Metrics That Deceive: High eCPM and Low CPI Don’t Guarantee Profitability
High eCPM and low CPI mean nothing for profitability. Both are gross, averaged, and time-lagged. eCPM hides falling…
Articles by Oleg Shlyamovich
Hybrid Monetization 2026: Adapting Your User Acquisition for a Blended IAA + IAP Model
Your UA team is busy chasing D7 ROAS. Product rolls out new IAP bundles. Ad ops keeps adjusting interstitial floors. Each team is optimizing on its own, and the player ends up stuck in the middle. They get hit with ads before they even see a purchase offer. Or they run into a paywall when all they wanted was a rewarded video. Hybrid monetization tossed out the old playbook. You cannot just pick ads or IAP now. The studios that win in 2026 run both at the same time for every player. Now every user has two lifetime value curves, not one. Mediation decides who sees ads, how often, and under what rules. This piece covers where studios slip up when they try to add hybrid monetization to a UA plan that only thinks about one thing. It shows how one mid-core studio rebuilt its stack using entitlement checks and frequency caps for different player groups. There is also a five-step sequence for setting up mediation without ruining the player experience.
CAS.AI Launches Referral Program
Grow Together: Introducing the CAS.AI Referral Program Scale your revenue beyond your own games with the new CAS.AI Referral Program. We’re turning community trust into a powerful third growth engine for mobile developers. How it works: • Earn Passive Income: Receive 1% of your referred partner’s ad revenue every month for a full year. • Performance Boost: Refer five or more active partners in a single month to jump your rate to 1.5%. • Guaranteed Start: Your first month’s bonus is guaranteed, with no revenue thresholds applied. • Simple Setup: Partners just enter your account name when signing up at cas.ai/company. Whether you are a studio founder, a mediation partner, or a publishing expert, you can now turn your professional network into recurring yield. [Read the Full Article] Ready to start earning? Log in to your dashboard to find your account name and start referring today.
The Mobile Game Publishing Reality
This article breaks down the brutal math: only 1 in 300 indie games reaches $30,000/month, compared to 1 in 10 for publisher-backed titles. The reason comes down to three structural gaps: marketing budgets too small to fuel growth, no predictive analytics to guide user acquisition, and compounding disadvantages in CPI and ARPDAU that make breaking even nearly impossible.
ILRD Is Not a Setting. It’s the Foundation of Your Monetization Stack.
ILRD isn’t just a setting. It’s the base of your monetization stack. If you’re still looking at yesterday’s aggregate revenue and calling it “performance,” you’re flying blind. In modern user acquisition (UA), seeing $27,000 in daily revenue doesn’t tell you whether your campaigns are profitable, whether your ad frequency test is working, or whether your cheapest advertising channel is quietly hurting lifetime value (LTV). Impression-Level Revenue Data (ILRD), which measures revenue earned per individual ad impression, changes that. It connects every ad impression to a real user, specific device, and the original traffic source, turning return on ad spend (ROAS) optimization, analyzing groups of users over time (cohort analysis), and combining ads with in-app purchases (hybrid monetization) into measurable systems instead of relying on educated guesses. But IRLD isn’t just about turning it on. Waterfall floor math, bidding mechanics, alternative stores like RuStore, and Meta's platform restrictions can introduce discrepancies that quietly corrupt your signal and your UA decisions. In the full article, we break down what’s normal, what’s fixable, and what’s catastrophic. We also show you how to verify your IRLD before every build. If you’re using target Return on Ad Spend (tROAS) in 2026, this isn’t optional reading.
Mobile App Monetization Under Siege: Maturing Algorithms Kill Organic Growth as User Acquisition Takes the Crown
ASO and paid user acquisition have merged into a single growth system as store algorithms focus on product quality, Apple expands ad placements, and organic-only strategies lose ground inside the competitive app economy of 2025. Mobile marketing entered 2025 at a crossroads. The rules that governed app growth for years - organic optimization here, paid acquisition there - no longer hold. Apple Search Ads rolled out new placements, user behavior shifted in unexpected ways, and competition intensified across every category. The result? ASO stopped being a standalone discipline practiced in isolation and became inseparable from the entire product and marketing funnel.
January, as strong as Black Friday: record UA efficiency at CAS.ai
In mobile games, January has long had a reputation as a “dead” month. Once the holidays are over,…
App Monetization Guide
Making money from an app is not as simple as flipping a switch. You need a whole toolkit. Ads, in-app purchases, subscriptions, and mixing them together all come with their own twists. What actually works depends on your app and the people using it. This guide walks you through every model that is actually worth your time. I will show you how in-app ads and mediation work in practice, where in-app purchases and subscriptions fit in, and why hybrid monetization is taking over in 2026. You will see how to choose a strategy based on your app, your platform, and your region. I will also break down the five metrics that really matter and the common mistakes that quietly put a lid on revenue for most teams. Let us look at some real numbers. One CAS.AI publisher, Fail Games, saw their revenue jump by about 80 times after it switched to a hybrid setup with both ads and in-app purchases, using mediation to manage the ads. Another publisher went from making just four dollars a day to eighteen thousand euros a month, simply by adding mediation. Here is how they did it.
What Is eCPM? Formula, Benchmarks & How to Increase It │CAS.AI
If you're a publisher, eCPM (effective cost per mille) is the revenue you earn for every 1,000 ad impressions. It's calculated with a simple formula: divide total ad revenue by total impressions, then multiply by 1,000. Unlike CPM, a fixed price that advertisers agree to upfront, eCPM reflects what you actually earned after accounting for fill rate, bids, and everything else. But the number alone means little without context. A $1.50 eCPM for a banner in Latin America is not the same as a $1.50 eCPM for rewarded video in the US. Format, geography, platform, and seasonality all move the needle. For publishers, the most reliable way to push eCPM higher? Competition. The more networks bidding on each impression in real time, the better your realized revenue. Publishers who switch to independent mediation typically see revenue per user jump 1.5–2x. That's not theory; that's what the data shows.
Mobile Game Publishing: The Growth Workflow We Use at CAS.AI
Mobile game publishing at CAS.AI is built for scaling mobile games with a data-driven system: CPI→ROAS UA, hybrid monetization (bidding + waterfall), ASO A/B tests, and creative iteration. Learn the baseline metrics we require and the workflow we use to scale profitably into Tier-1 geos.
Discover Growth Potential with CAS.AI A/B Testing
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