How to launch something you’ve never done before
This story might interest you if you:
work in the gaming industry
enjoy growth case studies
deal with ad monetization
are curious about making an extra $1M+ from the same audience
or just want to see how to dive into a completely new niche
Here’s the situation:
an old game with a huge audience that didn’t really like paying
ads made up 20–25% of revenue, mostly from Android players
the offerwall brought in 10–15% of ad revenue, which is barely noticeable in the overall revenue mix
The main problem: stagnant audience, stagnant ad revenue, and no idea what could change.
In modern mobile games, ad monetization is crucial, and there are many ad formats. One in particular stands out: offerwalls.
Offerwalls are where players complete tasks in exchange for in-game currency – install another game, make a purchase, or complete levels.
The goal: increase this revenue.
Step 1 – Start from zero
I had zero experience in ad monetization. I started by talking to experts:
interviewed dozen of ad monetization managers
spoke with colleagues from other companies
researched online (helped a bit)
asked partners about industry standards
GPT didn’t exist back then, so research took actual time.
Step 2 – Test a new provider
Turned out there were two most popular offerwall providers on the market. We decided to test new one. As it usually happens, the simplest solution brought the biggest result:
offerwall revenue grew 10–20x
offerwalls became 50% of ad revenue
total ad revenue jumped to 30-40% of total revenue of the game.
Big win. Offerwall B became the leading provider, and Offerwall A was forgotten. Fun fact: the company behind Offerwall A later bought the company behind Offerwall B.
That could’ve been the end of the case, but I’ll share the most interesting part next.
Step 3 – Generate new hypotheses
After this success, we generate new hypotheses:
are there even better offerwall providers? Test them all
what if we add as many other ad networks as possible with interstitial and rewarded formats and compare them?
what if we replace ad mediation (the engine optimising ad display)?
We tested all the providers we could find – none performed better than the current one, but that led to another idea.
Replacing mediation didn’t produce noticeable gains – only analytics and dev headaches.
Adding a dozen new ad networks – no A/B tests, but revenue seemed to rise slightly (+10-15%).
Growth x10-20 isn’t a typical case.
Step 4 – The double-offerwall idea
Most hypotheses failed, but one new offerwall provider showed promising results in A/B tests.
New hypothesis:
what if we have two offerwalls in the game?
and what if each gives different in-game currencies?
We ran multiple A/B tests:
2 offerwalls from the current provider, different currencies
2 offerwalls from different providers, same currency
2 offerwalls from different providers, different currencies
combinations mixed around
Winner: current offerwall + current currency + new offerwall + new currency.
Revenue from offerwalls +20-30%.
And I consider this +30% even more valuable than the initial x20, because it came from an unconventional idea that delivered a tangible result.
Interesting facts
Users who hadn’t paid in years started generating meaningful revenue.
Four analytics teams confirmed: offerwalls didn’t cannibalize in-app purchases.
Risks: resource inflation in-game.
Some players completed every task, even without needing the currency.
Takeaway
If it sometimes feels impossible to improve a metric – it usually isn’t.
You just need a radically different approach, and sometimes finding it comes down to luck.
