Balancing revenue and player experience in mobile games is more complex than it seems. In this interview, Ezgi Doğan shares practical insights on interstitial ad settings, using unfilled ad inventory strategically, and turning first-party data into actionable monetization. From common technical pitfalls to emerging AI-driven personalization, her advice can help you optimize both retention and CPM!
AppSamurai: In your article, you mentioned that standard interstitial templates (like 5+3+2) are often assumed to be the standard but aren’t always optimal. Do you recommend developers implement conservative settings, where the timer appears early or total video duration is shorter to optimize for player’s session depth or LTV prediction?
Ezgi Doğan: To be honest, today’s “standard” templates didn’t become standard because they were proven to be optimal, but because most developers aren’t really aware of what the current defaults are—and those defaults have quietly become the industry norm.
Networks with more aggressive default setups could offer better value to advertisers, so they gained a competitive edge. Over time, other networks followed to stay competitive, and that’s how we ended up where we are now: ads often not skippable until 15 seconds + at least 3 actions required by user, and users frequently finding themselves in the store with just a couple of unintended taps.
What’s interesting is that users are also getting used to this. In my recent experimentations across multiple titles, limiting skippable time of interstitials to even 10 seconds now causes fairly significant CPM drops. In the past we’d see up to 20% CPM drops; now I’m seeing cases where it’s closer to 40%, which makes it almost impossible to justify strict limits, because the retention lift is not strong enough to offset that loss.
From a pure UX angle, shortening the total duration doesn’t necessarily help, but making the ad skippable earlier almost always improves the experience. The problem is: that now also hurts monetization significantly.
So do I recommend more conservative settings?
Only to a point.
I still like a 5-second skip for the main video and instant skip on all end cards from a user-experience perspective—but in practice, I now suggest starting with 15 seconds total skippable time for interstitials, and testing from there. On iOS in particular, limiting too aggressively can have a very visible impact on revenue.
When teams go all-in on super-early skips or very short videos, I’ve seen CPMs drop up to 50%, especially on networks that are optimized for longer templates.
Overall, my recommendation is to experiment—and to do it by segment:
- For potential payers, conservative ad settings and stricter limits usually pay off.
- For the rest of your users, adjust step by step and track both revenue and retention.
And one important note: when you revert your changes, performance doesn’t bounce back in a day. So avoid very sharp, short-lived experiments and give the system time to stabilize before making conclusions.
AppSamurai: You spoke at Gamesforum about turning unfilled ad inventory into growth. Without giving away the entire talk again, were you leaning more toward using that space strategically for internal cross-promo and churn mitigation, or is there actually a monetization layer for “low-tier” or hard-to-fill traffic that most studios still overlook?
Ezgi Doğan: A bit of both — but my main point was that unfilled inventory is a massively underused asset.
Most studios think of cross-promotion only as UA support for new launches, but when you plug it into your waterfall correctly, it becomes much more strategic:
1. It helps with churn mitigation
You keep users inside your ecosystem instead of sending them to random low-quality ads — especially in older titles where churn is high and monetization is weak.
2. It offsets low-tier, hard-to-monetize geos
There absolutely is a monetization layer here that most teams overlook.
When you fill low-value impressions with house ads priced at $0.01, demand partners in your waterfall don’t know it’s internal. They just see another network “filling” at that price point.
That creates a competitive signal, and I’ve seen networks increase bids to stay competitive, which lifts CPMs across the stack.
3. And yes, it can improve revenue
It sounds counterintuitive, but cross-promo — when limited to truly unmonetized inventory — can actually push global CPMs up and stabilize pacing.
So rather than thinking of it as gap-filling, cross-promotion should be seen as a strategic layer in its own right — when set up correctly, becomes a multi-purpose tool: it boosts UA, keeps users in your ecosystem, and can even lift overall monetization in parallel.
AppSamurai: You mentioned that first-party data is a major opportunity for developers. From your perspective, what is the practical ‘first step’ for a developer to start leveraging that internal data rather than just leaving it sitting in their database?
Ezgi Doğan: The first step is actually much simpler than most teams think:
start by structuring your own user data into usable segments.
Most developers already sit on really strong first-party signals — session depth, pay propensity, churn risk, player type, genre affinity, ad sensitivity — but none of it means anything until it’s turned into targetable cohorts.
Once you carve out even a handful of core segments (new, at-risk, high-value, ad-sensitive, engaged non-payer, etc.), everything starts to unlock:
1. Better, smarter targeting
This is the most straightforward win.
You can immediately improve:
- rewarded placements
- personalized IAP offers
- dynamic paywalls & discounts
- personalized ad frequency
- cross-promo relevance
2. Actual monetization opportunities
First-party data isn’t only about targeting — it opens direct revenue doors too:
- direct deals for specific high-intent segments
- real-time in-app offers tied to player behavior
- brand-sponsored rewards and value exchanges
3. And yes, data you can actually monetize
Not raw user data — segments.
Partners increasingly look for publisher-owned audiences they can activate in a privacy-safe way.
So the practical, zero-complexity first step is very clear: define your core segments and make them accessible inside your marketing + monetization stack.
AppSamurai: With your roots in engineering, you see the ‘under the hood’ setup of monetization. How often do you find that a drop in CPM is actually a technical integration issue (latency, waterfall setup, end-card rendering) rather than a market demand issue?
Ezgi Doğan: Honestly, Way more often than teams think.
When I start working with new clients, I see technical causes in almost every single account.
A few patterns come up again and again:
- Rewarded ads requested way too early, which makes the inventory look low-value for advertisers and pushes CPMs down.
- Banner refreshes set far too aggressively, flooding the auction and hurting viewability.
- Waterfalls that are simply too long, causing slow ad loading, timeouts, and inconsistent supply and causing IVT.
These kinds of issues are usually some of the biggest reasons for low CPMs. It’s really important to look at your data with the supply–demand relationship in mind. More ad requests or more placements doesn’t automatically mean more revenue.
AppSamurai: Looking ahead, which emerging adtech innovations or monetization paradigms do you see fundamentally reshaping how developers approach monetization for mobile games? How should studios prepare to adapt their product and revenue strategies to these shifts?
Ezgi Doğan: The way I see it, ad quality is going to dominate 2026. Low-quality creatives are already creating real friction in user experience and overall performance, and we’re reaching a point where neither networks nor developers can afford to ignore it anymore.
I also feel that dynamic, player-specific experiences are finally becoming real with AI. Real-time personalization of monetization flows is actually possible now, and I’m hoping teams start taking much better advantage of it.
