Scaling ARPDAU: Devsisters' success with Moloco’s in-app bidding SDK

About Devsisters

Devsisters, founded in 2007, is a South Korean mobile gaming powerhouse behind the globally successful Cookie Run franchise, including Cookie Run: OvenBreak and Cookie Run: Kingdom. With over 600 employees across four global offices, their games reach 200M+ users across  200+ countries.

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Challenge: Efficiently increasing revenue without impacting gameplay

For Devsisters Cookie Run games, while in-app purchases remain the primary revenue stream — in-app advertising is also a vital revenue driver. Optimizing ad revenue remains a delicate balance. Serve too many or low quality ads and risk a suboptimal user experience, but too little — can cause revenue challenges. Meanwhile, yielding the maximum revenue from a waterfall model required the team to optimize values each week and ongoing monitoring, which was time-intensive.

Like many publishers, Devsisters sought to experiment with the in-app bidding approach to address these challenges. Above all, Devsisters prioritized integrating ads that would not disrupt the gaming experience and carefully selected a reliable and efficient partner to achieve this goal. 

With previous success using Moloco’s waterfall SDK, Devsisters decided to test Moloco’s bidding SDK, supported by Moloco’s certification as a partner with AppLovin’s MAX and Unity’s LevelPlay.

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Solution: Doubling down on in-app bidding over waterfall

After seeing initial success using Moloco’s waterfall SDK for their game Cookie Run: OvenBreak,  Devsisters opted to test Moloco's in-app bidding with another major hit in their portfolio — the Cookie Run: Kingdom. To evaluate the impact of Moloco in-app bidding, the team set up an A/B test splitting traffic between the use of the SDK and without it. Almost immediately, they saw clear results showing the positive return of the SDK. Given the impact, Devsisters decided to continue using in-app bidding for OvenBreak and Kingdom. 

‍"We pride ourselves on bringing joy to our users' lives through our games — and so, our implementation of ads mustn't impact their experience. Based on our tests of Moloco's in-app bidding SDK, we were pleased to see noticeable increases in ARPDAU without impacting gameplay." — Moonjin Seo, Ad Monetization Manager at Devsisters

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Results: 10% increase in ARPDAU and valuable time saved using bidding

At the outset, Devsisters was pleased by the simplicity and straightforwardness of integrating the Moloco in-app bidding SDK. Furthermore, for both titles — Moloco achieved a 10% increase in ARPDAU — placing it amongst the top four performing ad networks for Devsisters.

Lastly, moving away from waterfall significantly reduced the operational oversight needed by the team — freeing the Devsisters' resources to work on strategic improvements rather than routine maintenance. 

‍"In hindsight, I wish we had transitioned to Moloco's in-app bidding sooner. The noticeable increase in ARPDAU was enough to convince us, but the added value of time saved not monitoring and managing a waterfall has improved our team's morale and enabled us to spend time working on more valuable projects." — Moonjin Seo, Ad Monetization Manager at Devsisters
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