Hi I use interstitial ad in my game that pop up after the player has died, and i ask to myself how often i must show them to be efficient and don't too boring for players. Every 5mn? 10mn? every 10 gameOver? What is the strategy you use?
This is a question a lot of developers would like to have an answer to. I look at these games like a motion picture. There is a lot of hype before the movie is release, trailers that make the movie to be more exciting than what it really is and then there is a huge burst of business for a week or two and then a new movie take it place. The movie continues to make money but not the same as at the time of the release. I think many players will get tired of a game after a short while. They will play it for the first few days and may continue after but not with the same frequency. But if you can hit all of the players during that period you stand to make enough money that you never have to work another day in your life. I say keep plugging away and make games as though the next one will be the one.
I'm going with every 3 game overs I was putting up the interstitial ad on every game over in Run Bunny Home. But I'm not good enough at this kids game so I keep dying. It becomes too annoying. So I'm cutting back to once every 3 lives, but randomly so sometimes it is not even every three. I use a random number gen to make it 1/3 prob to get an ad. I also changed the mix of ads on the admob mediation panel. I was getting endless video ads about some will you be kind game with a model in it, you know the one. It was too annoying, so I picked some of the other services. I think other people don't like the ads either. However they don't seem to want to buy the edition with no ads or pay for the in app purchase to turn the ads off. Still if people play more or longer with fewer ads, or buy some other paid game it will be worth it.
An alternate solution to cjerian's: Once per game if at least X minutes have passed. I've found 2 to be a good number for X, but my games are generally slower paced and, if the player plays well, they could see it every game. (edit to add: mustn't post this early in the morning, this is basically what the OP was thinking. To answer his question: 2 minutes) Another trick I did with my last game was, the game mode that monetized best doesn't have (m)any ads at all. This way, people will be encouraged to play this better mode more often.
