Like, the game will show you the same 3-5 optional ads over and over with absolutely no issue when you’re trying to get something, but all of a sudden with full connection there’ll be no more ads “available,” and when they are available it’s one of those ads that you’ve been watching over and over anyway! It can’t just be artificial scarcity, right?
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It’s a way to limit your use of watching ads for free stuff. They want you to spend the money to get the ad free version or on whatever you are trying to watch the ad to get for free.
Might be related to them only getting paid for unique ad views
Remember that the revenue for the ads ultimately comes from the maker of the product being advertised. They might be willing to pay to have you see the same ad 3 times in a day. They might not be willing to pay five times that amount to have you see the same add 15 times in a day.
I think you have to understand the business model of free to play games, and that you’re probably not the target audience for them. Ultimately, ads for other free games don’t pay the bills — but whales do. And by whales, I mean the people who end up getting addicted to one of those games and spend thousands of dollars on it. That’s what they’re looking for. So they’re trying to get you to play as many “free” games until you find one that hits your dopamine sensors just right so that you open your wallet to continue playing it. Eventually they figure out that none of those games are doing it for you, so they “run out of ads”
The mobile games don’t manually pick the ads. The advertisement network takes your profile and looks if anyone right now is willing to pay for your attention.
Different types of ads require different payment.
So the simplest thing is that your attention at the time is just not worth enough for any advertiser to pay for it.
It’s real scarcity. There’s little reason to advertise to the child casino (aka mobile game) player, and even less reason to repeatedly advertise to the same person who’s unwilling to buy anything. I’m sure some marketing beancouters have already done the math on the diminishing returns of showing the same person several ad videos especially in rapid succession.
Companies pay to have ads shown X number of times, and the ads get shown that many times and no more. Once that particular platform has shown all the ads it has under contract as game incentives, no further ads are available to the player until more are paid for.
In digital marketing, there’s something called a “frequency cap”. When building an ad you can adjust a setting so that each person can only be served your ad a set number of times. Two times per day, five times per week, etc.
Do you ever notice that the ads you get on mobile games are usually not for big brands like Coke or Ford, but are for local businesses, other mobile games, etc. Big brands (usually) have teams that are going to be mindful of that frequency cap. Small brands (usually) don’t, so if you get targeted for their ad they will firehose you with it until they burn through their budget.
The companies paying for ads don’t pay infinite amounts of money for showing their ads. Its not like the ads run out, but rather the companies behind run out of money.
In 30 years of internet use I have never bought anything I have ever seen in an online ad. I just don’t get it. I have so much spare cash now
The way ads work is the game has some 3rd party ad network. Whenever the game has an ad trigger, the ad network runs an “auction” between all the companies that have ad campaigns there.
The highest bidder will get their ads shown.
When you see a repetitive ad it means that that company is paying per view the most (and sometimes it doesn’t care that you get repetitive views).
Which are you asking about? Monetized ads where you are allowed to only view so many or the carousel of ads having a limited selection?
The former is related to preservation of the game economy usually. The latter is dependent on the ad service and the setting used. If you want to keep ads under a certain age, wanting to target specific groups, and use segmentation, you might only have a few ads for any specific group as they get away from the core.