How Much Do Mobile Games Make Per Ad?

If you search for a straight answer to this question, you’ll find a number somewhere between $0.50 and $50. That range is technically accurate and almost completely useless.

What a mobile game earns per ad depends on which format you’re running, which platform your users are on, where in the world they live, what genre your game is, how your mediation stack is set up, and what time of year it is. Change any one of those variables and your revenue per impression changes with it, sometimes by a factor of ten.

This article breaks down each of those variables with actual benchmark data. If you’re a game developer trying to understand what your ad revenue should look like, or why it’s lower than the numbers you keep reading about, this is the full picture.

First: How Ad Revenue in Mobile Games Is Actually Measured

Before getting into numbers, it’s worth grounding the question itself. The industry does not think in “revenue per ad.” The standard metric is eCPM, which stands for effective cost per mille, where mille means 1,000. eCPM tells you how much revenue you earn for every 1,000 ad impressions served.

The formula:

eCPM = (Total Ad Revenue / Total Impressions) × 1,000

So if your game generated $50 from 10,000 impressions, your eCPM is $5.

From eCPM, you can back-calculate to a per-impression figure by dividing by 1,000, so a $5 eCPM equals $0.005 per impression. But eCPM is the number you’ll see in every dashboard, benchmark report, and network agreement, so that’s the unit we’ll use throughout.

One thing to understand early: eCPM is not a fixed rate that ad networks pay you. It’s an output metric that reflects the combined effect of how much advertisers are bidding for your inventory, how well that inventory fills, and how engaged your users are. Two games on the same network, in the same genre, can have meaningfully different eCPMs based on ad placement, session length, and user quality.

For a broader primer on how in-app advertising works, that’s worth reading before going further.

eCPM Benchmarks by Ad Format

Ad format is the single biggest driver of eCPM. The difference between the lowest-earning and highest-earning formats is not marginal. It’s multiple orders of magnitude.

Here are the current benchmarks based on Q4 2024 and Q1 2025 data:

These are broad ranges, and the specifics of each format matter a lot.

Banner Ads

Banners are the lowest-earning format in mobile games, and the gap between them and everything else is significant. Average eCPM sits around $1.50 globally for Android. On iOS, banner rates are often lower, with US iOS banner eCPM recorded at $0.27 in recent data.

The reason is simple: banners have low viewability and almost no engagement. They exist in a game session as visual noise that most players train themselves to ignore. Advertisers know this, so they bid accordingly.

Banners aren’t worthless. For games with very high session counts and daily active users, banner impressions accumulate at scale, and the fill rate is typically high because demand for banner inventory is broad. But if you’re relying on banners as a primary revenue format, the ceiling is low.

Interstitial Ads

Interstitials are full-screen ads shown at natural breaks in gameplay, typically between levels or sessions. They earn meaningfully more than banners because they demand attention: the player can’t proceed without at least seeing the ad, which drives completion and engagement metrics that advertisers value.

Global eCPMs for interstitials range from $3 at the low end to $13 in top-tier markets like the US. The US specifically leads interstitial rates at $11.06 on Android and $9.58 on iOS. Canada, Australia, Denmark, and Switzerland follow in the top tier. The variance here is almost entirely geographic, which is addressed in detail below.

The tradeoff with interstitials is frequency. They’re the format most likely to frustrate players when overused. This is not a soft concern: games using fewer than 3 interstitial ads per session retain 27% more users than games that exceed that threshold. Revenue per impression goes up when you show them less but at better moments.

Rewarded Video Ads

Rewarded video is the highest-performing standard format in mobile gaming, and the reason is opt-in. The player chooses to watch a video in exchange for something of value: extra lives, in-game currency, a continue, a power-up. Because the user initiated the interaction, completion rates exceed 95%, which is significantly higher than any non-opt-in format. Advertisers pay a premium for guaranteed completion.

Q4 2024 US benchmarks: iOS rewarded video hit $19.63 eCPM and Android hit $16.49. Global averages sit between $15 and $25 depending on region. 78% of mobile gamers say they willingly watch rewarded video for in-game benefits, making this the format with the best combination of user sentiment and advertiser demand.

For most casual and hybrid-casual games, rewarded video should be the core monetization format. It earns more per impression, it doesn’t damage retention when implemented well, and it creates a value exchange that players generally accept.

Playable Ads

Playables are interactive mini-demos: a 15 to 30-second snippet of gameplay that a user can actually interact with before seeing a call to action. They’re primarily used for user acquisition rather than monetization, but publishers who carry playable inventory earn strong eCPMs in the $10 to $30 range.

The premium comes from advertiser intent. UA teams pay more for playable inventory because users who engage with a playable ad and then install have meaningfully higher retention and LTV than users who installed from a static or video creative. That quality signal is priced in.

Offerwall Ads

Offerwalls are a different category entirely. Rather than a single ad unit shown mid-session, an offerwall is a page of tasks a player can choose to complete for in-game rewards: install another app, reach a certain level, complete a survey, sign up for a service. The player opts in, completes the task, and earns the reward.

The eCPMs are dramatically higher than any other format: $240 to $1,670 on Android, depending on app genre. This is not an error. Because each offer represents a completed action with commercial value (an install, a subscription, a lead), advertisers pay per conversion rather than per impression, and those conversions are worth a lot. The eCPM figure simply represents what that translates to on a per-1,000-impressions basis.

The tradeoffs are real. Offerwalls require careful integration to avoid disrupting the game economy. If completing offerwall tasks gives players too much currency, it can devalue the IAP side of your monetization. They also tend to work best in games where players have a reason to want large amounts of in-game currency, which limits the genres where they fit naturally. For a complete breakdown, see What are Offerwall Ads? and if you’re evaluating which networks to use, Top 9 Offerwall Ad Networks covers the field.

iOS vs. Android: The Platform Split

Five years ago, iOS was the higher-earning platform by a wide margin. Publishers focused their optimization efforts on iOS because the eCPMs were better and the user base spent more. That picture has meaningfully shifted.

In Q1 2026, Android accounts for 57% of total mobile game ad revenue share versus iOS at 43%. That’s a near-complete reversal from 2019, when iOS held 63% and Android held 37%.

The cause is Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) rollout in 2021. When ATT launched, most iOS users opted out of tracking when presented with the permission prompt. Without the ability to target users based on cross-app behavioral data, advertisers lost confidence in iOS inventory. Bid prices dropped. Revenue per impression fell. Publishers who had built their monetization around iOS eCPM saw immediate declines that persisted.

Android never had an ATT-equivalent policy, so targeting data remained intact and advertiser confidence stayed higher. Over time, Android’s share of ad revenue climbed while iOS’s fell.

The nuance: iOS still often earns higher eCPM per impression in many formats. US iOS rewarded video at $19.63 versus Android at $16.49 in Q4 2024 shows that iOS users are still more valuable to certain advertisers. But the volume advantage has swung decisively to Android.

What this means in practice for a game developer: if your game skews heavily Android, your revenue share is now closer to market norm. If you’re iOS-heavy and haven’t optimized your ATT opt-in flow, you’re likely leaving money on the table, because every iOS user who grants permission is worth considerably more to advertisers than one who doesn’t.

Geography: The Variable Most Developers Underestimate

Of all the factors that determine mobile game ad revenue, geography is the one that surprises developers most. Two games with identical ad setups, identical DAU counts, and identical format mixes can produce radically different eCPMs based purely on where their users are located.

Here’s the US rewarded video benchmark for context: $12.91 on Android and $13.18 on iOS. For the top 20 countries globally, Android rewarded eCPMs range from $3.31 at the lower end to $12.91 at the top. That’s a nearly 4x difference between the best and worst markets in the top 20, and that’s before you get to emerging markets, which sit well below even those lower figures.

Tier 1 Markets (US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany)

These are the highest-paying markets across every format. The US leads across all formats by a significant margin. For interstitials specifically: US Android hits $11.06, Canada hits $8.64, Australia $6.65, Denmark $6.34. Western European markets like Germany and the UK earn solid eCPMs, with Germany notable for posting some of the strongest growth in 2025 across multiple formats.

If a meaningful share of your DAU is from these markets, your blended eCPM will be pulled upward significantly.

Tier 2 Markets (Japan, South Korea, Western Europe)

Japan and South Korea sit among the top globally for many formats. Japan’s interstitial eCPM has historically exceeded $10 and its banner eCPM leads the world in that category. Japan also held 11% of iOS ad revenue share in Q1 2026, up from 9% the prior quarter, indicating growing importance.

Western European markets outside Germany and the UK earn moderate eCPMs: rewarded video in the range of $3 to $6 in prior years, with growth trending upward.

Tier 3 and Emerging Markets (Southeast Asia, India, Latin America, Middle East)

The gap here is wide. Latin America’s rewarded video eCPM on Android sits around $2.00, comparable to Southeast Asia. Banner eCPMs in these regions can be as low as $0.15. India saw broad eCPM decreases across most formats in the 2025 analysis, with only Android rewarded video as a minor exception.

This does not mean users from these markets have no value. Total volume can be significant: Subway Surfers alone saw 38 million installs in India in 2024. And growth trajectories in Southeast Asia and the Middle East are strong. But the revenue per impression today is a fraction of what Tier 1 markets produce.

The practical implication: a game developer whose user base is 70% India and Southeast Asia is not competing for the same advertiser demand as a developer whose users are 70% US and UK. The benchmark eCPMs you read in industry reports almost always reflect Tier 1 markets. If your geo mix looks different, your actual eCPM will too, and that’s not a reflection of a broken setup.

Understanding your geographic distribution is therefore a prerequisite for interpreting your own eCPM data honestly. See the Global Mobile Gaming App Market Report for context on where mobile gaming growth is happening regionally.

How Game Genre Affects Ad Revenue

Genre is not just a product decision. It directly determines what percentage of your revenue comes from ads, which formats work in your game, and what eCPMs you can realistically target.

Hyper-Casual

Hyper-casual games are 90% dependent on ad revenue. The entire monetization model is built around high-frequency ad exposure: short sessions, many interstitials between levels, rewarded video for second chances. There’s no meaningful IAP layer because the games are simple enough that players don’t invest deeply enough to pay for progression.

The model works because the volume is enormous. Hyper-casual games consistently top download charts globally. Hyper-casual remained the leader in downloads in 2025 with 22 billion downloads. The revenue per user is low, but when you’re serving millions of users and running 3 to 5 ads per session, the aggregate adds up.

The challenge: hyper-casual is the genre where eCPM floor rates matter most, because even small changes in fill rate or CPM have outsized effects on total revenue. The competitive pressure on these titles is also high because the barrier to copy a mechanic is low.

Casual and Puzzle

Casual and puzzle games sit in a hybrid position: approximately 50% of their revenue comes from ads and 50% from in-app purchases. The ad format that performs best in this genre is rewarded video, specifically “rewarded moves” placements where players earn extra turns or boosters in exchange for watching a video. This placement works because it’s contextually relevant to the game state: a player who just ran out of moves has strong motivation to watch a 30-second video rather than quit or pay.

Rewarded ads contribute 45% of ad revenue across casual titles, making it the top-performing format in the genre. Puzzle games also have some of the highest Day 30 retention rates among all mobile genres at 5.35%, which matters for ad revenue because retained users generate ongoing impressions.

Mid-Core and RPG

Mid-core games (RPGs, strategy, shooters) derive less than 15% of their revenue from ads. These games monetize primarily through in-app purchases: premium currencies, battle passes, cosmetics, progression unlocks. Ads in these titles tend to function more as retention tools than primary revenue sources, giving non-paying players access to rewarded content so they don’t churn.

The eCPMs available in mid-core can actually be higher because the users have demonstrated spending intent, which advertisers value. But the frequency is lower by design. Showing too many interstitials in a mid-core game breaks immersion and damages retention faster than it does in a hyper-casual context.

Strategy games generated $17.5 billion in total revenue in 2024, and RPGs generated $16.8 billion, but the majority of that is IAP-driven. Ad revenue as a share of that total is relatively small.

What Real Games Actually Earn: Scale Reference Points

Benchmarks are useful, but knowing what actual games earn puts the numbers in context.

Subway Surfers

Subway Surfers is one of the clearest large-scale examples of ad-first monetization in mobile gaming. The game had 28 million daily active users and 140 million monthly active users in 2024. It has been downloaded more than four billion times since launch and is essentially entirely ad-supported. Three-quarters of its player base is on Android.

At that scale, even modest eCPMs produce significant absolute revenue. With 28 million daily users watching rewarded video or seeing interstitials, the daily impression count is in the hundreds of millions. The exact ad revenue figure isn’t publicly disclosed, but the scale of the operation illustrates what ad-first monetization looks like when it works at the top end.

Uboat Attack (Voodoo)

For a more grounded example: Voodoo’s Uboat Attack maintained approximately $35,000 per week in revenue while serving around 500,000 active users. This is a more representative scale for successful but not blockbuster hyper-casual titles. At $35,000 per week, that’s roughly $1.8 million annually from a single hyper-casual title with half a million active users.

Working backward: $35,000 per week across 500,000 users implies a weekly revenue per active user of about $0.07. If those users each generate 5 to 10 ad impressions per day across a week, that’s 35 to 70 million weekly impressions. At $35,000 revenue, the implied blended eCPM is in the range of $0.50 to $1.00, consistent with a heavy interstitial and banner mix serving a global (non-Tier-1-heavy) user base.

These numbers illustrate the gap between format-level eCPMs and blended eCPMs. A game might have rewarded video earning $15+ eCPM, but if rewarded video only represents 20% of total impressions and the rest is interstitials and banners, the blended eCPM across all inventory will be much lower.

See the Top 25 Mobile Gaming Publishers and Developers by Revenue for broader context on how the biggest studios generate revenue.

The Variables That Move Your eCPM

Once you know your baseline, the question becomes: what actually controls where you land in the benchmark ranges? These are the specific levers.

Ad Format Mix

This is the most controllable variable. A game running only banners and interstitials will have a dramatically lower blended eCPM than one that also runs rewarded video and playables. The format that earns the most (rewarded video) also has the lowest friction in terms of user sentiment because it’s opt-in.

The challenge is that rewarded video requires a game design reason for the player to want to watch. You need something valuable enough to offer as a reward. Games that do this well build the reward mechanic into the core loop rather than bolting it on. “Watch an ad to continue” is a standard implementation. “Watch an ad to earn the in-game currency you’ve been saving for” is more integrated and typically sees higher uptake.

Frequency Capping

Showing more ads does not straightforwardly mean more revenue. Games using fewer than 3 interstitial ads per session retain 27% more users, and retention is what determines long-term ad revenue. A player you keep for 30 days will generate far more total impressions than a player you drove away on day three with aggressive ad frequency.

The right frequency varies by game. Fast session games (hyper-casual) can support higher interstitial frequency because each session is short. Long-session games (RPGs, strategy) need much more conservative pacing. The principle is consistent: optimize for session quality and retention, not impression count.

Platform Optimization

If you’re on iOS, the ATT opt-in rate directly affects what advertisers will pay for your inventory. Users who grant tracking permission are worth more to advertisers because they can be targeted with relevant ads, which drives up bid prices. Improving your opt-in rate through better timing, better messaging, or offering a reason to opt in (some developers explain what the permission does before the system prompt appears) directly improves iOS eCPM.

On Android, bidding competition has grown. In-app bidding over traditional waterfall setups is worth evaluating: bidding creates a real-time auction for each impression, which tends to surface higher bids than a static waterfall that prioritizes networks in a fixed order.

Mediation Stack

Your choice of mediation platform determines which demand sources compete for your inventory and at what rates. Google AdMob dominates Android demand with 28% market share. AppLovin leads iOS at 37%. Unity Ads and Mintegral hold meaningful shares on both platforms.

Running a single network is almost always suboptimal. Mediation platforms allow multiple networks to compete for each impression, and that competition raises the clearing price. The comparison between ironSource, AppLovin MAX, and AdMob is a useful starting point for evaluating which stack fits your scale and genre.

For a broader view of available platforms, Best 9 App Monetization Platforms and Best AdMob Alternatives cover the options in detail.

AI-Driven Optimization

AI-based ad personalization improved eCPM by 12% across Android platforms based on recent data. This covers dynamic floor pricing, optimal ad timing, format selection per user segment, and predictive models that identify the best moment in a session to show an ad. Showing an ad when a player just failed a level is different from showing it when they just succeeded. Timing affects completion rates, which affects advertiser satisfaction, which affects future bid prices.

This is an area where autonomous ad operations tools are starting to replace manual configuration. The decisions that used to require a dedicated ad ops hire, adjusting floors, updating waterfall order, testing placements, can now be handled by systems that react faster and test at a scale no human team can match. See How AI Agents Are Improving Ad Operations for more on what that looks like in practice.

Seasonality

Ad revenue is not flat across the year. Q4 is consistently the highest-earning quarter because advertiser budgets surge ahead of the holiday shopping season. More advertisers competing for inventory means higher bids and higher eCPMs across all formats. The lift can be significant: some publishers see Q4 eCPMs 30% to 50% above their Q1 baseline.

Q1 is typically the weakest quarter. Advertisers have exhausted their annual budgets in December and restart slowly in January. If you’re benchmarking your eCPM in January and comparing it to an industry report based on Q4 data, the gap is partly seasonal.

The Hybrid Monetization Shift and What It Does to Ad Revenue

This matters more than it might initially appear. The trend toward hybrid-casual games, ones that combine an ad-first structure with meaningful in-app purchase mechanics, is driving eCPM growth across the category.

The reason: when a game has users who make in-app purchases, advertisers value all of that game’s users more. Someone who has demonstrated spending intent is a higher-quality audience to reach. That drives up bid prices, which raises eCPMs for that game’s ad inventory, including impressions served to users who never spend a dollar.

Hybrid-casual projects showed significant growth in 2025, with total IAP revenue increasing 20% to $4.2 billion. The games that are winning on both dimensions, reasonable ad eCPMs and meaningful IAP conversion, are the ones that have integrated both systems thoughtfully rather than treating ads as a fallback for non-payers.

For pure hyper-casual games, the pressure is increasing. The eCPMs available to games with no IAP layer are competitive but not growing. Games that can introduce even light spending mechanics, cosmetics, a battle pass, a starter pack, tend to see their ad rates improve alongside their direct revenue.

Making Sense of Your Own Numbers

After going through all of this, here’s how to actually use it as a developer.

Your blended eCPM is a composite of every impression you serve across every format, platform, and geography. The headline benchmarks for rewarded video or offerwalls do not tell you what you’ll earn. They tell you what the best-case version of that format looks like in the best markets.

To interpret your own numbers honestly, you need to know:

Your geo mix. What percentage of your DAU is in Tier 1 markets (US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, Japan)? If it’s under 30%, your blended eCPM will be pulled down by the volume of lower-paying impressions even if your high-value users are generating strong eCPMs individually.

Your format split. What percentage of your total impressions are banners versus interstitials versus rewarded video? A game where 70% of impressions are banners has a fundamentally different eCPM ceiling than one where 40% are rewarded video.

Your genre benchmark. A hyper-casual game at $0.80 blended eCPM might be performing well relative to genre peers. A casual puzzle game at $0.80 is underperforming.

Your platform split and ATT status. iOS heavy without good ATT opt-in rates is leaving money on the floor. Android heavy without proper bidding competition is the same problem in a different form.

Your mediation setup. Single-network monetization is almost always leaving revenue behind. The incremental eCPM gain from adding a second or third demand source to a properly configured mediation setup is often meaningful enough to be felt immediately.

The gap between a developer earning $1 eCPM and one earning $5 eCPM on nominally similar games is usually explained by two or three of the variables above. It’s rarely a mystery once you look at the components.

The Numbers, in Summary

Global mobile game ad revenue reached $62.1 billion in 2025. Video formats drive 68% of that. The US alone accounts for $19.4 billion. That money does not distribute evenly across developers. It concentrates toward games with strong retention, good geographic distribution of high-value users, well-configured mediation stacks, and format mixes weighted toward opt-in and full-screen inventory.

The per-ad question doesn’t have one answer. A banner impression in India might be worth $0.0001. A rewarded video completion in the US might be worth $0.02. A completed offerwall task might be worth $1.00 or more. All three of those can happen in the same game in the same hour.

What moves the needle is understanding which levers you control, and those are: format mix, frequency strategy, platform optimization, mediation configuration, and the user quality signals you send to advertisers through your retention and engagement metrics. Geography and genre are constraints, not levers, but knowing where you sit in those dimensions tells you what’s realistic and what’s genuinely suboptimal about your current setup.