An estimated 8 out of 10 developers who build a subscription-based mobile app fail to earn $1,000 per month in subscription revenue within their app’s first 24 months, according to new data from RevenueCat.
This finding suggests developers who want to reach revenue milestones should pursue a hybrid monetization strategy, offering a mix of subscriptions, in-app purchases, and advertising. Most mobile apps attract a diverse range of customers, some of whom will insist on an ad-supported option.
Building a successful, subscription-based mobile app isn’t easy. RevenueCat, which makes a tool that helps developers manage their subscriptions, estimates that fewer than 6% of mobile apps earn $10,000 or more per month in recurring revenue by year 2:
- 80.83% fail to earn $1,000 in monthly recurring subscription revenue (MRR) by year 2
- 19.17% earn $1,000+ in MRR by year 2
- 11.92% earn $2,500+ in MRR by year 2
- 8% earn $5,000+ in MRR by year 2
- 5.34% earn $10,000+ in MRR by year 2
Mobile consumers are fickle, no matter what type of app you’re building. It’s estimated that the average app loses 77% of their daily active users by day 3 after install.
1% customer conversion rate
Subscription-based apps can face an even steeper challenge, because they ask consumers to find enough value in their content that they’re willing to pay to access to the content. In a study of 75,000 subscription-based mobile apps, RevenueCat found that the median-performing app was able to convert just 1% of their downloads to a paying customer by day 35.
In practical terms, imagine that 10,000 people downloaded an app on day 1. By day 35, just 100 people would have converted to subscription-paying customers. That’s the median—half of subscription-based mobile apps fail to achieve a 1% conversion rate after 35 days.
Health and fitness apps outperform every other mobile app category in customer conversions. The median health and fitness app has a 35-day customer conversion rate of 2.7%, according to RevenueCat.
The top health and fitness subscription apps (those in the top 10% of performance), have a 35-day customer conversion rate of 12.1%—more than double the industry average.
Annual subscriptions dominate
In 2024, 41.4% of subscription apps primarily pushed annual subscriptions, compared to monthly subscriptions (29.8%) or weekly subscriptions (27%). There are some key benefits to annual subscriptions—developers get subscription money upfront, and they don’t have to ask customers to renew for 12 months.
Renewal periods coincide with an uptick in customer churn, as people make notes to themselves to cancel subscriptions that they’re not getting sufficient value from, according to RevenueCat.
The primary benefit of weekly and monthly subscriptions is a lower upfront cost, which can help convert customers who don’t want to pay $20 (and in some cases much more) for an annual subscription to an app.
Annual subscriptions are most popular with health and fitness apps. Roughly 2 out of 3 health and fitness apps primarily offer annual subscriptions, with a median price of $40 per year.
Monthly subscriptions are most popular with shopping apps. Some 51% of shopping apps primarily offer monthly subscriptions, with a median price of $5.99.
Weekly subscriptions are most popular with mobile games. Nearly 8 out of 10 games offer weekly subscriptions, with a median price of $4.99.
Across all annual subscription plans, education apps have the highest median annual subscription fee, at $44.99 per year. Travel apps have the lowest median annual subscription fee, at $18.67 per year, according to RevenueCat.
Dynamic offers based on user behavior
Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all subscription pricing—today, the price you see inside an app is increasingly dependent on your location and behavior.
For example, a highly engaged user who signs up for a one-week trial period and checks into the app every day might see an offer for a full-priced annual subscription on day 3.
In contrast, someone who downloads an app, fails to sign up for the trial and skips a few days before opening the app again might see an offer for a monthly subscription, with a discount on the first month.
In some cases, audience segmentation happens immediately after download, as users get a questionnaire asking them to self-identify what they want from the app. Their answers can put them on two or more customer journeys inside the app, with personalized subscription offers.
Developers also offer different prices based on a user’s geography. The median cost of an annual subscription in North America is $35.99, while in Southeast Asia it’s $17.96, according to RevenueCat.
The iOS App Store still drives the majority of subscription revenue, with 76.1% of developers saying they earned $8 out of $10 (or more) subscription dollars from Apple downloads.
Hybrid monetization
Successful apps combine multiple monetization streams, offering subscriptions, in-app purchases, and ads.
Mobile games are most likely to embrace hybrid monetization, with roughly 6 out of 10 subscription-based games also offering in-app purchases, lifetime subscriptions, and other monetization engines.
If your mobile app isn’t taking a hybrid approach to monetization, you could be leaving money on the table. It’s important to test a monetization mix that works for your customers and your specific app. Depending on your app, some of your customers might prefer a lightweight, ad-supported version, while others will be happy to buy a subscription for the full feature set.
Monetize your mobile apps with ads from Start.io. Connect with us to learn more about how Start.io can help.
Mobile games saw 49.3 billion downloads in 2024—a decline of 6.5 percent from 2023, and 14 percent lower than an all-time high set in 2020, according to new data from Sensor Tower.
Despite the decline in downloads, mobile games saw year-over-year improvements in both in-app revenue and time spent playing games, suggesting that mobile publishers are building stickier games, and getting better about extracting revenue from games.
In 2024, people spent an estimated 390 billion hours playing mobile games, roughly 7.7 percent higher than time spent gaming the year before. Mobile games pulled in an estimated $81.7 billion in in-app revenue last year, a little over $3 billion more than 2023, according to Sensor Tower.
More than 60 percent of the world’s population lives in Asia, so it’s no surprise that Asia leads the world in mobile game downloads (21 billion) and in-app revenue ($38 billion). But growth stalled last year in Asia, which saw a 3 percent year-over-year decline in revenue, and a 6 percent year-over-year decline in downloads.
On a country level, downloads and in-app revenue were either flat or down in Asia’s four biggest mobile markets: China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
The United States is the single biggest country on the planet for both mobile game downloads and in-app revenue, generating $25.8 billion in mobile game revenue alone in 2024—or roughly 1 out of every 3 mobile dollars worldwide.
In-app mobile game revenue grew in the U.S. by 8.8 percent year-over-year, while mobile game downloads declined by around 10 percent.
Scopely’s 2023 breakout hit Monopoly Go! was the most lucrative mobile game of the year, bringing in more than $2.5 billion alone.
The most successful new game launch of the year was Pokemon TCG Pocket, which generated an estimated $5.3 million per day—roughly equivalent to $1.9 billion per year if its revenue remains constant.
Chinese mobile giant Tencent is the largest mobile game publisher of the year, bringing in more than $10 billion in revenue last year, according to Sensor Tower. Its next-closest competitor, Scopely, pulled in an estimated $3 billion.
Tinder remains the most-downloaded dating app in 45 out of 50 U.S. states, driving more than half of its parent company’s in-app revenue in 2025, according to a new data analysis from Start.io.
Tinder’s next closest competitor, Bumble, lost relative market share over the past year, amid a CEO change and declining company’s stock value, according to Start.io’s analysis.
This year, Tinder and Bumble both saw fresh competition in the U.S. from the Czech company FlintCast, makers of the dating apps Evermatch, SweetMeet, Maybe You, and iHappy.
For this analysis, Start.io used its privacy-compliant, anonymized first-party audience segmentation data to study more than 400,000 active mobile devices in the United States that have one or more dating apps installed. This data includes mobile app installation rates, but does not include whether someone is actively using the app.
Another banner year for Tinder
Match Group owns more than 60 dating websites and apps, but one app stands above them all: Tinder. The dating app that popularized the phrase “swipe right” generated $1.94 billion in revenue for Match Group in 2024—a little more than half of the company’s total revenue.
And while Tinder has tens of millions of users, it makes money from the roughly 9.7 million people who each pay the company an average of $16.68 per month to use the app, according to Match Group’s FY 2024 annual report.
In 2025—13 years after the app initially launched—Tinder is the most-installed dating app in 45 U.S. states, according to data from Start.io. Tinder is #2 in Arkansas and Minnesota, and #3 in Louisiana, Rhode Island, and South Dakota.
Match Group’s other apps
Match Group, which employs around 2,500 people and is valued at around $8 billion, runs a number of smaller dating sites and apps—none of which come close to Tinder’s audience in size.
In Start.io’s analysis of the top 10 most-downloaded dating apps in each U.S. state, seven Match Group-owned apps made the cut:
- Tinder: Top 10 in 50 states
- Plenty of Fish: Top 10 in 40 states
- Hinge: Top 10 in 35 states
- OkCupid: Top 10 in 5 states
- BLK: Top 10 in 3 states
- Chispa: Top 10 in 3 states
- Match: Top 10 in 2 states
Collectively, Match Group’s non-Tinder properties generated $1.47 billion in in-app revenue in 2024.
Bumble stumbled in 2024
2024 was a challenging year for dating giant Bumble, owner of mobile apps Bumble, Bumble for Friends, Badoo, and Geneva. The company hired a new CEO in early 2024, who resigned in early 2025.
Bumble cut about 30 percent of its employees in 2024, and lost its chief financial officer, chief business officer, and chief technology officer in 2025, according to its latest annual report. The company is shutting down Fruitz, a Gen Z-focused dating app it acquired in 2022, and Official, an app it acquired in 2023.
Bumble’s stock reached an all-time low in 2025, falling from around $75 per share at its 2021 IPO to less than $5 per share in March 2025. Wall Street currently values the company around $530 million.
For years, Bumble was unique among dating apps because it didn’t allow men to send the opening message to women in the app’s heterosexual dating section. This solved a persistent problem in heterosexual dating apps, of men flooding women’s dating inboxes with generic, occasionally hostile, opening messages. In 2024, Bumble changed that core feature, inviting men to respond to an Opening Move from women they matched with.
Bumble ranks among the top 10 most-downloaded dating apps in every state in the U.S., and the #2 most-downloaded dating app in 24 out of 50 states (in most cases, behind #1 Tinder), according to Start.io’s analysis. The company’s other top dating app, Badoo, is in the top 10 dating apps in 47 out of 50 states.
Grindr remains steady
Grindr, which specializes in gay, bi, trans, and queer dating, stayed relatively constant between 2024 and 2025, appearing on the top 10 most-downloaded dating app list in 45 out of 50 U.S. states, according to Start.io data.
Grindr is the #3 most-downloaded dating app in two states—Arkansas and New Mexico, according to Start.io data.
Grindr ended 2024 with an average of 14.2 million monthly active users, a nearly 7 percent increase in MAUs from 2023, according to the company’s latest annual report. Grindr’s stock price more than doubled in 2024, starting the year at around $8.30 per share, and ending the year at roughly $18 per share. Wall Street currently values Grindr at around $3 billion.
New upstarts trying to squeeze into the dating space
Czech Republic-based FlintCast had a big year for growth in the U.S., gaining a foothold with their apps SweetMeet, iHappy, Maybe You, and Evermatch.
These four apps failed to crack the list of top 10 most-downloaded dating apps in Start.io’s 2024 analysis. Not so today:
- SweetMeet: Top 10 in 50 states
- iHappy: Top 10 in 46 states
- Maybe You: Top 10 in 37 states
- Evermatch: Top 10 in 13 states
Other notable privately owned dating apps in 2025 include:
- Boo: Top 10 in 30 states
- Happn: Top 10 in 10 states
- Hily: Top 10 in 10 states
How often do you see ads inside your favorite mobile app? Today, there’s a good chance the answer depends on how you interact with the app.
Mobile game developers are experts in audience segmentation, building multiple experience paths for their users based on their characteristics. Mobile audience segmentation can lead to revenue uplift of 20 percent or more in average customer lifetime value, according to the panelists at a recent monetization talk at Gamesforum Barcelona.
Defining audience segmentation
Audience segmentation is the process of organizing a group of people into groups that share common characteristics.
Brands use audience segmentation to send ads to the people most likely to purchase their goods and services. Advertising platforms like Start.io offer advertisers thousands of audience segments, from the very large (“everyone in the United States,” “women globally between the ages of 18-34”) to the very small (“commercial goat farmers in Idaho,” “bicyclists in Hawaii”).
Mobile app developers look at audience segmentation through a different lens: Their audience is everyone who uses their app, and audience segmentation is the process through which they group their audience into two or more buckets, based on common characteristics.
For mobile app developers, the goal of audience segmentation is to increase customer lifetime value by doing two things:
- Extending the time people use the app before abandoning it
- Showing people the monetization levers they’re most likely to interact with
For large developers, small improvements to monetization can mean millions of dollars in additional revenue over time.
“We are very happy with a small uplift,” one game developer said at Gamesforum Barcelona. “Sometimes we have 5 percent uplift, sometimes we have 3 percent uplift. Sometimes we just get insights. It’s quite doable to get 15- to 20 percent overall [revenue per user] uplift—it’s quite doable, just start doing it.”
Audience segmentation through spending behavior
For more than a decade, mobile game developers have used a fishing analogy to segment their users by spending behavior—big spenders are “whales,” medium spenders are “dolphins,” and small spenders are “minnows.”
“Minnows” might see lots of rewarded videos, where they can earn free in-game items for watching ads. On the other side, “whales” might see very few ads, and instead encounter frequent offers to buy high-ticket items with cash.
Both groups are happier with a personalized experience: Minnows don’t mind spending their time, and whales don’t mind spending their money.
With a behavior-based segmentation path, all users get the same experience at the start of the game, with tests in early gameplay to learn whether they’re whales, dolphins, or minnows.
Audience segmentation through user acquisition channel
For some mobile app developers, audience segmentation begins with one of the earliest signals that a user generates—whether they downloaded an app organically, or through an ad campaign.
One mobile game company that earns $200 million per year from one of their main titles found that people who download the game through a paid media campaign are typically skeptical of the game at first, and need a few days of uninterrupted gameplay to get hooked, a developer at Gamesforum Barcelona said.
If the person is still playing by day 3, the company gradually turns on ads and offers for in-game items. This developer found that people who downloaded their game organically had far less skepticism, and were OK with seeing ads and in-game offers on day 1.
Audience segmentation through in-app decisions
Mobile app developers have a tough challenge—they need to design apps that are quick and easy to consume for casual users, and richly engaging for hardcore users.
Mobile game developers segment their audience into casual vs. hardcore players, by measuring how often someone opens the game, how long they play during an active session, and what types of decisions they make inside the game.
At Gamesforum Barcelona, one game developer described creating up to six audience segments based on user behavior inside the game.
On one end of the spectrum, ultra-casual players typically open the game sporadically, play for a few minutes and don’t open the game again for multiple days. This group typically doesn’t like engaging with rewarded video ads, and will close the app early if they encounter an ad they can’t skip.
On the other end of the spectrum, ultra-hardcore players open the game several times a day, and play longer game sessions. This group is most open to rewarded video ads, and more likely to buy in-game items.
Audience segmentation through demographic characteristics
Game developers collect (or infer) demographic information about their players, and use this information to segment their audience and personalize the in-game experience.
This could include characteristics like age, gender, geographic location, and interests.
How to set up audience segmentation tests
At Gamesforum Barcelona, game developers said they are constantly building monetization and audience segmentation tests that run on 10- to 20 percent of the user base. If the test is successful, it’s gradually introduced to the entire user base.
Tests are designed to answer two questions:
- Is this a better way to segment our audience?
- Does this test yield higher average lifetime value per user?
There are a nearly infinite number of ways to segment an audience, and A/B tests reveal which segments yield meaningful differences in user behavior.
Could your mobile app benefit from audience segmentation?
Generative AI apps broke the 1 billion milestone in 2024, with 1.49 billion cumulative downloads worldwide, and nearly $1.3 billion in revenue from in-app purchases, according to new data from Sensor Tower.
To put that growth in perspective, generative AI apps were virtually nonexistent just two years ago. In 2022, generative AI apps pulled in just 119 million downloads worldwide and $30.1 million from in-app revenue. The market is now 12x bigger for downloads, and 42x bigger for in-app revenue.
Mobile developers are integrating AI into their apps (or saying they are) in huge numbers. Apps that mentioned “AI” in their name, subtitle, or app description were downloaded 17 billion times in 2024, according to Sensor Tower.
ChatGPT is far and away the most popular generative AI app on the market, leading in both downloads and in-app purchases in every major country globally in 2024 except China, where it’s not available. When ChatGPT launched its mobile app in May 2023, it took just five months for the company to reach 50 million monthly active users (MAU), which represents one of the fastest mobile adoption rates in history.
By comparison, Temu, Disney+ and Reddit all took longer to reach 50 million MAU—5 months for Temu, 12 months for Disney+ and 62 months for Reddit.
People spent an estimated 7.7 billion hours chatting with AI bots in 2024, an increase of 347 percent from the previous year, according to Sensor Tower.
India leads mobile downloads globally
Zooming out to a global level, India remains the undisputed world leader in mobile app downloads, while Americans spend more money on in-app purchases than any other country,
Indians downloaded an estimated 24.36 billion mobile apps and spent 1.1 trillion hours on their phones in 2024, according to Sensor Tower.
With an estimated 650 million smartphone users in the country, that means the average Indian mobile user downloaded 37 apps and spent 1,700 hours on their phones last year. More than half of smartphone users in India are under the age of 24, according to Start.io data.
The United States is just as mobile-obsessed as India, with Americans downloading an estimated 12.3 billion mobile apps and spending 323 billion hours on their phones, according to Sensor Tower.
Back-of-the-napkin math: With an estimated 300 million smartphone users in the U.S. in 2024, that means the average American downloaded 41 mobile apps, and spent 1,075 hours on their phones.
Where the United States really shines is in mobile in-app purchases, with Americans spending an estimated $52.4 billion inside apps in 2024, according to Sensor Tower. That’s around $175 per person, per year.
Globally, people spent an estimated $150 billion on mobile in-app purchases in 2024, with about a third of that revenue coming from the U.S. alone.
Mobile games generate more in-app revenue than any other category by far. In 2024, people spent about $80 billion in-app on mobile games, and $69.2 billion on all other types of apps.
Video apps—a category that includes apps like like Disney+, Max, and WeTV—pulled in $12 billion in mobile subscription revenue in 2024, followed closely behind by in-app spending inside social media apps.
In 2024, five mobile apps crossed into the mobile monetization hall of fame, generating more than $1 billion in mobile in-app revenue in a single year. These included the games Brawl Stars, Dungeon & Fighter, Last War, and Whiteout Survival, and the Chinese streaming video app WeTV.
There are now 26 mobile apps that have managed to generate more than $1 billion in mobile, in-app revenue in a single year, according to Sensor Tower:
- Clash of Clans (2014 or earlier)
- Puzzle & Dragons (2014 or earlier)
- Monster Strike (2015)
- Honor of Kings (2017)
- Netflix (2018)
- Fate/Grand Order (2018)
- Tinder (2019)
- Coin Master (2020)
- Game for Peace (2020)
- Pokemon Go (2020)
- PUBG Mobile (2020)
- Roblox (2020)
- TikTok (2020)
- Candy Crush Saga (2021)
- Disney+ (2021)
- Garena Free Fire (2021)
- Genshin Impact (2021)
- YouTube (2021)
- Google One (2022)
- Monopoly Go (2023)
- Royal Match (2023)
- Brawl Stars (2024)
- Dungeon & Fighter (2024)
- Last War (2024)
- WeTV (2024)
- Whiteout Survival (2024)
In the fast-evolving world of programmatic advertising, efficiency and transparency are key to maximizing revenue for publishers. One of the most widely adopted solutions for header bidding is Prebid, an open-source framework that enables publishers to integrate multiple demand sources and optimize competition for their ad inventory.
At Start.io, we’re committed to ensuring seamless participation in the programmatic ecosystem by developing Prebid adapters—both client-side (Prebid.js) and server-side (Prebid Server). In this article, we’ll explore what Prebid is, why it’s crucial for modern ad monetization, and the differences between client-side and server-side integrations.
What is Prebid?
Prebid is an open-source set of software solutions that simplify header bidding, allowing publishers to connect with multiple demand partners in a fair, real-time auction before making an ad request to their primary ad server.
By leveraging Prebid, publishers increase competition for their ad inventory, achieve higher eCPMs, reduce latency and improve page load speeds, and gain access to analytics and auction insights.
Prebid offers two main ways to integrate with demand sources: client-side (Prebid.js) or server-side (Prebid Server). Each offers its own advantages, depending on the publisher’s needs.
Client-side vs. server-side Prebid adapters: Key differences
As we develop adapters for both Prebid.js (for client-side auctions) and Prebid Server (for server-side auctions), it’s important to understand how they differ.
| Feature | Prebid.js | Prebid Server |
| Auction location | Runs in the user’s browser | Runs on a separate server |
| Latency | Can be slower due to multiple network calls from the browser | Faster, as bidding happens server-side |
| Transparency | Publishers have full visibility into bids | Less transparent due to server-side processing |
| User syncing | More control over cookies and user data | Limited access to cookies due to privacy restrictions |
| Implementation complexity | Easier to set up | Requires infrastructure for server management |
| Data privacy | Subject to browser limitations (ITP, Privacy Sandbox, etc.) | Less affected by browser restrictions |
What is Prebid.js?
Prebid.js runs directly in the user’s browser, sending bid requests from the publisher’s page to multiple demand sources. The browser selects the highest bid and passes it to the ad server for final decisioning.
- Pros: Higher transparency, better cookie matching, easy set up
- Cons: Increased latency, browser restrictions (e.g. Apple ITP, Google Privacy Sandbox)
Server-side Prebid
In contrast, Prebid Server offloads the auction process to a server, reducing the number of network calls from the browser. Instead of handling bids in the client environment, the request is sent to Prebid Server, which communicates with multiple demand partners and returns the highest bid.
- Pros: Lower latency, better scalability, reduced impact from browser privacy restrictions
- Cons: Reduced transparency, weaker user ID matching, requires server infrastructure
Why Start.io is building Prebid Adapters
At Start.io, we are laser-focused on helping publishers maximize their ad revenue opportunities, across both client-side and server-side environments.
By developing Prebid.js adapters, we’re helping publishers participate in real-time auctions directly within the browser. Meanwhile, our Prebid Server adapter helps publishers who would rather participate in real-time auctions using server infrastructure.
By supporting both integration methods, we’re providing flexibility for publishers to choose the right setup based on their needs: Prioritizing transparency with client-side bidding, or speed and efficiency with server-side auctions.
Prebid has become a cornerstone of programmatic ad monetization, offering publishers greater control, competition, and transparency in header bidding. Understanding the differences between Prebid.js and Prebid Server is crucial for choosing the right approach to ad monetization.
Stay tuned for more updates as Start.io expands its capabilities in the Prebid ecosystem. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you optimize your ad monetization strategy with Prebid adapters.
Start.io’s primary mission is to help mobile app developers earn the most money possible from the ads they run inside their apps. This month, we made a breakthrough in this effort, achieving 9.8 percent higher advertising fill rates and 12 percent higher daily revenue through our new partnership with Intent IQ.
Here’s how.
Every time Start.io needs to display an ad, it attaches (where allowed) the consumer’s mobile advertising ID, or MAID. MAIDs are a 32-character, anonymous and resettable alphanumeric identifier that gets attached to every mobile device.
For example, here’s what a sample MAID looks like: 34868ee1-3299-465e-a776-4fe0abd869c6
Adtech companies attach consumer demographic information to MAIDs, like the consumer’s general location, their interests, estimated income, and other factors, based on what companies can observe (or guess) about the consumer’s profile.
When we send an ad request that includes a MAID, advertisers compete with one another to show an ad to that person, based on the demographic information attached to their MAID.
For example, car companies pay high CPMs to show ads to people actively shopping for their next car. On the flip side, a large potato chip company might pay low CPMs to reach everyone in America as part of a general brand awareness campaign.
MAIDs have some limitations. For one, consumers can reset their MAID, or choose not to share their MAID with advertisers. Google and Apple can (and have) restricted the industry’s ability to use MAIDs for ad targeting. Regulators worldwide have signaled that they could enact new rules around how companies use industry-standard advertising identifiers like MAIDs and their browser equivalent, third-party cookies.
Enter alternative advertising IDs.
These IDs work like MAIDs and serve as a repository for companies to organize consumer demographic and behavioral information. Intent IQ’s identity resolution platform helps companies like Start.io match MAIDs with one or more corresponding alternative IDs. Intent IQ maintains its own alternative ID, IIQ ID, and helps companies match MAIDs with other third-party alternative IDs.
With Intent IQ, we’re now able to send more information along with our advertising requests—ideally, both a MAID and one or more of the MAID’s corresponding alternative IDs.
In our tests, we used Intent IQ’s platform to match MAIDs with their corresponding alternative IDs. We then sent out millions of real-world ad requests and compared the performance of enhanced ad requests (containing multiple advertising identifiers), with a control group (containing only MAIDs).
In an industry as hyper-optimized as ours, winning 12 percent higher daily revenue is a major win. Start.io delivers hundreds of millions of ads per day to more than 500,000 active mobile apps, so the impact of this test is both immediate and global.
We’re now in the process of introducing enhanced ads to all our demand partners.
Alternative IDs help the programmatic advertising ecosystem deliver ads that are better tailored to a consumer’s individual interests.
Everyone wins: Consumers get privacy-friendly ads that are better targeted to their interests, brands get their message in front of potential customers, and publishers get higher CPMs for their advertising inventory.
Most people say they’re at least “somewhat” annoyed by digital ads, but concede that ads are the lesser of two evils—given the choice, they’d rather look at ads than pay for the content they consume online.
That’s the takeaway from two recent, unrelated surveys, from the IAB and the advertising privacy startup Eyeo.
These findings aren’t surprising, but they do illuminate the industry’s continued challenges around digital ads. People want to see relevant ads, and advertisers want to reach engaged consumers. Start.io is a sell-side platform that helps brands, agencies, and DSPs navigate this complex journey of enabling relevant advertising experiences to consumers.
Let’s dive into the data.
First, the bad news—people find ads frustrating.
In a recent survey from Eyeo, between 70- and 80 percent of respondents said they felt at least “somewhat” frustrated when they encountered digital ads, noting that they were least frustrated with CTV ads, and most frustrated with mobile ads.
The good news?
The alternative—paying for access to ad-free content—is worse, according to a separate survey published this week from IAB. In a global survey of some 3,500 online consumers, 80 percent said they prefer seeing ads over having to pay for online services.
Roughly 70 percent of people surveyed by the IAB say they’re willing to share their data with trusted publishers, if that means getting targeted ads that are relevant to their interests.
“The way I see it, if there’s something I really want and advertisers show it to me, it could be a good thing,” one respondent told the IAB. “I could find a product that I might not have realized I wanted, but if they’re advertising to me and it’s not something that I care about, I won’t buy it.”
Consumer attitudes toward ads remain fairly consistent across age groups and income.
Asked whether they prefer to see online ads rather than paying for content, boomers are most enthusiastic about ads (84% prefer ads), while millennials are least enthusiastic (78% prefer ads).
It’s a similar narrow range when respondents are sorted by household income, with wealthier households (earning $150,000 or more per year) being more enthusiastic about ads (85% prefer ads), and poorer households (earning less than $60,000 per year) being less enthusiastic about ads (77% prefer ads).
The IAB asked people to name their top concern around data privacy, and the overwhelming majority—80 percent—said they worried that their data would fall into the hands of criminals, and they would be victims of fraud or theft. Just 2 percent of people said their top concern was their data being used for personalized advertising.
Advertisers and publishers can glean four key takeaways from these two surveys:
Mobile ads are frustrating. Americans are now spending 3 hours and 45 minutes per day on their mobile phones, and remain frustrated by the mobile ad experience. This can be due to the frequency of ads, the disruptive nature of larger mobile ad formats, and/or the perceived lack of personalization in mobile ads vs. desktop ads.
People are more frustrated by paywalls. Consumers dislike paywalls more than ads. Given the choice, consumers will pick ads over paid content, and would (ideally) pick personalized, relevant ads over generic ads. Paid content remains a non-starter for consumers in 2025, outside of a select few use cases, such as premium branded publishers and CTV subscriptions.
People understand the value of ads. Three decades into mass adoption of the internet, consumers are generally comfortable with the exchange of value: They want free content, and they’re willing to share their data and consume ads to get it. Consumers are pretty ad-savvy—the average click-through rate for display ads on the Google Display Network hovers at around 0.46 percent. Put another way, if you deliver 100,000 display ad impressions, you can expect just 460 people to click on that ad.
Targeted ads are king. With the digital exchange of value set, it’s on advertisers, publishers, and the advertising technology industry to improve the consumer experience by delivering better-targeted advertising. This will reduce ad frustration, improve clickthrough rates, and make it more likely for consumers to return to a publisher’s content. Start.io’s solution is at the core of this tradeoff, providing a tech stack that enables brands, agencies and DSPs to navigate the complexity of the ad-tech ecosystem, leveraging mobile signals to deliver a well targeted ad across platforms.
In the weeks and months leading up to TikTok’s U.S. ban in mid-January, millions of short-form video addicts went searching for a TikTok equivalent—fearing that the app would permanently shut down in the U.S. on Jan. 19.
They found RedNote, a TikTok-like app built by a Shanghai-based startup that is popular with China’s Gen Z.
In the week leading up to the U.S. TikTok ban, more than 3 million American “TikTok refugees” downloaded the app, Reuters reports. Google search volume for “RedNote” began picking up on Jan. 12, and peaked Jan. 19, when TikTok briefly went offline in the U.S.
[Image of Google Trends results for “RedNote”] [Caption] Google Trends result for “RedNote” from the past 30 days, captured Jan. 29, 2025At Start.io, we saw a similar trend in the data, with RedNote downloads jumping by 4x on Jan. 13, compared to their baseline average from the previous two weeks. RedNote downloads peaked on Jan. 19 when TikTok went offline, with an estimated 26x more mobile app downloads than average.
Source: Start.io analysis of relative download volume of RedNote, Dec. 30, 2024 to Jan. 12, 2025
As expected, RedNote downloads fell Jan. 20, after the incoming U.S. administration said it would not enforce the ban immediately, giving TikTok more time to find an American buyer.
Interestingly, RedNote downloads didn’t drop to their baseline, and remained relatively high in the week following the TikTok reversal, suggesting Americans are still interested in checking out TikTok alternatives.
Even on Jan. 26, a full week after TikTok’s ban was temporarily halted, downloads to RedNote were still 15x higher than their average baseline, as measured between Dec. 30, 2024, and Jan. 12, 2025.
This higher-than-average download activity suggests that short-form video content creators are hedging their bets, and trying to build an audience on RedNote, in case a future TikTok ban in the U.S. is permanent.
Per capita, U.S. downloads of the RedNote app were heaviest in Nevada and Oregon, followed closely by California. A Start.io analysis of TikTok mobile app installs from 2024 suggests that roughly half of people in Nevada have downloaded TikTok.
Worldwide, the U.S. is the sixth-largest market for RedNote, behind China, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, according to Start.io data.
Start.io delivers hundreds of millions of ads per day to more than 500,000 active mobile apps. Where allowed, Start.io collects anonymized first-party mobile data, which it uses to help advertisers target consumers with relevant ads.
Mobile data can tell us a lot about the planet. There are now an estimated 7.2 billion smartphones in use worldwide. In countries like France, Germany, and the United States, more than 8 out of 10 people own a smartphone.
People consume an average of 15 gigabytes of data per month on their smartphones, and generate vast amounts of valuable, real-time data.
In 2024, we used large, anonymized samples of mobile data to study the popularity of TikTok in the United States, the current state of dating apps, language use in America, who was traveling to the 2024 Summer Games, Android device use worldwide, and mobile data speeds.
Here are the 6 most interesting data insights from 2024:
#6: Nevadans are obsessed with TikTok
If TikTok ends up getting banned in the U.S. on Jan. 19, the impact will be felt hardest in Nevada, where roughly half of the state’s residents have downloaded the app. TikTok and Instagram spent 2024 battling for market share, with TikTok gaining a major foothold in the Midwest and American South.
The king of social media remains Facebook, whose mobile app is installed on more than 60 percent of American smartphones nationwide.
#5: 1 in 10 Americans have at least one dating app
Roughly 9 percent of Americans have at least one dating app installed on their smartphone. And if you’ve got a dating app, chances are, it’s Tinder.
Tinder owns an estimated 27.7 percent market share in the United States. And although there are more than a thousand dating apps available for download, six apps own 85 percent of the market: Tinder, Plenty of Fish, Bumble, Badoo, Hinge, and Grindr.
#4: 90% of Americans speak one language
How many languages do you speak? In America, a little over 90 percent of people speak one language. Roughly 5.7 percent of Americans are bilingual, and 3.1 percent of Americans speak three or more languages.
Not surprisingly, English and Spanish are the two most popular languages in the United States.
West Virginia, Montana, North Dakota, Vermont, and Maine had the least language diversity in the country, which correlates with low rates of racial diversity in those states.
#3: Oregonians flocked to Paris for the Summer Games
The population of Paris briefly swelled over the summer as the City of Light hosted the 2024 Olympic Games. At the height of the Games, tourists made up roughly one-third of the city’s population.
Thousands of Americans traveled to Paris for the Olympics, and we were curious which states were sending the highest number of tourists. Oregonians, who typically make up just 1.26% of the country’s population, made up nearly 13% of all American tourists in Paris.
Put another way, if there was a demographically representative sample of 100 Americans in a room, just 1 would be from Oregon. But at the Paris Games, 13 out of 100 would have been from Oregon.
#2: Wyoming’s mobile internet is slower than most
If you live in Wyoming, it’s not just you—your mobile internet *is* slower than the rest of the country. A little over 17 percent of the cell phone towers in Wyoming still connect using 3G.
Wyoming is the least populated state in the continental U.S., with just 6 people per square mile. Compare that to a state like New Jersey, which has more than 1,200 people per square mile.
#1: Samsung is big everywhere (except Asia)
Samsung is huge, and remains the most popular Android brand in 125 countries. In North America, Samsung owns an 80 percent market share.
The South Korean electronics giant is much less successful in Asia, where it is the dominant smartphone brand in just Hong Kong, Macau, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka. Samsung owns a 28.2 percent market share in East Asia and the Pacific, and 9.1 percent market share in South and Central Asia.
In Asia, other brands are far more dominant, notably Google (Japan, Malaysia, and Singapore), Xiaomi (India), and Oppo (Indonesia, Cambodia, and Thailand).
The Chinese smartphone brand Techno appears to have focused exclusively on capturing market share in Africa, where it is the dominant brand in 17 African countries.
Are you interested in more data insights like these? Start.io now offers media buyers more than 3,000 audience segments when building an advertising campaign. Browse available segments on Start.io’s Consumer Insights and Audiences Hub.
