Questions and articles about Monetization, answered in plain English.
A typical free Android app earns roughly $0.50–$3.00 per 1,000 daily active users per day from in-app advertising, which works out to about $15–$90 per 1,000 DAU per month. The spread is enormous because earnings are the product of three numbers: how many ad impressions each user sees, what advertisers pay for that audience, and what share of requests actually get filled. A casual game in the United States showing rewarded video can clear $5 per 1,000 DAU per day; the same game in a low-CPM market showing only banners may make $0.10. Ad income also ramps — a brand-new app earns very little in month one because ad networks need install volume and retention data before they bid seriously on its inventory.
eCPM is effective cost per mille — the ad revenue an app earns per 1,000 ad impressions. The formula is eCPM = (total ad revenue ÷ total impressions) × 1000. If an app served 240,000 impressions last month and earned $720, its eCPM is $3.00. eCPM is the single most useful monetization number because it normalises across formats, countries and networks: it lets you compare a rewarded-video placement against a banner, or US traffic against Indian traffic, on one scale. Watch eCPM per placement, not just per app — one badly positioned banner can drag the whole average down while looking fine in aggregate.
Rewarded video earns the most per impression, interstitials are second, and banners are the lowest. Rough 2026 global averages: rewarded video $8–$20 eCPM, interstitial $4–$12, native $2–$6, banner $0.20–$1.50. Rewarded wins because the user opts in and watches to completion, so advertisers pay for genuine attention. Banners earn least per impression but fire constantly, so they still contribute real volume. The best-earning apps do not pick one — they run rewarded video at natural opt-in moments, an interstitial on a session or level boundary, and reserve banners for screens where a full-screen ad would break the flow.
Ad mediation is a layer that asks several ad networks for a bid on the same impression and serves whichever pays most. Without it your app is tied to one network's demand and takes whatever that network offers; with it, networks compete per impression. Real-world uplift is commonly 15–40% higher eCPM versus a single network, and fill rate improves in smaller markets where any one network runs out of demand. The usual stacks are Google AdMob mediation, AppLovin MAX and Unity LevelPlay. Mediation is worth it once an app has meaningful daily volume — below a few thousand daily users, the extra SDK weight and setup cost outweigh the gain.
Above 95% is healthy for banners and interstitials; 70–90% is normal for rewarded video. Fill rate is filled ad requests divided by total ad requests. Low fill usually has one of four causes: a geography with thin advertiser demand, an eCPM floor set too high, a single network with no mediation behind it, or an app category advertisers avoid. Rewarded video legitimately fills lower than other formats because its inventory is scarcer — that is not a fault. If banner fill sits under 90%, add mediation before you touch anything else.
Indian traffic typically earns $0.30–$1.50 eCPM on banners and $1–$4 on interstitials, with rewarded video reaching $2–$6. That is roughly a quarter to a tenth of United States rates, because eCPM tracks what local advertisers will pay to reach that audience. Two practical consequences: an India-first app needs far more daily active users to hit the same revenue as a US-first one, and format mix matters more — leaning on rewarded video instead of banners can double effective earnings on the same user base. Payments from Google are made in local currency once the account passes the $100 payment threshold.
Expect meaningful ad revenue from roughly month three, not week one. The ramp has three stages: for the first few weeks the app has too few impressions for networks to bid confidently, so eCPM sits well below its eventual level; by month two, install and retention data lets mediation price the inventory properly; by month three or four, earnings stabilise and track daily active users. This ramp is why app monetization partnerships often start on a fixed monthly payout while installs build, then move to a revenue share once the ad income is real and measurable.
The app listing lives under the publishing partner's verified Google Play identity, while the code, brand and assets stay with whoever built them. That split is the whole reason a written agreement matters. A sound arrangement states four things in plain language: who holds the intellectual property, who controls the ad network accounts and therefore sees the revenue reports, how the app can be transferred out using Google's official app-transfer feature, and the notice period on either side. Google's app transfer moves a listing between developer accounts while keeping its installs, ratings and reviews — so a clean exit is genuinely possible when it is agreed in advance.
No — past a point, extra ads reduce total revenue by driving users away. Ad income is impressions multiplied by eCPM, but impressions depend on retention, and aggressive ad load is one of the top reasons users uninstall. Google Play also enforces this directly: ads that interrupt without warning, appear outside the app, or cover content are policy violations that get an app removed. The pattern that actually earns is fewer, better-placed ads at natural breaks — a session boundary, a level end, an opt-in reward — measured on revenue per daily active user over 30 days rather than impressions per session.
An ad revenue share pays the publishing partner whose Google Play account distributes an app a fixed percentage of the in-app ad income it earns. Here is where the money comes from, the typical splits, and how payouts actually ramp.
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