SuperScale CEO Ivan Trancik: Most Profitable Mobile UA Spend Hides in Long-Tail Networks

At Pocket Gamer Connects Nordics in Helsinki on October 20th and 21st, SuperScale CEO Ivan Trancik will present findings from over $100 million in measured user acquisition spend, arguing that the mobile UA market is split in half.

The top eight UA networks absorb roughly 50% of spend but return, on average, only about a quarter of the profit. Meanwhile, the roughly 30-network long tail carries the rest of the market and, according to Trancik, holds the majority of actual profit.

Most publishers run four or five channels and assume the rest of the market isn't worth the operational overhead. Trancik says that is the most common mistake in the games sector. The mistake isn't bad buying, he argues, it's stopping exactly where the profitable half of the market begins.

Trancik emphasizes profit as the key performance indicator, not ROAS, CPI, or any proxy. Everything SuperScale runs is held to measured profit per channel, cohort by cohort. He says proxies are how a channel can look great while the P&L quietly disagrees.

The long tail of ad supply, including rewarded, OEM and on-device, creator-led, regional and emerging networks, gets dismissed as not worth the operational cost of onboarding. In measured data, Trancik says that is where the majority of the profit actually sits. The industry treats it as an inventory question when it's really an operational one, and operational problems are solvable.

Trancik will be available at SuperScale's booth during the event and is especially interested in speaking with mobile publishers thinking hard about UA economics, whether spending $500K or $10M a month, and anyone wrestling with fragmented data or getting AI beyond the pilot stage.