In-game advertising has become the standard in the market but there are several companies who provide it. The largest two are Mochi and CPMstar. While Mochi has a variety of services, for sponsors, its CPMStar that should be favored. Armorgames and some other large sponsors do not allow Mochi on their sites but are open to Star.

Star is better for sponsors generally because it offers shared revenue which means you can get part of the in-game ad revenue from the game whereas sponsors get none of it with Mochi. Star has a special system in place for this. Since the potential for in-game ad revenue can be quite large on a good game, this can make quite a difference in the time in takes to get a return on your investment into a game.

The other reason is that Star’s Ads are just better and more tolerable than Mochis. Many of mochi’s ads talk(like that Lysol commercial). Ads with sounds are just plain annoying to developers, sponsors, publishers, and most importantly, players. None of Star’s ads so far talk and they are all targeted towards gamers, which makes them superior.

For developers that need to or really want to use mochi’s services such as leaderboards, Mochi is the obvious choice. However, if your games get a large percentage of Non US and UK traffic, CPMSTAR is also the better choice. Unlike Mochi, they have ads for all countries. After talking to developers who use both Star and Mochi and get alot of international traffic, I found that the average eCPM for star is 3-4 times higher than Mochi overall and infinitely higher for Non-US/Western Europe countires(since Mochi’s eCPM for those countries ia almost 0.00). If you develop games in other languages aside from english, star is the way to go. Even if the sponsor is getting 30%-50% of in-game revenue, you will still be making more because of the high eCPM. My own mochi eCPM drops to less than 10 cents many days because of the geographical location of players. After checking with other authors who use star and have geographically diverse locations for players, their eCPM was on average twice to three times mine.

Looking at those results, its clear which one I should use in the future. I will probably make a mochi version to take a advantage of their distribution system but the main version I will distribute will be with CPMSTAR.

I will be testing star with my next few games in the coming weeks and will post results here(can’t vouch for shared ad revenue because I sponsor my own games and get 100% of everything).