In some games the user can pay up to $2.99 usd to not see the advertisements, paying dividends back to the advertising companies, but this alone cannot be enough to justify the ads. To decide to advertise via a specific app, they had to have looked at their prime prospects and saw an overlap with the game's player's demographics. Do they predict the habits of their prime prospects will stay consistent with that of the game they're currently playing? They certainly did not go on a limb and decide random games to advertise on, primary research had to have been done to decide which outlet is best.
So how do they know if it's truly effective advertising through this outlet? Focus groups and observations, experiments and surveys were most likely utilized to decide this. Focus groups and surveys will allow them to hear straight from the horse's mouth if the advertisement will ultimately be effective, where as experiments and observations will let them see how often the user pays attention to the advertisement and if they retained any information from it.
Personally, I'm tired of these advertisements when I'm just trying to pass the time on my phone, but I don't have the money to skip the ads, so I'll keep dealing with it. Occasionally I'll look further into an intriguing ad, but the majority of the time I'm jamming my finger on the corner of the screen frantically when the prompt comes up that I can finally skip.
This is very interesting Shane, I've never thought that maybe ads are actually hurting the apps in the end. I agree with you of course, I'm sick of the ads. But now that you bring it up, I think yes, ads definitely hurt the game. I know if I play a game and there are too many ads or they are not able to be skipped, I quit playing rather than buying the game. Or similarly, now that Facebook puts video commercials in the middle of popular videos, I just quit watching most of the time. Rather than helping the company from the ad, I think it more so just hurts the app.
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