Was Tapjoy a Good Acquisition for ironSource?
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #83 - Will the HomePod Kill Christmas for Google and Amazon (Again)?. Check out the full article for more insights.
Another week and another acquisition that's shrinking the mobile ad market. This week it's ironSource, another ad network that recently went public, that's acquiring Tapjoy, one of the first ad networks.
Like last week, I took a closer look at our SDK Intelligence (via Explorer) to see who's using ironSource and Tapjoy. What I saw pretty quickly was an interesting pattern. Many of the apps that have the Tapjoy SDK also have the ironSource SDK installed.
Let's have a look at the numbers:
ironSource is significantly larger than Tapjoy, but about 34% of apps that use ironSource also use Tapjoy. I wonder if that was a consideration during the acquisition talks. While it means ironSource's footprint won't grow as much, it does mean that for developers, the transition may be smoother.
In more absolute numbers, ironSource publisher pool will grow to 79K apps and games, mainly on the Android side of the fence. Notable shared users of both include big names like Voodoo, Miniclip, and Imangi. Some or all of their games have both SDKs installed.
I looked through the list of "new" names that will be coming over, but there weren't too many big names you'd recognize.
Like the MoPub acquisition, the multiple here was also around 5x, which sounds lower than it would have been a few years ago. Yet another example of how App Tracking Transparency continues to take its toll on the industry.
Question: If you're currently monetizing with ads, have you considered changing models?
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
