DISQUS

Andrew Chen (@andrew_chen): Age (and ARPPU) ain’t nothing but a number: Data on how age impacts social gaming monetization

  • frinsen · 3 months ago
    Just to make it clear: ARPU per month?
  • Andrew Chen · 3 months ago
    average revenue per PAYING user per month
  • Susan Su · 3 months ago
    It's ARPPU (average revenue per PAYIING user), and yep, the data covers 1 month.
  • Ted Rheingold · 3 months ago
    Great post. Thx to Susan, Gambit & Andrew for posting.

    I have not been able to gather enough data, but I have a suspicion that adults with children are curtaining their entertainment-related online spending due to the recession even though they haven't reduced their childrens' budgets.

    If this is true and the economy rebounds on main street (whenever that is) I bet we'll see the overall spend of the 40+ crowd increase rapidly.
  • Andrew Chen · 3 months ago
    One potential implication is that social gaming is mostly made of 13-30yos anyway, and while the ARPU numbers are high for the 30+ set, it won't counteract the full MASS of young users ;-)
  • Kingsley Joseph · 3 months ago
    I'd love to see what the ARPU or ARPPU curve looks like. I suspect from anecdotal evidence and some conversations with industry insiders that a few outliers skew averages tremendously. Depending on if that's true, you'd want to go in for a customer nurturing strategy vs a casting a wide net strategy.
  • UpasanaTaku · 3 months ago
    Susan - awesome data usage to explain your point!
  • csun · 3 months ago
    Thanks for sharing these stats and the commentary.
  • Ryan · 3 months ago
    insightful post Susan, thanks for sharing.

    would be helpful to see a breakdown of total users by age as well (i.e., ARPU segmentation by age). that is the missing piece of the puzzle to determine value by age group in Gambit's context (e.g., things look very different if the 50+ age group represents .001% vs 1% of users in the network @ that 0.3% total revenue) and would help inform others in triangulating in on the value of the demo they serve.
  • Edward S. Baker · 3 months ago
    Great post. I agree with @Ryan though. Since Gambit's user base could be skewed, it would be helpful to see paying users as a percentage of total users in each age group (=ARPU/ARPPU).
  • Andrew Chen · 3 months ago
    I think Gambit's user base is skewed, but is probably representative of offer platforms in general imho. But good point ;-)
  • Mike Su · 3 months ago
    Great data...thanks for sharing! Not to get greedy, but would also be useful to get some ranges on an individual game basis. Not the direct numbers for a specific game, but rather to know an effective game gets $X ARPPU, while a poorly designed game gets $Y. Gambit is in the interesting position of aggregating across a number of app developers and has insight into a broader view of data.

    As a side note, the industry really needs to come up with a better acronym than ARPPU, which is easy to read but impossible to pronounce differently than ARPU without spitting all over someone.
  • Paul · 2 months ago
    Great report, has there been any research in breaking this data out by gender as well?
  • Teemu Kurppa · 2 months ago
    Susan, any chance that you could post more detailed split of 20-29 age group? Is it heavily skewed so that 20-22 generate most of the revenues and 25-30 is similar to 30-39 age group?