# Why most mobile game players are worth almost nothing, and what we built about it | Influence Mobile

- Canonical URL: https://wefunder.com/feed/373703
- Entity ID: wefunder:feed_item:373703
- Published at: 2026-08-24 15:36:36 UTC
- Updated at: 2026-08-24 15:36:37 UTC

## Author
Daniel Todd

## Subject
Influence Mobile

## Content
TechBullion just published a piece on where mobile game advertising is heading. I'm quoted throughout, and it explains our business better than our pitch deck does.Here's the core problem. For a decade, the industry bought players the same way you'd buy bulk inventory: pay a flat price per app install, hope enough of them spend money, repeat. It worked while installs were cheap. It stopped working when Apple's privacy changes in 2021 made it much harder to see which players were actually worth anything.But the tracking was never the real issue. The real issue is concentration. In our own data, roughly 0.35 percent of players account for about 75 percent of all spending. Published industry studies put the range wider, somewhere between the top 1 and 5 percent driving half to 80 percent of purchases. Either way, the conclusion is the same: the overwhelming majority of installs never earn back what they cost.Paying the same price for every player, when almost none of them are worth the same, is the flaw at the center of the model.That's what Amplify was built to fix. It uses more than five years of data, over 500,000 player spending histories representing more than $100 million in client revenue, to predict how valuable a player will be over the long run and price them accordingly. Vintage followed, closing the pricing gaps Amplify exposed. Together they've produced an improvement of $500,000 per month to our operating profit.We got here the hard way. Between 2018 and 2020 we ran hundreds of experiments, and almost all of them taught us nothing. Then one did: older female players, a group nobody else was paying attention to, were converting and spending 60 to 70 percent more than anyone else on our platform. That insight, helped along by a surge in available ad inventory during the pandemic, took us from $3 million in annual revenue to $60 million over four years.We've also placed in the top tier of two independent industry rankings that score ad networks on player retention and return, published between 2022 and 2025.The lesson I keep coming back to is that the companies winning over the next five years will be the ones that stop optimizing for what happens in a player's first week and start optimizing for what happens in their first year. That's easy to say and hard to build. Most of the industry doesn't have the data infrastructure for it yet. We spent years building ours.Full article: https://techbullion.com/mobile-game-developers-are-finally-learning-to-stop-chasing-cheap-installs/