricted).

• As always, be careful about benchmarks… I’ve had a heated debate recently with a friend, on why benchmarks are vastly misleading. Eric stated why you should care about ATT figures, which reminded me of this old but gold MDM article.

• Talking about opt-in rates: a large number of users have reported on Reddit, Apple forums & else that they had the “Ask Apps not to track” settings option activated by default and greyed-out (aka, “restricted” ATT status). Although Flurry says “restricted” is just 3-4% of devices, I’m seeing wild numbers in the nature. (Pro tip: If you’re restricted, log out & log back in your iCloud account).

• Have you taken a specific look at IDFA availability on iOS14.5 and restricted status percentages for the “non ASA” countries Brazil, China & Turkey? You might get a bad surprise…

• …But maybe you’ll get a good one elsewhere. Who would reasonably click on that French or Italian “Ask app not to track” button?! 😂

• Besides the figures themselves, it’s definitely interesting to look how different apps are requesting consent. Instead of downloading every app out there, head to Sylvain Gauchet’s awesome attprompts.com and get a full gallery of prompts and pre-prompts. It’s crowdsourced, so go and add the ones you see!

• If you browse attprompts.com enough, you’ll notice quite a few are infringing Apple latest guidelines (no filtering, no mimicking, no incent, no “allow” on the CTA). Well, I found Apple’s first example bordering on incent myself…

  

• One of the most interesting consent approach I’ve seen came from Snap, with a look&feel that reminds me the style of the growth.design case studies

• Sex at first date? At the opposite of the spectrum, a large number of games are prompting at first launch, with no pre-permission nor context… I want to believe this was tested, and while still counter intuitive to me, I’ve seen quite a few pre-prompt screen tests fail at improving opt-in rates…

• As usual, games were quickest to react, with single-digit adoption of ATT in non-gaming apps according to Appfigures (4/29).

• Božo Janković took a look at all top100 grossing games 48h after release, with only 42 showing the prompt, and barely 8 with a pre-prompt screen. More stats and tons of examples in his full post.

• While apps won’t likely be able to circumvent consent that easily (even in China, where the government said no to CAID), “there will always be bigger fish in the sea. Cell networks and ISPs simply don't need to get device-level consent from users, because they're further up the food chain”, writes Alex Bauer in mobile growth news #25.

🍎 Apple Search Ads updates

• As revealed as early as February on the ASOstack Slack channel, Apple has now rolled out its suggestions in search in US, CA & UK. Let’s see the impact on ASA inventory. (Edit: unlike what I initially mentioned, it doesn’t only apply on single keyword queries)

• Tech media got wind of the new AppStore ASA placement I showcased 3 months ago (slide 43). While the display ads in Stock & News apps are postponed, this new inventory will imminently be available (May?). I’m told by developers in the know it’s CPM only, which makes me wonder what kind of price we’ll see. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of us get charged 3-digits…

• Many pundits whine that Apple uses “tracking” settings others can’t. To me, it’s all first party so far, hence not “tracking”. The opt-out option for Apple “personalized ads” is much more like Google’s “web & app activity”, also buried settings. than the “Allow Apps to Request to track” that involves third party. I always unconsciously call that option “request apps not to track”, maybe so in order to name it #RANTT. Regardless, Apple was never known to be very strong with targeting and we’re already seeing this live, as for reported for instance by Nadir being advertised Aussie snacks (bonus point for Matej’s reply 🥨).

• Also on ASA, the new measurement framework Adservices is now in action (and there’s certainly self-preferencing here), although I’m quite disappointed so far, as I expected significant improvement from the LAT-on inventory reporting.

• #Freenemies: According to MobileAction data, the biggest ASA advertiser is…

• SearchAdsHQ released very detailed ASA benchmarks, including a flexible datastudio to play, link hidden at the end of the report

💡 Other (non-app) interesting reads…

• “Online Pareto”: in digital, 99/1 is the new 80/20. Content creation isn’t an exception in the winner-takes-all nature of many online markets, with 97% of Youtubers not making minimum wages, 98% of Patreon creators below $1k monthly and 98.6% of Spotify artists making in average $12/month thanks to the $0.00437 per stream alms Spotify is granting. Just like in the rest of society, a healthy middle-class is missing (h/t Heartcore)

• That’s partly why monetization focus is shifting from advertising to commerce in general, and subscriptions in particular. Some winners took that train years ago, like the NYT: early 2000, ad revenue was over $1b yearly. In 2020, subscriptions made $1.2b (half from digital only, growing 30%) while ad revenue fell down below $400m (another -26%) . Other alternatives to the attention merchant model who won last decade include micro-transactions, virtual currencies, and now NFTs (check this great NFT mansplaining). MADV doesn’t have any of this, but have you acquired any of my bitclout yet?

• a16z often has amazing content (have you not checked their landing page on Social? legendary). This overview of user research platforms is another one.

• Reforge (now a16z portfolio) also has incredibly valuable articles, their analogy of growth & racecars was on point.

• Mistakes running a growth team, by John Egan

I had 3 more sections on the latest subscription apps tactics, web-to-app strategies & ASO news, but those will wait for at least MADV 009 , and the iOS14.5 dust to settle a bit…

Thanks for reading! Sharing is caring.

Indeed, there was no episodes lately. Sorry, yet I had warned schedule would be irregular. Why? This newsletter takes time and it’s been entirely free for now: no ads, no affiliate link, no sponsored content. “No trick, no gimmick”. If you want to get MADV more often, feel free to send donations. Bitcoins welcome, just don’t paypal me. Or be like Andre, and send over a nice aged rum to the island!

I was also expecting a major event “early 2021” and wanted MADV to be past it, but here we are, hanging without any precise date… Hopefully we can rip the band-aid soon and move on.

💡 Noticeable news from Q1

• As major ad platforms took back most targeting & optimization levers, UA managers increasingly focus on ad creative production, testing & deployment. AppAgent released a solid free ebook about their method & learnings (highlights)

• “The best apps today are games in disguise” - I often tell app developers to get inspiration from gaming pioneers, and use the quote that “games are to apps what porn has been to ecommerce”. This is valid for UA, and for in-app tactics. a16z agrees

• Another marketing advice I keep repeating is to prioritize benefits over features. I’ve updated my favorite illustration on this:

• While CRO & UX practitioners rather focus on removing friction, adding friction can bring huge benefits, through credibility, personalization, commitment... Overlooked has relevant app use cases.

• There was a ridiculous amount of M&A in adtech, including Adjust (Applovin), Algolift & GameRefinery (Vungle), Soomla (Ironsource), Adcolony & Fyber (DigitalTurbine). On top of that, IPOs are done or in the books for Huuuge, Roblox, Babbel, Playtika on one side, and IronSource, Applovin and InMobi on the other, although it’s becoming harder to draw the line between categories: the merging of gaming & adtech is one of the highlights of this recent trend, and it’s accelerating (I’ll let you guess why).

  

• The ASO space was also heated, after AppFollow in Q4, AppTweak raised a $22m Series B, while AppRadar and TheTool merged.

• It’s not only gaming & adtech, the photo editing space is also on fire, with Canva buying Removebg, Getty buying Unspash, Pinterest interested in acquiring VSCO. Who’s next?

• Shamanth Rao repackaged learnings from his great podcast “The mobile user acquisition show” into a free pdf: “The Mobile Growth Handbook 2021”.

• SensorTower shared 2020 stats on the “wellness” space and their billion installs. What attracted my attention was the rare but insightful split between Fitness, nutrition and the “emotional” segment. The former gets most volume, but the latter has 3x higher ARPU.

• Within this “emotional fitness” space, mental health is very hot. While I see many startups coming to disrupt them (sleep, journaling, therapy, CBT…), established meditation apps keep growing: Calm shared milestones of 100m downloads & 4m paying subscribers before 2021 even started, it’s profitable since 2016 and doubled its downloads last year. Their lead seems to be increasing. Headspace got their Netflix show. Alexandra Borbely looked at Calm vs Headspace marketing approaches.

🔥 App Stores : antitrust, fees & scams

• The AppStore revenue keep soaring even ahead of predictions. In Q1, iOS consumer spent rose another 40% yoy to $21b (AppAnnie data)

• Last year, EPIC Games’ vocal stance against stores’ policy on payments (leading to Fortnite being kicked out both app stores), followed by the creation of the “Coalition of app fairness”, has attracted a lot of scrutiny on store fees. This is most likely what pushed Apple to open up a SMB program where developers earning less than $1m yearly can apply to get their fee down to 15%.

• Some good news from Google, for once: following Apple lead, Google will also lower store fee by half later this year, and this will apply to all developers automatically. For many, that means $150k in extra cash in 2021!

• As often, such fee reduction is really just a PR move, at times where GAFA are in the crosshair: the cost on the platforms bottom line is small in proportion to their gigantic profits - and funny enough the almost exact same number, the restrictive mechanics on the Appstore compensating for its 2x revenue.

• It’s no news that app stores are winner-takes-all markets with huge concentration at the top, but I still found the stats following those announcement staggering: AppAnnie estimates that only 2.6% of iOS developers are over the $1m mark (on Play, not even 1% developers get there). The other 97.4% collectively represent 7.6% of revenue. If one zooms further, most of the elite of developers is not flying private to their beach in the Bahamas neither. On the other side of the spectrum, over half of AppStore revenue is made by developers earning 50+m yearly. (AppFigures)

• One of the justification of the 30% fee, beyond payment processing and discovery, is that the app stores create “a safe and trusted” environment. While the lax control on Play makes this debatable, some horror stories also affecting the AppStore are putting stress to the argument. One of the latest instance is crypto fishing through a fake Trezor app. Avast shared no less than 134 examples of “Fleeceware” on iOS, with over half a billion installs and $365m in revenue… There’s no lack of reporting of scams, especially involving subscriptions apps. AppsExposed, Kosta eleftheriou, DrBarnard, Marco Arment, Ryan Jones & others have reported them for years, while proposing solutions. The pattern is often clear: fake ratings & reviews, hardcore paywalls at first launch, insane weekly prices, aggressive ads (for example here on TikTok). TheVerge, Techcrunch and other media outlets helped give the problem visibility, but Apple is moving slowly (uninstall popup last year, weekly pricing now?) but this harm done to consumers is a real concern for legit developers.

📈 Benchmarks

A wise friend told me we shouldn’t focus so much on benchmarks. The way I see it, "A good conversion rate is one that's better than yesterday”. It means you're improving, understanding your users better. Better measure your product to its past version than spending time researching your neighboor's dick size.

• Just 2.2% convert into a paid subscription in the US: qonversion.io released subs benchmarks, with a split by country of install-to-trial & trial-to-payment stats.

• Appsflyer trove of data is a great source for retention stats. Day-30 stands at 4.5% on organic and 3.5% elsewhere. (no idea about the methodology leading other providers to quote 66% ).

• Talking about Day-30 retention: SuperCell aims at 20%! No wonder they get to kill some many projects, but those surviving are that successful. Let’s see what happens with its 3 new Clash titles.

• Airship shared some useful push notification & re-engagement benchmarks. on iOS, 51% opt-in and 3.4% open the 8,8 average monthly PN per user.

• Free dashboard with Facebook CPMs trends (200b impressions by GuptaMedia).

• ConsumerAcquisition has mobile app specific figures. Can anyone explain what happened there, with iOS/Android media spend moving from x2 on iOS to almost the same mid March?

  

☑️ Subscriptions FTW

• I keep seeing growing demand around subs pricing testing. As the pool of skilled people is small (the 5-6 people I know in that field are fully booked, and none wants to work in-house anymore), many do it themselves. Some are open enough to share their process & findings, such as Zach and his useful tips on paywall testing. SubClub is also an awesome place to exchange these.

• Other approach it through tooling. Adapty & Purchasely both unveiled a no-code offering to help streamlining paywalls A/B tests as well as provide guidance on getting through review by following Apple’s moving guidelines.

• Subs app tools are a fairly new space, I’ve heard about no less than 3 VC rounds being closed in the subs management layer of this tool stack from TheAppFuel

  

• Trial, intro offer, lifetime, day pass, discounts… Things can get complicated, but here’s a great work from Jakub Chour, deconstructing when/how to price subscriptions depending on your subs category & steps of the user journey.

• Among other insights from the qonversion.io benchmark mentioned above, 39% of free trials being cancelled within 24h is scary. Here’s a brilliant article from Blinkist on how to battle against free trial cancellation, this time betting on transparency. I’ve seen a couple developers copying that method (with varying degrees of success…)

• That clever flow was featured in TheAppFuel’s free pdf among other 30 leading subs apps in-app secret sauce. Great resource!

• Another dev sharing learnings openly is Jake from Fitness.ai, illustrating in this thread how moving to web payments for apps isn’t as trivial as some think

• I have updated my Twitter list of subscription apps accounts.

🤳 First party content!

“We listen to your feedback” has lost most of its meaning since a tech giant decided to use it as a running gag and act the opposite. A few MADV readers told me they don’t want a list of webinars & panels like in episode 006. Here are still some free content that might peak your curiosity, check the “speaker” section of my Linkedin for more of those. And for those with no time to attend all those post-covid webinars, remember growthgems.co does the curation & summary job for you (and your team).

• Mobile growth & Pancakes podcast

• MDM podcast: Why doesn't Google have to show the prompt?

• ASA: what to expect in 2021

• Incrmntl & Vungle 2021 & beyond predictions and premonitions

• “RAMA: subscription apps from acquisition to revenue” (Slides on-demand)

I haven’t included the HR section, but if you’re looking for work as a UA manager, Senior PM or subs monetization lead, hit me up!

I had deep dives on Roblox & Strava planned, but it’s getting to gmail size limit already. Instead I’ll end on that note: I’ve decided to rewatch HBO’s Silicon Valley last month, all 6 seasons, and while I knew what to expect, I can only recommend you to do the same. It’s so real it’s frightening. Huge laughs again too. Recently, I noticed some services with PiedPiper winks in their onboarding, such as the sign-up form on growth.design. Just avoid Pipey the piper.... Well Bitclout has Clippy, so what could go wrong?

If you do want to show your appreciation for MADV and incite me to write more regularly, but didn’t find the btc address in the header note, maybe you’ll consider a Cameo from Russ about MADV :) In the meantime, I’ll go and chase my second comma.

🔮 APS Berlin: the role & skills of app marketers for 2021

I was pleased to attend APS again, even though remotely. The deck is available on SlideShare, and you can watch the full replay on Youtube.

I sadly observed that many of you read, like and share but rarely click on external links, so I thought I’d share the TLDR:

🎅 The state of mobile marketing 2020 and forecast for 2021

This was possibly the last event of the year, and I join the awesome AppFollow team to take a look back at 2020 biggest trends and try to predict what may and may not happen next year and beyond. The recording is now available on Youtube.

🍎 New era in mobile marketing with iOS14: Post-IDFA changes, strategies and trends

I was happy to join other app marketing experts Andrea Raggi (Phiture), Johannes von Carmon (Growfirst), Ryan Goeden (Kochava) and Lina Danilchik (Splitmetrics) on this webinar about the huge shift coming at all of us in 2021. Find the video & transcript on Splitmetrics website.

The 90min panel was “Growth Gem’d” by Sylvain Gauchet, find some of the gems on his linkedin post, or in the growthgems.co vault.

💡 AGS - Subscription Apps fundamental

I’m really thankful to all of you who voted at the AGS top speakers of 2020, honored to be featured alongside fantastic speakers, especially with 7 of the top10 female speakers! Thanks Louis & team, and thanks Appsflyer for sponsoring the AirPods :)

The presentation I gave at the last AGS was about Subscription Apps fundamentals. I had released the deck previously on Slideshare, but the full video has now be made available on Youtube as well for those who missed it.

🎄 Mobile Growth Stack Ask me Anything

I’ll join Eric Christensen from Phiture from an AMA on acquisition & retention, next Monday 21st at 7pm CET/10am PST.

If you aren’t part of their slack channel, apply here. If you are you can submit questions already on this form.

I’d very happy to get your feedback on the above!

In the meantime, I’ll be working on the usual MADV update. Expect a loaded one as there was a ton of news and crunchy content released since last episode.

All previous episodes available on madv.io

💥 IDFA0: the time is now

https://madv.substack.com/p/idfa0-the-time-is-now

A disruptive #longread to rethink your UA approach for Q4 & beyond, where I provide more details about the 💣 I dropped in MADV 004. I rarely post extensive articles, so your feedback is much welcome.

“TLDR: the mobile app installs ads reach on self-attributing networks is currently shrinking. Start adjusting your Q4 short term and 2021 mid-term strategy & mindset accordingly”. Read in full

🤳 More first-party content

• I’m participating with Batch & Appsflyer to a webinar in French this Wednesday 18/11: “Optimiser l'engagement sur mobile en temps de crise”.

• I’ll also take part of a Post-IDFA strategies panel (in English) with Andrea Raggi & Johannes von Cramon hosted on 26/11 by SplitMetrics

• MADV’s friend Sylvain Gauchet has extracted, organized and summarized my recent subscription apps podcast with Eric Seufert in written, digestible chunks. Member-only link, otherwise head to growthgems.co

💀 More around the IDFA & changes in attribution

Still here and haven’t clicked above?

Despite the endless stream of coverage on the hottest topic in the industry, as a MADV friend puts it, “hardly anyone thinks enough about the associated train wrecks coming up.” Most advertisers & vendors are just as unprepared as in September.

• Apple said to have finally fixed SKAdNetwork latest issues reported in MADV004, so maybe network can finally start testing how those conversion postbacks are looking…

• “Contemplating the next 18 months of mobile advertising”: also directly related to the iOS ad app-pocalypse, the MDM podcast features David Philippson and Nebo Radovic on UA teams organization, media sources demand & the viability of programmatic. A big takeaway is the temporary pause on all automation efforts, to rethink attribution.

• Last time I mentioned Facebook updated guidance for SKAdNetwork, which is critically important to get prepared, but as Eric & Nebo observe in the previous podcast: “we’ve heard literally nothing from Google. It’s really weird. It’s bizarre. Google has not even acknowledged that this is happening ... Google is just slow. It takes them forever to react to these things. There was that one generic press release and that was all”. It’s probably happening behind the scene. But besides Google’s usual practice of favoring big clients in private while leaving the rest of us in the dark, I’m on Eric on this : “part of it is just because there’s an opportunity which shuts down for them: Youtube view-through. There’s no workaround, we have no solution for that, it’s just gone”. Beyond UAC alone and its fundamental transparency issues, the death of impression-based attribution will totally change marketing performance perspective, and we’re back again to the same conclusion: incrementality measurement is the way forward.

• Apple still hasn’t communicated how ASA will be tracked. Until now, the amount of LATon/off was disclosed within the UI, enabling some to run extrapolations on the untracked IDFA0 users, but since 21/10 there’s a gap between LATon+off and total conversions: iOS14’s LAT status doesn’t get disclosed anymore. Different rates of LAT on iOS14 make a second extrapolation dubious, be careful about reporting automation…

• Adjust completed its article on how to get ATT opt-in and packaged it in a quite insightful pdf.

• In the MDM Slack, someone has been reporting not even seeing any iOS14 attributed from Facebook, although this looks more of an edge case than an industry-wide observation. I’m awaiting confirmation.

• My friend Thomas Benias did an overview of changes coming for various players in TheDrum.

• Once you’ve read my IDFA0 piece above, you might be more interested in checking out this incoming webinar with Winclap on managing LAT campaigns.

📰 App marketing news, November 2020

• Subclub, episode 3 features Jack Mor from FitnessAI on “Taking a Fitness App to Y Combinator and Beyond”. Great perspective about a vertical some say is saturated but keeps seeing innovation & new players.

• A new website for ASO inspiration (hat tip Alemaya)

• Apple to suggest apps to install in iOS14.3 during an iPhone setup? That’s what 9to5mac suggests. I wonder if there will be ASA placements there too.

• iOS Apps available to run on desktop (with MacOS Big Sur & a M1 chip)

• Appsflyer released a detailed report with 2020 gaming data. 2 interesting quick insights: paid installs grew 2x faster than organic installs this year. And While IAP was increasing significantly (+25%), in-app ads were dropping (-16%), even more so when looking at the US alone.

• SensorTower also released their Q3 report (under a signup wall) listing top publishers in a selection of countries. US mobile game revenue reported at $5.8b, slightly down from Q2 huge numbers.

• US elections have pushed news apps up (more on this on Appfigures blog, which also report a curious trend about Alexa). Oura is also reporting an average 1.4bpm heart rate increase and 139 millions sleep hours lost that day (More on this in Sifted).

• ConsumerAcquisition keeps releasing valuable content, with a new piece on Creative Optimization. By the way, if some start thinking they’ve been sponsoring MADV to get featured every other week, I’d like to mention 100% of the content you’ve seen in MADV so far is “organic” (unpaid for). I might include sponsored content some day, but it will always be clearly marked as such. I’ve actually refused one of them last week as I didn’t think it was interesting enough for my readers.

• Talking about Creative, another episode of Mobile Ad Eaters is out, with Szilvia from PixelFederation.

• In MADV004 I mentioned how Chess apps are soaring thanks to Netflix series. I was surprised that flat search volume, for good reason: search queries on chess have risen: Anton Tatarinovich showed me Apptweak data on short & long tail keywords with rising search popularity index values. It’s also happening the web, although not that much on Youtube where you can see some of the series games deconstructed, as Claire Rozain pointed out.

• Facebook keeps updating its Ad Library, now with information on spend & impression, as spotted in grow.co newsletter. I don’t seem to get those details most of the time yet though :(

• Sheryl Sandberg once said: “If you’re offered a seat on a rocketship, you don’t ask which, you just get on”. Here’s a rocketship seat available: Mojo is hiring a head of growth in Paris. Small team, smart founders, big numbers, great culture & cool product. Ping me if you want a warm intro to their team.

💡 Worth following

Various announcements from my friends at mobile growth agency Phiture who always share a ton of value in the community:

• Next week will see a new, must-join channel: the Mobile Growth Stack slack community. You can request early access not to miss Andy' Carvell’s AMA session on this Tuesday 7pm CET.

• Their twitter account has a series of mini-videos on mobile growth topics with Andy Carvell explaining fundamental concepts of the MobileGrowthStack: insights & analytics, the attribution layer, deeplinks, even tracking

• Their blog feature a great article from Jakub Chour on subscription pricing automation

If you reached this point and haven’t clicked on the first link, I’ve failed.

In this post, I’m not trying to cover the many implications of the incoming IDFA partial deprecation, nor how to prepare for it (for such purpose, this guide would be a good place to start), but to observe how iOS14 is already impacting Q4 performance on paid media and make you think about your marketing mix.

First some details on Mobile App Installs ads & iOS14

A few more details before I move to the actionable part, to answer some surprises my initial claim raised among MADV readers. The shrinking reach of SANs inventory is happening from the combination of 3 factors:

• 😱 iOS14 has higher proportion of users with inaccessible IDFA

• 📈 iOS14 is rising in adoption (roughly 70% after a steep acceleration early November)

• ❌ SANs only show MAI ads to users with an advertising ID. 

- LAT rate is not on an increasing trend on iOS14 , it’s stable at 45% on iOS14. It’s the combination of higher than iOS13 + rising iOS14 adoption that makes it look like it grows over the whole iOS userbase.

- SANs (mostly) not showing MAI ads isn't a new phenomenon, it has nothing to do with iOS14 and it's been the case for as long as I’ve worked in this industry 👴. SANs aren't showing MAI ads to IDFA0 users because they rely on advertising IDs (IDFA on iOS) to match & report attribution, at least outside their own biased reporting. I've said it previously but nobody really seemed to care that 20 to 40% of their audience wasn't reachable through their core channels. Insert “it’s fine” meme.

- Besides limiting reach, the rising IDFA is also affecting how adgroups using narrow lookalikes perform, as Facebook is only left with an even smaller potential audience.

- It's not only Facebook as I simplified earlier due to their dominant share of the iOS paid installs: Admob, Youtube & what I call "secondary social" (Tiktok, Snap, Twitter*, Pinterest...) all do the same. (For the record, Google UAC always showed MAI ads on search, but that’s a relatively small share and since 2020 search’s extrapolated conversions only live within Google Ads UI and don't get passed to MMPs as they can't be attributed at user-level).

EDIT 17/11: I’m told by a MADV reader that Snap is now offering LAT-on traffic for MAI in testing, but only reported in their UI, no data passed to MMP where those will show up as organic. I suspect Twitter doing the same.

-When saying “SANs” (aka “SRNs”) , I’m talking primarily about their first-party inventory (which others call “O&O”, owned & operated, namely: Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube, Snap..), but it also applies, possibly even stronger, on third-party inventory (Audience Networks, Admob…).

- Toggling on LAT isn’t an ad-blocker: users without accessible IDFA still get ads, but not SAN mobile app install ads. At least that I know of to the same amount. You can easily experience what it’s like by switching your iPhone to LAT-on and open whatever endless feed you waste your time on these days. As a corollary, this shift means the mobile web inventory pressure is very slightly decreasing in parallel. I bet a few ecomms will be happy just before black friday & Xmas coming to see app advertisers leaving inventory on the table, even more so this year when we're -almost- all stucked at home. It also mean that such users start getting randomly targeted ads, a topic for another day.

- This limitation doesn’t apply for 2021 if/when SANs switch to SKAdNetwork attribution, all users will get app installs ads regardless of their IDFA status (although some optimization might depend partly on the IDFA-on traffic, which is still unclear at this point).

Q4: the red pool

2021 will likely be a completely different game for mobile UA. Hence the panic of some, the ostrich effect on others, and the overdose of IDFA news, most of which barely scratches the surface of the incoming tsunami. In the meantime, behind the FUD speculative headlines, the combination of limited reach & increased demand is already putting double the pressure on the profitability of paid UA on the leading app ads networks in the short term. How are your Q4 volume & profit goals doing so far? For most, the answer is not that great 📉 .

Per my estimates based on Mixpanel, Appsflyer & Kayzen data (thanks for sharing!), the proportion of inventory not reachable on SANs is currently up by over 50%** compared to early September, and will likely rise a bit further by the end of the quarter. The share of devices without accessible IDFA is even higher in some countries (starting with the US...) and verticals (VPN apps anyone?). 

Just like vendors had to move from denial, anger & bargaining to acceptance real fast in Q3, Q4 is the time for advertisers to follow suit and start adapting already. As for SANs, they probably don’t need any of my help to keep racking in billions, even though I was amused at hearing (a big) one stuck at denial...

“If you're only using Facebook, Google and other SAN's MAI Ads for your paid promotion, you're not reaching a growing share of your target audience” <Click to tweet>

Here’s one reason among many your Q4 may look poor, or plateau’ing so far: you’re fighting in a red pool. You’re also swimming against the current: competition for the remaining IDFA inventory on SANs is fierce. For some, especially among earlier/smaller/indie & non-gaming advertisers, the issue is particularly acute: the 2 biggest SANs alone concentrate a very high share of spend & paid installs. To add some bad news, LAT users are in many cases even more valuable than users with IDFA assigned (something that Apple once briefly disclosed before editing the mention).

Reaching LAT users beyond SANs

More than ever, diversifying beyond the duopoly matters. The more deterministic the attribution of your channels, the least you're currently reaching the growing base of IDFA0 users. To promote your app to these, you’ll need to consider both where you can reach them, and how measurement will be performed. 

• Organic sources such as search, browse (featuring, charts, apps you may like) aren't affected and all users get similar exposure. Scarce visibility from AppStore Connect.

• Apple Search Ads always was a very particular “SAN”: showing ads to LAT users***, but reporting them as organic ,a topic I’ve covered extensively in the past, which became even more tricky since Apple stopped reporting LAT status on iOS14 in October.

• SDK adnetworks, such as Unity, Ironsource, Vungle, Applovin, Adcolony or Chartboost , have always shown ads to IDFA0 users (tracked through fingerprinting), unless you specifically excluded them on your own. My personal tip on this: if you can, do bet on both cohort, but split them and analyze them appart.

• Open programmatic & the endless stream of DSPs have also been quite smarter than their walled-garden counterparts in that regard, assigning a different value (CPM) to the cohorts with/without IDFA, to match the gap in demand, optimization potential (contextual vs behavioural) and “attributability”. Some players even started to market this segment heavily recently:

  • Liftoff alleged to have matched and/or improved CPA & D7 ROAS for Playrix on non-personalized LAT traffic (more pitch here).

  • In another Playrix case study I can’t link publicly to, CrossInstall saw “saw double the purchase rate on LAT traffic compared to IDFA traffic”.

  • Persona.ly claims to match eCPI with 20% higher D3 retention for Tilting Point. A few others pitched customers with questionable case studies in the same manner. I want to believe them, but the shared data looked weak to me to support their stance.

On top of these fairly conventional app marketing channels comes a hidden part of UA which is hard to quantify as it isn’t showing in usual benchmarks of paid channels for apps, such as the Appsflyer Index or Appsumer report I shared in MADV previously, because they aren’t easy to normalize across advertisers:

• Less conventionally attributable channels, such as podcasts, TV and all offline naturally don't apply any kind of filtering.

• The elephant in the room is influencer marketing, which can only grow further in a post-IDFA world, and the improved attention on incrementality modelization overall should help improve measurement for these actions.

• Web to app acquisition isn't affected at this point either, on owned (your website), earned (PR, community) and paid (Outbrain, Taboola, and all MAI acquisition going through an intermediary landing page, or even a (re)direct deeplink scheme). The smartest app advertisers already noticed:

  “The most technically. ambitious hypercasuals are now trying to make web campaigns work now. Before HCs never cared much about web traffic”, Matthaus Krzykowski

• The same comment applies to “tracked virality” & social links (I’m not talking about real word-of-mouth here)

• You can also run “classic” acquisition campaigns on Facebook, Google & other SANs directing to a web landing page, redirecting later towards the app. Whether that landing is going straight to the store, or after signup/payment is a topic I’m quite interested to debate with practicionners in private, but will leave for another spicy MADV episode.

Most of those partly or entirely depend on web to app measurement, and I have concerning questions regarding how to attribute web to app traffic in 2021. It isn’t a use case covered by SKAdnetwork (what was Apple thinking here?!), and no decent advertiser can be satisfied by the campaign URL scheme Apple offers in AppStore Connect. I overheard about a few hacks & DIY methodology I am quite doubtful about…

How much of your current marketing efforts are all of the above representing for your app(s)? For many I know personally, the non-organic sources above are either a small minority, or entirely missing. For the record, I admit I have a large bias of working with many early stage startups, this isn’t necessarily representative of large advertisers media mix.

Don’t wait for 2021 and rethink your media mix already

With the current high level of uncertainty on the exact mechanics of SANs with SKAdNetwork, and their associated performance compared to the IDFA era, I believe the time to start adjusting to the fact IDFA deprecation is already behind us. Kudos on Eric Seufert for having seen it all years ahead, as usual.

Sure, there is already an depressing list of hot topics to prepare for the IDFA doomsday ☠️, including testing ATT prompts, adapting internal BI for aggregated data, developing incrementality/media mix models (MMM), running first-24h data vs LTV regression analysis… My point today is that a missing piece to prep 2021 is rethinking your channel mix for the short-term (SANs inventory) and the mid-term (no IDFA world).

Don’t shoot the messenger. We’re all busy and I’m adding bad news on the pile. There are always 2 faces of the coin, so here are some things to rejoice about:

• On the seller side, after years of status quo in the duopoly marketshare (over)dominance, the delay in IDFA deprecation is an occasion for more open alternatives to grow their share of adspend by exploiting this temporary SAN weakness. Will advertisers tap on it, or let their competitors benefit?

• On the buyer side, after suffering from the commoditization and leveling (down) playfield of UA management as networks force them to ML-based optimization, it's a fantastic opportunity for smart marketers to make a difference by thinking out of the (black)box of the duopoly. I’ll provide more depth on how to evolve as a UA manager in 2021 at AppPromotionSummit in december, keep posted.

Like a smart reviewer of an early draft of this post told me, one may argue changing the direction of your channels mix is very short-term sighted, and can only give you an edge for the next 6-8 weeks before things get shaken again. I believe there are various reason to pay attention:

• It’s still a critical period to deal with for many businesses! If your plan is to follow to status quo until IDFA actually dies, you’re missing out. Why not save the quarter and win next year?

• Who’s to say enforcement will start in January anyways? Apple vaguely said “early 2021”. The last-minute September update could be the first of a couple delays. Devs working in the kids apps space know it took a few of them over almost a year for initial the big splashy anoucenement to go live (and a few more month to effectively be enforced).

• Most importantly, it’s about building a more resilient marketing mix for the mid-term, while developing new, smarter skills within your acquisition/marketing/growth workforce. In particular, thinking outside the SAN(d)-box can only help raise useful questions about improving measurement perspective, as well as completing the app marketing lense with web & non-direct response marketing capabilities, to embrace “full stack marketing”. In MADV 004, I‘ve said the hottest topic of 2020 was incrementality in UA. Take a moment to think where you’re at on this complex but fundamental question.

The temporary, unexpected and long due disruption of the status quo is an opportunity to anticipate a much bigger picture. Nobody wants it, everyone wants to believe it’s for a far tomorrow. Not only the best prepared will prevail, but the “new normal” (sic) of UA has already started.

The beginning of the end of the AppStore paradigm?

The current situation, in-between the comfy period of deterministic attribution and the yet unknown post-IDFA world coming, is a good, overdue time to rethink your overall distribution strategy, short & long term, and its likely dependencies on current measurement practices & SANs dominance. Make that thought broad: most app marketers (including myself) tend to think of the IDFA deprecation through the very narrow scope of the current AppStore paradigm. I’m writing today about app acquisition channels details, without anticipating that all the IDFA smoke & mirrors talk may only be “a distraction from the more fundamental parallax scroll of evolution in consumer tech” coming at us: a post-platform mobile future. The 2010-2020 AppStore era may only have been the initial piece of a more complete puzzle for developers.

The IDFA earthquake is accelerating evolution. Apple was already able to handicap FB/Google /et al even before implementing the ATT popup, but this may come and bite back. Harming the effectiveness of mobile performance marketing may not benefit Apple in the long term as much as claimed after the initial announcement : its tight control on the platform could very well be weakened by the awakening of app marketers that there’s an entirely world outside theirs. I know very few professionals who excel in both web & app environments, but I’m convinced cross-platform marketing is going to be a high-demand skill next year.

Notes:

This MADV post wasn’t emailed to subscribers, but attached in MADV 005.
* I noticed that Twitter started showing a small amount of MAI ads to LAT users recently, not sure if part of testing to expand reach?
** Overall inventory for which IDFA is null or non accessible is currently around 39% vs 25%, which is a +56%. It means the accessible inventory on SANs is down from 75% to 61% of overall, -20%. Depends how you want to look at it
***unless you add age/gender criteria in every single adgroup

• The “Strava of X”: I mentioned A. Dewez’ Future of Consumer Social in MADV 003, but I fucked up the link: go back & read about VSN & online communities.

🤳 First-party content

• “How to win with subscriptions on mobile”: I had a fun conversation with Eric Seufert on the MDM podcast: web vs app journeys, the limits of over-A/B testing, hybrid monetization models, the 7-digits plateau of many VC-backed subs apps...

• TLDR? If like me you can’t follow a full 90min podcast, MADV friend Solal summarized all the gems in a 2-pager.

🔥 What’s hot

• Facebook has discretely updated its guidance for SKAdNetwork. Lots of changes since early Sept., highlighted in Eric’s thread: no new account, more than 9 campaigns, VO might survive (?) and MMPs back into the game. The big question remains at which date will the new SDK be released so we can start testing and gauge the measurement/performance loss?

• IDFA deprecation postponed to 2021? It’s already happening, but silently. The proportion of users without IDFA has risen from 25% on iOS13 to 45% on iOS14 (in average, US is higher) according to Appsflyer detailed research. With iOS14 adoption increasing, that’s over a third of users without IDFA, and growing.

• But why is it increasing? Apple seems to be forcing the LAT-on setting by default on some device as spotted on Reddit… More details on Appsflyer link above.

• Talking about Facebook, I’ll drop a bomb I’m surprised nobody is talking about. Afaik, Facebook isn’t showing MAI ads to user without IDFA (this isn’t new or related to iOS14). A growing rate of IDFA-less users means FB MAI Ads inventory is shrinking! Combined with heavy pressure from advertisers this quarter, the most premium inventory for mobile UA is at all-times high. How are your web campaigns testing going?

• Another bomb related to the topic: Apple admitted SKAdNetwork isn’t working!! Reported by John Koetsier.

  

• If you’re aren’t fed up by IDFA content, RocketShipHQ is releasing a free guide with 70+ pages and 500min of content from friends in the industry.

• Brilliant ad placement for Calm on 3/11/👏

• “Chess is cool again”: As I hinted on the ASO Stack slack, Netflix’s The Queen Gambit is affecting chess apps positively. Surprisingly, “search popularity” index is flat, while downloads are soaring: is search discovery overrated?

• If you work with subs apps, you might have noticed a cohort of users cancelling their trial immediately after starting it, not to get charged. This is particularly popular among younger audiences, and a nightmare for growth practitioners trying to figure out how to create habits & convert. A debate I’m happy to extend in private, or in the related SubClub thread.

• ASO & search ads, part1: Google has killed the legacy Play Console and its useful insights on organic vs paid, for a new version I’m yet to hear anyone likes.

• The obvious goal of that new console is to hide behind a weird-colored UI the obfuscation of critical ASO data: paid vs organic. It’s always been a nightmare to reconcile UAC data with the console and @nadir did a great job at unveiling how to to guesstimate Play Store Ads installs from the Console.

• ASO & search ads, part2, with an exclusive for MADV readers: Google is rolling out a slight iteration of the reports in the Ads UI. Besides moving metrics & dimension from left to right - surely took months of user interviews to make a decision on this -, there’s a small change that should attract all ASO practionners’ attention: filter network=search, and list “keyword/placement”: Google is (accidentally?) revealing a small subtract of the search ads keywords! The sample is small (single digit %) but shows a high proportion of brand terms, and hints at the organic cannibalization potential of running UAC campaigns.

• If 2020 had only one hot topic in UA, I’d choose cannibalization vs incrementality. In the aforementioned post, Nadir shows (again) how UAC can be eating up your organics. Deterministic attribution made it easy to fool oneself. I believe marketers are about to get a lot more aware of this next year, and many smart people are working hard on changing the attribution perspective. Follow @maorsa for instance, like in this fun “adtech communism” conversation.

🎧 Audio everywhere! “Straight to your ears from the world’s greatest minds”

The rise of audio is nothing new. Sure, Spotify has now 144m subscribers (+27% yoy!). But there’s a lot more happening around audio & voice than the revenue of the oligopoly controlling the music industry. After the first wave of 100% audio apps such as Blinkist or Aaptiv, there’s a whole new shift towards audio in many areas. Maybe the SV elitist discord Clubhouse and its $100m pre-launch is onto something after all.

• One space I see exciting early stage startups is the “micro-learning” one, or “learning on the go”. Blinkist released an exciting new format called ShortCast. A friend of mine jumped on the promising project at Himalaya, another way of becoming a “better you”. Welcome to the Jungle launched another microlearning format dubbed “Welcome Originals”.

• Speechify, which turns any text (pdf, URL, scan..) into an audiobook, is seeing tremendous growth. I’m bullish on its founder, which moving story I recommend you to experience it in-app, right after the onboarding.

• For makers, a startup to follow: Rapchat. Headlines coming up in 3, 2, 1…

• I had a few more cool examples, but I lost my notes :( If you saw more in the audio space, send over!

I just can’t catch up with my long podcast queue, but here are a few I enjoyed lately:

• The MobileUAshow is on fire. For an amazing perspective of monetization in the early days of the AppStore, the episode with @DrBarnard was fun and insightful.

• David finally started the SubClub Podcast, with the first episodes featuring must-follows of the subscription economy Jacob Eitling (RevenueCat CEO) and Nico Wittenborn (Adjacent founder).

• The Mobile Growth Nightmare (MGN) podcast is back for a new season, starting strong with the always interesting Simon Lejeune (soundcloud, itunes)

• StoreMaven publishes a new podcast series dubbed “Mobile growth & pancakes”, featuring MADV friends Claire & Nadir.

• It’s rare to find decent content on UAC tactics. To be fair, there isn’t much to say, especially while respecting their heavy NDA aimed at hiding the best features from indies & early stage advertisers. But Natalie Drodz made a great job at “thinking out of the black box”.

🕹️ Gaming stuff

• Despite making the bulk of the AppStore revenue, this newsletter isn’t much about games. I just don’t know enough. I’ll make an exception to mention to Playrix’s crazy success story. Gardenscape & Homescapes have pioneered the fake ads tactic and generated each 10-digits in revenue. But so did Playrix’ initial game Township, which launched in 2011 on Google+ (!), with a current yearly run rate of $200m (installs are up 20% this year). My go-to place for gaming content Deconstructor of fun did a fantastic coverage on this title.

📈 Up & to the right

• My friends at Speechify are killing it, with x15 weekly downloads since summer. I’m not able to use their speed-read feature, but love the UX of the app.

• Gamified language-learning app Drops reached 25m “users” (and $10m in yearly run rate, x13 since 2017), a third of which this year alone. Impressive figures in a crowded vertical for a bootstrapped company, and a great signal you don’t always need VC fuel to reach 8-digits revenue.

• Only 3 Android apps have been rated more than 100m times on Google Play. All 3 belong to Facebook (Appfigures data).

• Insane figures from Genshin Impact with $250m revenue in its first month.

• In comparison, Pokemon “only” grossed $122m at launch, but racked in $4b since, a quarter of which this year.

• Among Us! is on fire, with 67.2m new downloads last month, ranking #1 globally

• Last 3 figures are coming from SensorTower, which released a report I’m very interested about, but can’t afford as an indie :( If anyone from SensorTower is reading this, or a generous MADV reader is willing to share, I’d be thrilled to get a look at their promising State of Food & Drink Apps report. NYT Cooking is an interesting case (+66% active, +50% revenue this year), so is their candid admitting that “When terrible things happen, our numbers go up”.

💡 Worth following

• The Phiture blog updates almost always qualify as must read, and this guest post on pricing is no exception. Among other subs tips, Saket Toshniwal confirmed seeing "several companies combining subs and IAP double their revenue".

• No Xmas for UA managers: ConsumerAcquisition has another interesting post about Facebook CPM trends in “Q5”: well worth a consideration for Fitness & Education apps in particular.

• Dirty little secrets of the subs app economy: high churn is normal. A great post from RevenueCat revealing that 5 apps out of 6 see a takeout rate under 75%…

  “The 85/15 split — which Apple is keen to mention anytime developers complain about the App Store rev share — doesn’t have a meaningful impact for most developers.”

• With 1b iPhone userbase, Apple’s bet on “Services” is paying off: in 2017 they aimed at $50b yearly revenue by 2021: already ahead of schedule with $14.5b last quarter (+16% yoy). A large part from the AppStore, but licensing to Google search is estimated being 17-26% of it (and 1/6 of Apple yearly profits).

• Apple itself acknowledged Services profit is at risk. Not through the rumors it’s entering the search space, but from regulators (spotted by Ben Bajarin)

• GameAnalytics shared a benchmark on hypercasual retention: it’s a tough world out there, with a median of day7 under 6%.

• I often hear questions about the impact of distributing on alternative app stores such as the AppGallery or the Amazon Store (hint: it’s low). Eric shared the fundamental principles of an app store. This Indian perspective from Deepakabbot is also very interesting.

• A few friends including Andre & Lorenzo shared some of their worst UA nightmares on Bidshake blog.

• I bet this will sound familiar to most…

👔 Job hunting

If you’re looking for a new challenge, I’m seeing 10 offers for every candidate. Don’t be shy and ping me to jump on top of the resume queue, I can refer you directly to the positions below.

• Ahead App,"Purpose driven growth director". Berlin or Remote. Early stage, 1.5% equity and one of the most appealing job description I've seen recently

• A stealth, well-funded, subscription app in Barcelona looking for a full stack marketer to execute the early stage and become a leader over time. Very promising vertical yet to be taken, strong founders

• Depop, UA/perf. London-ish. Cool stuff to do on Snap & Tiktok in particular, with my friend @goutaste

• Emjoy, UA/perf. Barcelona. Work directly with me on this one in a vertical which enables exciting creatives

• Fishbrain, PMM, Stockholm. Half-product, half-CRM, cross-teams function with lots of ownership and a “wonderful boss”. Your goal: "make sure our product marketing does not suck"

• Bux. UA/Perf. Amsterdam

• Fabulous. Head of Mkt. Remote or Paris/SF

• 3 offers at Current to work with Adam Hadi in NYC: offline perf, PMM & Sr PM

• Also more non-marketing jobs with: Creative Director at Lingokids (Madrid), Engineering Manager for RevenueCat (Remote), BizDev for Ironsource (South Europe/remote), a countless positions for Wildlife in São Paulo, Data Analyst/Brand manager/Community Manager at Curio (London)…

👁️ One more thing…

What kind of UA manager are you? I used to be the archetype of the “complicated virgin”, before UAC & AAA killed the game.

Thank you! & welcome to MADV!

🤓 Must reads!

• Alexandre Dewez’ post on subscription pricing is one to bookmark, gathering tons of insights on activation & monetization, like the 4 examples of where to place your paywall in the user journey. There’s a also downloadable spreadsheet with 100+ subscription apps price points, showing that the average monthly price x12 is exactly twice the average yearly price (and half of the average weekly price x52).

• If in gaming, this IAP packs in F2P should be a more relevant equivalent for you.

🤳 First party content

• I published on Slideshare my slides on subscriptions apps from MAMA Sao Paolo.

• I tried to spark a debate about how good free trials really are, on Twitter and SubClub. If you’re a strong advocate of them - or have hard data proving I’m wrong again -, let’s talk!

🔥 What’s hot, October 2020

• Appsflyer updated its Performance Index. While every vendor out there found the niche segment to claim they’re competing with the duopoly, the most interesting addition was to see IAP propensity factored, which demonstrates that Google inventory is as big as bad - even Twitter outranking them on paying users 😂 - , and explaining why FB remains by far the king of UA on iOS, as illustrated in MADV 001 (search for Appsumer pix)

• UA automation tool Algolift was acquired by Vungle. Kudos Paul Bowen!

• @Deantak interviewed a few vendors about their current status regarding the IDFA deprecation & SKAdNetwork: most are moving towards the last of the 5 stages of grief.

• Appsumer summarized well the state of affairs of the expected impact of ATT & SKAdNetwork for each major UA channel, with more details in specific posts at the end of the article.

• The Advanced ASO ebook is now available for free! Not fully updated, but most of it is still gold and a great place to start. if you already own that gem, Moritz & Gabe shared interesting “behind the scene” details.

☑️ The subscription corner

• @Alex_danco quote is solid: "Subscriptions are a great example of a hard problem that looks on the surface like an easy problem". But that wasn’t even the best punchline on subscriptions I’ve read this week, beaten by @jproco’s: “It’s about fixing leaky pipes, not replacing exploding toilets” (There’s now a follow-up to this story).

• Given the need to get detailed subscription data, and how bad it is getting it from Apple yourself, it’s no surprise to see MMPs jump in the hot space of app subs tracking. I’m expecting others to soon follow Adjust steps.

• Eric Seufert asked in the MDM slack which agencies produce compelling ad creative for subs apps. Twigeo & Winclap jumped in, happy to hear about your own feedback.

• I thought I’d leave it out for lack of relevance, but I’ll turn it into a question: eMarketer showcased some “shares of subscription apps installs” by vertical. Who are those health & fitness or music apps generating the 70+% of installs in their category?

• Thriving subscriptions business can be a double edge sword for some: "The @nytimes will triumph financially, dramatically so, and utterly fail as an intellectual institution, at least by its former standards", by Monkey Chaos author. Worth noticing the subscription publishers can afford to spend big money on FB Ads, while the ads-based publishers are priced out. (Sad but true headline from Digiday).

• I often doubt the methodology used by early startups sharing their MRR & ARR figures, often more aligned with this brilliant tweet below than what VCs think they’re reading. Yannick Oswald wrote about the ARR as “The most ambiguous term in startup land”

🕹️ Gaming stuff

To me, games are to apps what porn was to ecommerce: there are the true pioneers I have to learn from & the tricks I can port to non-gaming before they become the playbook.

• “How to have a great 6 pack”: the @theJBDev wrote a great article on IAP pricing & the categorization of payers. Great inspiration about paywalls. TLDR: “When in doubt, copy”.

• More gaming IAP solid content with Matthew Emery’s first part of his IAP merchandising playbook

• Eric Seufert contrarian & well argumented take on “traffic trade network” in gaming

• The end of fake ads? the UK ads regulator wants to ban the tactics Playrix has successfully developed at scale. I’m skeptical about enforcement. Reported by the BBC and Gamasutra.

• Voodoo remains the king of hypercasuals, according to Apptopia Q3 report

• IPO time: Both Playtika & Roblox have filed around $8-10b. At the same time, even influencers are going public these days.

📈 Up & to the right

Apps killing it lately.

• Roblox again, with impressive store revenue growth. Check out Eric Seufert’s recent coverage of their advertising opportunity.

• Covid hasn’t been bad for everyone. After new unicorn Strava (MADV002), two other subs apps made 🦄 headlines with big numbers: Duolingo’s CEO sharing a few metrics (3% paying “users”) and Calm for raising at $2b valuation. I’m hearing that revenue doubled this year (profitably).

• Kahoot also raised at $2.4b (+71% in just 4 months!), propelled by SoftBank deep pockets + big usage metrics (200m games played, 1.3b “participating players” in last 12 months, 4.4b all time “users”)

• Nintendo pretty much doubled its (overall) subscribers count since Mario Kart was released a year ago. With a strong uptick on its app this month (Appfigures)

💡 Worth following

aka: where I get my sources from

• “I don't know what makes an ad great, but I do know this - it's not logic”: I’m a fan of the legendary Bob Hoffman, aka @adcontrarian

• “We need more ads and we need them fast!”: automating ad production, by AppAgent

• Zachary Shakked was on a great spree with his $100k challenge, sharing a ton of valuable details for indies, but sadly just stopped it in progress. Never too late to check out the early episodes from this summer.

• Apptweak published some good insights on the impact of influencer campaigns on Youtube over organic downloads. The last 2 links in conclusion are gold.

• Apple released a bunch of new iPhones, I don’t have any opinion on this anymore. I found that pricing chart from @asymco interesting though.

• Alexandre Dewez’s Overlooked deserved multiple mentions at once & as many kudos. For his subs app pricing spreadsheet. For the related post I picked as must read above. For the exciting TheAppFuel project. And last but not least, for the guest post on his newsletter about the future of consumer social.

• For those in the health & fitness space, the “Future of fitness” report from Apptopia might be relevant. Loved that microcopy of theirs:

• If you reached that far (congrats) and you’re still on time, there’s a busy schedule for events this Wednesday 21st with App Growth Summit SF, Tea on: Mobile Growth and Mobile on Air. Exactly the kind of situation when I’m happy to be a growthgems.co subscriber!

👔 Job hunting

Unless specified otherwise, reach out to me for an warm intro

• If you’ve missed MADV 001, there’s still a few hot matchs to be made, among which 2 mid-level & senior positions whom I’ll be working directly with.

• For the entrepreneur minded of you, I got word of a great business opportunity to join a promising app very early: Barcelona/Remote, powerful technical cofounder, experienced and wealthy backers behind, very hot market. DM for details.

• My friends at AppAgent are looking for a senior marketer to lead their small, efficient team collaborating with many exciting apps & games. A position with big learnings & good vibes.

• Some more job offers I’m not connected with but may be relevant to you at Tally (Lifecycle), Tilting Point (ASO), MobileAction (ASO), Playstack (UA), ReadySet (Acc. manager), Twigeo (UA), BoomBit (monetization), Fyber (PM), SimpleHabit (growth designer), Jump Ramp Games (UA).

Share the buzz & tell your friends. In the meantime, the conversation continues on Twitter. Feedback: @thomasbcn / thomasbcna -at - gmail

Previously, on MADV… S01E01 was good for feedback and last minute tweaks (emoji yay! typo nay!). This new episode covers October 1-9th. I tried to be shorter, but I failed again.

🤓 Must reads!

When I don’t find 10x content, I’ll just keep this blank.

• Phiture often publishes very high quality posts, and @Nadir’s coverage on how to run Youtube influencer marketing for games is no exception

🤳 First party content

This newsletter features primarily other people’s content, on purpose. Once in a while, I do publish stuff myself:

• Nothing new this week, but I’m preparing 2 fresh pieces of content, one of which is a prezo on subscription apps to be showcased live at MAMASaoPaolo on Wednesday 15/10 (free signup). As usual with public event, I’ll post the slides on my Slideshare, feel free to browse older ones in the meantime.

🔥 What’s hot, October 2020

• Up & to the right: SensorTower was quick to release his Q3 figures to beat AppAnnie to the punch. Some interesting highlights:

  • Store revenue keeps soaring with $19b for the Appstore alone (not factoring taxes & refunds): +10% from Q2 and +31% from last year

  • The AppStore ARPD is over 6x higher than the PlayStore’s (and the gap is even bigger from non gaming, but that’s not disclosed)

  • TikTok is killing it on IAP, not even mentioning its soaring ad revenue (also: now #3 non-porn web domain according to Cloudflare!)

  • 9/10 of the top grossing are video/streaming. The outlier is Tinder.

• iOS App Clips are killing it. My friend Leopold saw his Motivation App climb to the top #5 spot of the Appstore (Hat tip from the private subclub.app). Branch’s mobile growth newsletter also mentions other nice examples that you might check for inspiration: Emoji Sudoku, Scribble Together, Parcel app, CardPointers, SmartGym, ChibiStudio, SignEasy’s eSignature, Doc Scanner

• The Antitrust Subcommittee has released its report on big tech, and it’s quite straight to the point. Two excellent sources covering the crunchy bits of the 449 pages report are the highly recommended Matthew Stoller’s newsletter BIG and Alisson Schiff’s piece on AdExchanger. No action is being taken yet (the EU is also all-fart no-poo on this, while both India and China launched new probes against Google), but the contrast with the patronizing tone of monopolists makes it extremely insightful.

• What does this have to do with apps anyway? I published a thread on the app-world related quotes, once again highlighting how Google is abusing monopolies to create further moats and undermine any competition. I still have hopes that in the long term either Android, Youtube, Admob or all three will get splitted from Search and we can all forget the UAC nightmares.

• Combining the Sensortower & #antitrust news into one:

• Eric’s MDM Syndicate announced its first investment in @maorsa’s INCRMNTL. I couldn’t put my hands on the beta, but this is very promising in the perspective of the death of deterministic attribution.

• Talking attribution, I think I forget to mention last week that 28-days attribution is dead on FB

• Sure, you can use the well-hidden exclusion lists, but how many advertisers have been buying their own cross-promo traffic for years?

• Lots of debate in France around adoption: Barcelona-based Pickaso digged into tracing apps download figures:

☑️ The subscription corner

• Adjacent.vc’s Nico has a 2-tweets post on subscription pricing well worth a look:

• Not app-specific, but MemoHub’s Clement Vouillon also used the short video format to share his thoughts on subscriptions upselling tactics:

• Hidden in the comments of the above tweet, I’m bullish on upselling additional goods (both digital & physical) to existing subscribers, please send over to me examples you’re seeing around! One is the SWEAT shop, although I’m not sure about that naming…

• If you read too fast above, sign up for MAMA SaoPaolo where I’ll share some tips & benchmarks on subs apps this Wednesday.

• The latest unicorn subs app is killing it. You may remember Strava recently upped its subscription game (covered by MADV-network Fede Behrens & growth.design)? In 13% of the year, it made 39% of its revenue, according to Apptopia. Strava is rumored to be in unicorn-level fundraising at the moment.

  

💀 The IDFA corner

• I haven’t heard many (new) news around IDFA this week for once… but Apple reviewers not being aware that the IDFA & ATT changes are postponed until January is biting some devs who can’t release… In this example, it happened for 2 releases in a row. FAIL.

• Also a reminder: if you’re testing ATT implementation to measure consent rate, be very careful to do it on a small sample (or better, use a fake/soft prompt instead! Which.is against guidelines btw), as firing ATT will block you from accessing IDFA from the (majority?) of non-consenters.

💡 Worth following

aka: where I get my sources from

• Shamanth Rao has some amazing guests in his regular UserAcquisition Show. I admit I’m several episodes late at the moment (since must-subscribe growthgems.co is temporarily on hold 😢) so I’ll let you pick your topic/episodes.

• RevenueCat clone Qonversion.io has a fantastic collection of 78 app onboardings

• “Ad Tech Could Be the Next Internet Bubble”: WIRED has a provocative piece from Xoogler Tim Hwang: "The scariest thing about microtargeted ads is that they just don’t work - Despite the extent of surveillance tech, a lot of the data that fuels ad targeting is garbage". Looking forward to checking his book (Simon Andrew’s FIX newsletter also has a strong quote on the efficiency of long tail programmatic)

  

• The ConsumerAcquisition blog has half badly salesy, half high-quality content on FB Ads. Their latest blog talks about running the new UAC-like “AAA” campaigns alongside regular ones (remember those, where marketers can do more than upload videos?)

• Dan Hockenmaier & Lenny Rachitsky’s content is more often than not high value and candidates for the must read section. As usual app-unrelated, but this FirstRound post provides good strategic framework thinking about growth channels.

Share the buzz & tell your friends

See you next week - or later, if I can’t make it.

Feedback: @thomasbcn / thomasbcna -at - gmail

🤓 Must reads!

• UA is dead but creative is king: this month must-read contender is AppAgent’s ACE creatives framework

• I intend to keep this newsletter (mostly) about app marketing, but this post about getting promoted is just too good not to read. Hard truths most try to deny and several among of the reasons I decided to go self-employed.

🤳 First party content

This newsletter features primarily other people’s content, on purpose. Once in a while, I do publish stuff myself:

• ASA automation tool SearchAdsHQ posted some of my opinions on the channel, as well as several other interesting people’s (Nadir Garouche, Johannes Von Cramon, Andrea Raggi…)

• I participated in the super cool first episode of Admiral’s Play2Grow where you may have seen me crash cars in Art of Rally. I dont think that was recorded though…

🔥 What’s hot, September 2020

• More IDFA drama… After FB “sub-optimal” - I’m told this is how Googlers calls a pile of crap - official solution, rumors araised that Apple may have had so much pushback they could postpone. I voted for bullshit, and once again I was wrong, as after large gaming companies join the vendors’ whining club, Apple did realize their solution will harm its new focus on growing services (vs hardware). IDFA deprecation is postponed (for real), as reported by the always reliable Alex Heath. See you in January, most likely just as unprepared as we all were early September.

• The Taboola-Outbrain merger is cancelled. If you’re looking into diversifying away from the duopoly while avoiding the programmatic jungle, Sandra Wu released more content about this untapped channel. Sandra’s the ultimate master of this, reach out to her for advice.

• Bad news for all fitness apps out there: Apple is their new competitor with Fitness+ at $9.99/m

• Place your bets! AppSumer published some interesting figures about how app’s UA media mix evolved in 2020. TLDR: FB still get 50+% of iOS budgets. UAC money comes mostly from its cheap & dirty inventory on Android, even hard-to-scale ASA remains bigger on iOS. TikTok far off behind Snap for now.

  

• More fancy icons, less actionable data: Google is killing the legacy Play Console on November 2, and developers are pissed to see the organic/paid split disappear, while the promised exports are still missing. Many people are lost looking for ways to reconcile UAC & console data. In the midst of such chaos, Google had the balls to send an insulting “Thank you for switching to the new Google Play Console” email.

• iOS adoption seemed to grow super fast early on, but stall after?! Latest figures from Mixpanel available here.

• EPIC has acquired Kids adtech SuperAwesome. Happy to get feedback if you have experience on this network.

• Apps killing it this month: Pinterest downloads are growing even faster than its share price (thanks to iOS14), while Discord is early on the “second wave” (thanks to Among us?)
  

☑️ The subscription corner

• If you’re still running paid apps (?!), my friends at RevenueCat (which is growing like crazy and just raised $15m to accelerate) published a guide to switching to subscriptions

• Subs app got excited with Apple “offer codes”. Still some concerns about the UX by seeing some ugly pre-app store screens…

• Hypercasuals moving to the subscription space? with the help of MADV friends, I located a few of them (most notably from Homa), more examples very welcome

• GBP’s updated slides on subscriptions (not apps specifics) was released

• Not fully app related either, but @nbt is on a publishing spree about consumer subs. This one is a good place to start. Like Adjacent.vc says: a great indicator for consumer apps is 50+% payment retention in year 2 (pricepoint & vertical bias applies)

  

• But then again it's not that simple: the 85/15 split in 2nd year is not as impactful as one would think, because of massive churn, as RevenueCat CEO reveals

• Impressive milestone: Babbel has sold 10m subscriptions cumulatively. I wonder how many of those were off-stores…

• I strongly believe you should take subscriptions benchmarks with high caution, but @parsa published some decent ones

💀 The IDFA corner

• Great quote from MDM’s Eric: “The IDFA is the hydrocarbon of the ads industry. But it takes time to transition away toward a ‘green energy’ measurement”. Later completed in a post.

• FB finally releases its “solution” for iOS14: 9 campaigns max, almost no targeting, no VO, no VTA, no creative report, mandatory SDK, all measurement through SkAdnetwork. The floor is the limit! Not sure where that leaves MMPs here, but blackboxing even further can’t be good for advertisers. I’m probably wrong again: $FB up 5% within hours after :facepalm:

• Also FB: Facebook *may* kill the audience network after IDFA deprecation and focus solely on first-party inventory. Mixing first/third party inventory was never a good idea any. Btw I recently discovered its finally possible to target the AN without the feed now. Yay

• Eric Seufert decrypts that infamous FB FAQ pdf that leaked for you (also here)

• Some actionnable stuff from 2ndPotion’s Kevin Bravo in the Mobile UA show: how to deal with conversion values in SKA (check also his YouTube tutorial). The only solid content on the topic I’ve seen alongside Tenjin clients workshops.

• A rare contrarian opinion on IDFA deprecation: let’s rip off the band-aid ASAP in the must-follow Deconstructor of Fun

• IDFA: apps moving to the web? mmmm…
  We may finally have passed the denial & anger stages, entering bargaining now: developers think they might move their budget to Android - hardly profitable for anyone in the subscription space - and the ever promise of the web and it’s 1/10 fee (Stripe and other competitors with worse UX will charge about 3% of your transactions). Not so easy fellows… I’ve failed at executing this twice myself (worse unit econ). Check Eric’s thread on the topic.

• Early (biased) data shows our assumptions may be completed wrong. Consent could be much higher, LAT too (or maybe not, that dataset wasn’t quite reliable), but CPM may drop much less than expect… :popcorn:

• Timing is everything: the same day Apple announced the IDFA deprecation delay, they published (on Youtube…) a video ad about iPhone’s privacy.

• More future-forward content from Eric: what would GAID deprecation look like. While I posit that Google would delay this move, a few reasons detailed there make a compelling case for its likelihood, as it could bring the garden walls even higher

• MMPs are starting to showcase their dashboards. Ping me in DM with your own experience. Even more so: how are you you testing this, given the lack of support from networks? btw, I’m also interested to share consent popup testing experineces in private and will try to publish content on this later this quarter.

🧼 Dirty little secrets in mobile

• Mintegral (Mobvista owned) SDK, which is used by apps generating 9-digits monthly downloads, includes malicious functionality leaking user data and opens the door for ad fraud through last minute click injection. Initially reported by Snyk, read also John Kostner in Forbes. Nice detail to turn off the feature if simulated/debugged/rooted/proxy’d.

• Less covered by the press, but Jiguang’s (PN) SDK - and its 37.2b cumulatived installs across 1.36b devices - also did some creepy data collection in the background.

💡 Worth following

(aka: where I get my sources from)

• #Hooked: The awesome growth.design looked briefly into TikTok addictive feed mechanics

• AppAgent is releasing regular episodes of “Ad Eaters” showcasing creative creatives. Check S01E02 here. Good job Tina

• The Cohort: 5 mobile marketing stories daily. Some gold there.

👔 Job hunting

Unless specified otherwise, reach out to me for an warm intro

• Paris-based profitable, fast (organic-led) growing subs app is looking for both a CMO & a COO. Small team, big growth ahead

• Sweden Fishbrain looking for a CRM/email freelancer, Braze experience a must.

• London ProductMadness is looking for a UA team lead (contact Claire Rozin)

• To my surprise MMPs keep hiring like tomorrow’s sun will shine as in July in Mallorca. Among many other offers. I know Appsflyer’s Berlin team enough to think it’s a good place to be.

• TFT app Tacter is hiring multiple technical roles. “Own product, full remote, small team.”

• Femtech is about to explode and Sexual wellness & women empowerment app Emjoy is looking for a UA manager in Barcelona, partial remote OK.

• Phiture is hiring a Head of Marketing in Berlin. Great company culture there
  

That’s it folks for September!

Feedback: @thomasbcn / thomasbcna -at - gmail
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