Turning Ad Friction into Revenue at Wooga

Rewarded ads were a reliable revenue stream in June's Journey, but they created two problems: highly engaged and paying players found watching ads disruptive to their session, and every ad impression was capped at a fixed eCPM — putting a ceiling on how much revenue the game could earn from its most valuable players.

I owned the question of how to serve the most engaged player segment better — players who were already paying but churned from ad entry points. The challenge was replacing a low-margin ad revenue stream with something that outperformed it without hurting engagement.

I worked with a cross-functional team to implement Skips — a consumable ticket sold in the shop that let players instantly bypass a rewarded ad and claim its reward. The critical pricing decision: a single Skip had to clearly outperform the eCPM of the ad it replaced, even if that meant a higher price point than felt safe. Undercutting on price would have made the feature popular but quietly cannibalized ad revenue instead of growing it.

Skips shifted a meaningful share of the player base from ad views to direct purchases, lifting overall ARPU by 4% and improving lifetime value among core and paying segments — while removing a friction point that was hurting the experience for the game's most engaged players.