🪦 Are Banners Dead? Zedge Removed Them, Cut 38% of Impressions, and Made MORE Money
two & a half gamers · 2026-09-16
💡 Quick Take
1. Remove standard banner ads completely to potentially increase total revenue while cutting overall ad impressions.
2. Avoid running fast banner refresh rates like 5 seconds, as they kill user conversion and devalue advertiser inventory.
3. Use the freed-up banner screen real estate for in-app messaging or promotional content instead of low-performing ad banners.
4. Monitor sequential ad performance by tracking how interstitial CPMs decay compared to banner CPM trends.
5. Keep rewarded video and interstitial ads as your primary revenue drivers since video formats continue to see continuous conversion improvements.
6. Avoid assuming banners are always net-positive; challenge the status quo by running rigorous A/B tests to measure true ad cannibalization.
📊 Detailed Explanation
The speaker discusses ad monetization strategies and presents a surprising case study regarding standard banner ads. Traditionally, mobile app and game publishers relied heavily on banners for baseline income. However, over the years, interstitial and rewarded video formats have undergone massive optimization, featuring longer engagements and higher conversion rates, whereas standard banners have remained stagnant since the late 1990s. Because banner innovation has been practically non-existent outside of primitive adaptive or native banner formats, their eCPMs have steadily declined relative to video-based ad units.
Zedge conducted a rigorous multi-month experiment starting in December and running through January, testing various banner refresh rates ranging from 15 to 30 seconds. In a surprising twist, they also tested completely removing the banner format. The results showed that by cutting 38% of total impressions through the complete removal of banners, the app actually increased overall revenue by roughly 1% and saw a 1.77% increase in their North Star engagement metric. A subsequent reverse test where banners were reintroduced yielded the exact same suppressed results, confirming the validity of the data.
The core reasoning behind this revenue increase ties into advertiser bidding dynamics and audience cannibalization. When an advertiser targets a specific user bundle ID, they want to acquire that user as cheaply as possible. Fast banner refresh rates—such as 5-second or 15-second intervals—often trick advertisers into buying cheap impressions on low-value banner units rather than investing in higher-value interstitial impressions. Removing banners eliminates the cheapest acquisition path, forcing algorithms to allocate better advertiser value toward interstitials later in the user session, where fill rates and impressions dramatically improve.
Publishers considering running this test on their own apps should first analyze ad value by impression sequence, comparing CPM decay curves between banners and interstitials. If interstitial CPMs decay slower than banners, it may be a strong signal to test banner removal. Furthermore, publishers can repurpose that vacant screen real estate for native in-app messages or feature promotions, improving overall user experience while removing ad request interference that might otherwise choke interstitial fill rates.
🎯 Gaming Expert Opinion
The insights shared from Zedge's large-scale monetization experiment provide a refreshing reality check for mobile game developers and publishers who blindly accept banner ads as mandatory real estate. For years, the industry standard dictated that filling every pixel with ads equaled maximum monetization. However, the data presented proves that ad inventory cannibalization is a very real, measurable phenomenon. By flooding low-value, unoptimized banner slots with rapid-fire refreshes, publishers may inadvertently training ad networks to bid lower on high-intent video inventory.
It is important to note that these results might not translate identically to every single game genre or app category. Zedge operates primarily as a personalization utility app where sessions are short and spaced far apart. High-frequency gaming apps with prolonged session lengths might experience different engagement and retention dynamics when altering ad layouts. Nevertheless, the underlying warning against aggressive 5-second or 10-second banner refreshes is universally applicable, as these rapid cycles destroy user attention spans and ruin advertiser conversion metrics.
Publishers should take this case study as a prompt to audit their own waterfall setups and run clean, isolated A/B tests rather than relying on legacy monetization assumptions. Instead of clinging to low-yielding banner units out of habit, developers should evaluate sequential CPM decay and test whether removing banners clears the path for healthier, higher-value interstitial and rewarded video delivery further down the session funnel.
Kanal: two & a half gamers