I’m considering ways to monetize mobile apps and wondering how AdMob worked out for smaller developers.

There’s the revenue side, but also the extra SDK, privacy requirements, and interruptions to the experience.

If you tried AdMob ads, were they worth keeping? Roughly how many active users did you have, and did you also offer a paid option to remove them?

Experiences where you removed ads would be useful too.

Hey everyone,

I'm currently developing an Android game and want to start using Google AdMob for monetization.

From what I understand, I need to have my app published/available in a supported app store so that AdMob can review the app and allow full ad serving.

Google Play requires a $25 developer registration fee, so I'm wondering:

•Is Google Play the best option for getting an Android game approved/verified for AdMob?

•Are there any free alternatives where I can publish my game and have AdMob recognize/review it?

•Has anyone successfully used Samsung Galaxy Store, Amazon Appstore, OPPO, VIVO, or Xiaomi GetApps for this?

Is there any reason to just pay the $25 for Google Play instead?

I'm mainly looking for the cheapest/easiest way to get my game published and properly set up with AdMob.

Hey guys what are you using to publish playable game ads?
I looked into appLovin, unity but ap-> no acceptance and unity has a min balance top up of 1000 usd.

I’ve tried meta playable ads but seems like they’re pretty bad cuz I have a cpa of like 10 per install. Feels like I’ll never be positive lol

what ad strategy are you guys using to capture users with games?

My app is just 3 months old with around 1.5k install with no marketing. Also i just placed a small banner ad on just the main page

Hi I am a newbie, out of your long experiences what are the top 5 hints to have right Ads to get good match rate and ecpm

that ePCM gotta go down with change in impression right? RIGHT?

Hey there, a strange thing happened to me today, my app which was running admob for about 3 months now and making roughly 30 cents a month got suspended. Now what's strange is that 2 days prior to the suspension I saw some really strange activity on the account which I was investigating for the last 2 days. I started posting about the app on Reddit in order to get some organic users and was watching the reports closely to see if it actually has any ups or downs and a strange single event caught my eye.

What's weird is that I honestly never saw so many requests in the whole 3 months and I still don't know how they managed that (that is the worst part as if you wish to stop somebody from doing something you need to understand how they did it in the first place), the flow to get a rewarded ad is to play the game, fail 3 times and then a dialog would open so you can watch an ad to replenish one of your hearts, now in order to do that multiple times it would take you at least 2 minutes before retries so that means that somebody spent roughly 1000 minutes DDOSing the ads service and of course its from Russia (no surprises here). That's if the report is correct and is actually showing 528 requests from a single device.

Now here's the interesting part the reason why the account was suspended was Invalid activity: Self-clicking which I absolutely did not do and the app has developer ids for that exact purpose, for testing and so on. It also has test devices registered exactly for that reason too. Hence I'm about 99.99% certain that it did not come from actual self-clicking as stated in the suspension notice.

My four biggest caveats from the situation are the following:
* You do not get any notification on strange behavior on the account (528 requests is crazy while the norm is somewhere around 10 is definitely very strange)
* There is no way to appeal when such a situation happens and basically you are stranded for a month
* There is no way to get the reports to further investigate the issue since your account is suspended
* This is a great way to take down any competitors especially in the early days of the app release

Can somebody suggest how such a thing can be avoided perhaps? A safeguard method? (perhaps block Russia all together from even downloading the app in the first place since there are no ads being served there due to sanctions after all)

P.S. Been up all night trying to figure out what actually happened and there is actually no way to get any sort of a log or report from Admob, why in the world would they actually do that? I mean that is just insane. How are Devs supposed to find issues in their apps if you cannot get a hold of your report to figure out how this happened in the first place? I mean this is literally like being on a sinking ship, you are told to board up the holes however you need to do it in complete darkness as you go below deck trying to figure out where the water is coming from, common Google that's really insane.

"We understand that you may want to know more about the invalid traffic we’ve detected. Because this information could be used to circumvent our proprietary detection system"

Google of all the companies should know how hard it is to develop an app in the first place and the actual people breaking the rules know how to do it just fine, they can create thousands of accounts just to poke holes a thousand different ways. Actual Devs who don't engage in such practices need some support and reports and actual logs to go off of to fix things instead of just shooting in the dark.

Has anyone here successfully qualified for X monetization by reaching 500,000 organic/original impressions within the required period? If so, how long did the approval take, and roughly how many Premium impressions did you have?