PlaySimple’s Word Search Explorer makes $163K a day in Ad Revenue
PlaySimple Games‘s Word Search Explorer is doing $163K a day in ad revenue 🤑, which is more than the current word category IAP leader NYT Games: Word, Number, Logic 👀 (which makes $150K a day) What is the catch?
Looking at these games even though their overall daily revenue is similar, the difference is of course the volume of installs they are pulling in. Word Search Explorer is doing more than 200K install a day, while the NYT game is doing barely 20K. So there is a 10x difference here 😵. Oh, but Jakub, that is bad traffic. No its not. Even though the NYT one is mostly US downloads, Word Search Explorer is doing more than 30K only US installs a day + the other countries on top. It also wins on current Daily Active Users of 3,3 Mil against 2,2 Mil. even though the NYT one has double the amount of US users there (1,7 Mil).
Core gameplay is very streamlined, your usual crossword 🧩 puzzle, but with a big difference that there is no fail state. As Felix rightfully noted, even though you can play it forever, changing the boards from small to big creates an illusion of easier and harder content, which is great for user pacing. Keep in mind that we want to players to stick around at all cost not to monetize them through IAP here. The whole ad monetization push starts really after level 24, which is way later compared to the competition.
Great job PlaySimple Games‘s team 😁 👍, this is an amazing success, especially coming from India. We see this as continuing trend of new successful challengers rising from countries mainly known for just copying/ fast following before (hint look at Vietnam 👀). This stereotype is no more, and the new kids are coming to disrupt the stable revenue of the old guard’s aging games. Join us as we talk about all of this with Felix & Matej on the two & a half gamers podcast 😎.
