Tapjoy boasts that its mobile video ads attract high-spending players

Video is the future of the Web, and it’s also one of the best money-making tools for mobile-game developers.

Spacetime Studios, the team responsible for mobile strategy game Battle Command, released a case study this morning that reveals some strong numbers for mobile-ad platform Tapjoy. That company’s video-marketing service helped Spacetime acquire players at a relatively low cost, and those gamers often spent significantly more than the people referred to Battle Command by other platforms. Worldwide spending on mobile reached $16 billion in 2013, and ad networks like Tapjoy, Flurry, ChartBoost, and Fiksu are all battling to serve as the premiere marketer for it.

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Earlier this year, Spacetime released Battle Command for iOS and Android, and the company enlisted the aid of Tapjoy and the other ad networks to bring its free-to-play game to some customers. While the studio worked with multiple companies, it noted Tapjoy only charged it for people who actually finished watching the entire trailer for Battle Command.

“At just 2 cents per completed view, we could afford to get our video in front of lots of potential gamers,” Spacetime associate marketing manager Ari Sapriel wrote in a blog post. “More than 80,000 people viewed the trailer over a relatively brief time period, and we were pleased to discover that over 1,000 of them went on to install the app.”

That means that Sapriel’s team only spent $1.57 per game install on Tapjoy. That’s well below the average cost per install in the U.S. of $2.17.

Many of those players then turned into top spenders in Battle Command. Spacetime found that the Tapjoy-referred players were twice as likely to make an in-game purchase compared to people who found the app organically, and Tapjoy also outperformed its competition.

“Overall, the revenue per install of Tapjoy players was a good 25-percent higher than any of the other networks we tested,” wrote Sapriel. “Our primary objective in running this campaign was to acquire high-value users and drive bottom-line results, so we were very pleased with the installs Tapjoy delivered.”

Of course, this is just one game, and the competition is ferocious in the app-marketing sector. Chartboost, Fiksu, and Flurry are all likely to counter Tapjoy’s methods. For now, however, Battle Command is well beyond a million downloads on iOS and Android, and it is thanking Tapjoy for part of that success.