The pandemic has impacted businesses large and small and that applies just as well to online social casinos. Interestingly, the biggest change for them was that how they made money changed pretty drastically.
A recent report by AppsFlyer shares some incredible insights about how mobile apps fared this past year. If you’re a data junkie like me you love this kind of stuff.
AppsFlyer is a tool that can be used by app developers to help them track their app performance data.
They report that the number of app installs jumped 45% in 2020 as compared to 2019. That doesn’t seem surprising. Many of us turned to our phones for things to do while we were in lock downs, quarantining, or simply keeping ourselves home.
Obviously the data in this report only applies to the pool of information gathered by the developers that use this tool but that does appear to be a large enough number to give us some valuable information.
While the more casual games saw the highest growth in installations of their apps, social casino apps still saw year-over-year growth in their installs, too. Their growth rate went from 10% in 2019 to 27% in 2020.
What surprised me most, though, was that social casino apps saw a change in the source of the money they made during 2020.
We all know apps make money by either showing ads to users and getting them to click on those ads (called In App Advertising) or by having users purchase items that enhance game play (called In App Purchases).
My least favorite apps are those that show you an ad right in the middle of a spin or while you’re playing a slot.
Apparently I’m not alone because these types of apps saw their In App Advertising income drop in 2020 despite having more installs.
Instead, they saw growth in their In-App Purchase income.
In the US market income from In App Advertising dropped like a rock for social casino apps going from 22.8% in January 2020 to just 6.9% in August.
But In-App Purchases went up.
In January of this year only 3.3% of social casino users on Android devices made in-app purchases. That peaked at 4.6% in June and then leveled out to 4.4% in August.
For the same category purchases on iOS devices went from 4.8% to 6.2%.
That’s 29-33% growth in In-App Purchases. I don’t really know if they make more per transaction from an ad click vs. a purchase but my semi-educated guess would be a yes.
We also don’t know if these social casino apps measured in this report made intentional changes to their income models to reduce ad exposure and purposefully grow in app purchase income or not.
AppFlyers seems to think it might have more to do with ad-tiredness on our part.
“It appears that players had a lower tolerance for ads in 2020 and were willing to make more purchases than usual.” AppFlyers
I could understand people being more willing to buy virtual coins in order to extend their play this year. We all had more time to kill than normal.
No matter what drove the change, though, I hope that more social casinos switch away from high ad usage and focus more on creating truly valuable in-app purchase options. I think that provides a better gaming experience overall for users.