Ad Revenue & ARPDAU Calculator

What this computes

"How much could my game make?" is the question every indie developer asks before — and after — shipping. The honest answer is a function of a handful of numbers, and this calculator runs them:

1. How many people open the app each day (DAU)
2. How many ads each one sees, and what those ads pay (eCPM)
3. How many of them buy something, and how much they spend
4. What the app store keeps from those purchases

It reduces both revenue streams to a per-day, per-user basis so they add up cleanly into ARPDAU — Average Revenue Per Daily Active User — then scales that by your DAU into daily, monthly, and yearly figures. ARPDAU is the metric mobile studios actually steer by, because it's comparable across games of any size.

How mobile games make money

Free-to-play apps almost always run two engines at once, and they behave very differently:

• Advertising. Most users never pay a cent, so you monetize their attention with ads — rewarded video, interstitials, banners. Revenue is impressions × eCPM, and the eCPM your ad network reports is already net of its share, so the app store takes nothing further from it.
• In-app purchases (IAP). A small slice of users buy currency, upgrades, or subscriptions. This is where Apple and Google take their commission — 30% standard, 15% under the small-business programs — so your net is the gross minus that cut.

For a first-principles tour of the business model — ad formats, real CPM ranges, ARPDAU benchmarks, and a worked monetization example — Igvend's guide Mobile Game Monetization: How Indie Games Make Money is a good companion read alongside this calculator.

The math

Ad revenue/day   = DAU × impressions-per-user × eCPM / 1000
IAP gross/day    = DAU × daily-payer-rate × avg-purchase-value
Store cut/day    = IAP gross/day × store-cut-rate
IAP net/day      = IAP gross/day − Store cut/day
Net revenue/day  = Ad revenue/day + IAP net/day
ARPDAU           = Net revenue/day / DAU
Monthly net      = Net revenue/day × (365 / 12)
Yearly net       = Net revenue/day × 365

A worked example

A casual game with 5,000 daily users. Each sees about 8 ads a day at a blended $8 eCPM. Around 2% of daily users buy something, averaging $5 a purchase, and the store takes the standard 30%.

• Ad revenue: 5,000 × 8 × $8 / 1,000 = $320/day
• IAP gross: 5,000 × 2% × $5 = $500/day
• Store cut: $500 × 30% = $150/day
• IAP net: $500 − $150 = $350/day
• Net revenue: $320 + $350 = $670/day
• ARPDAU: $670 / 5,000 = $0.134
• Monthly: $670 × 30.4 ≈ $20,375

Ads and purchases are nearly even here (48% / 52%), which is a healthier place to be than depending on either alone. Drop the store cut to 15% under the small-business program and the same game nets about $375/day on IAP — roughly $750 more a month from one input.

ARPDAU is comparable across games of any size — it's the number to steer by.

Notice that ARPDAU doesn't change when you scale DAU: triple your users and revenue triples, but ARPDAU stays $0.134. That's the point of the metric — it isolates how well the game monetizes attention from how much attention it has. Growth and monetization are separate problems, and ARPDAU lets you work on the second without the first masking it.

How to use this

1. Use real analytics where you have them. If the game is live, pull DAU, impressions per user, and your blended eCPM from your mediation dashboard rather than guessing. The defaults are a mid-casual placeholder, not a benchmark for your genre.
2. Blend your eCPM honestly. Rewarded video pays far more than banners, and US players pay several times more than emerging markets. Use the single blended number your ad network reports, which already weights formats and geos together.
3. Separate daily payers from total payers. The IAP input is the share of users who buy on a given day, not the share who have ever paid. For most games that daily figure is 1–3% or less.
4. Match the store cut to your status. 30% is the default; switch to 15% if you're in Apple's or Google's small-business program or modeling year-two subscription revenue. Ad revenue is unaffected either way.
5. Test the levers. Nudge each input and watch ARPDAU. You'll quickly see whether your game is built on ads, purchases, or a balance — and which number actually moves the monthly total.

What this calculator doesn't model

• Retention and lifecycle. This is a steady-state snapshot at a fixed DAU. Real revenue rides on retention curves — the same install is worth far more in a game players stay in for months. To project total earnings you'd layer this on top of a retention and lifetime-value model.
• User acquisition cost. Net revenue here is before you pay to acquire users. A game with $0.30 ARPDAU is only profitable if your blended cost-per-install and payback period work against that number. This calculator sizes the revenue side, not the spend side.
• Ad fill rate and seasonality. eCPM swings with the season (Q4 is far richer than Q1), with ad-network demand, and with how reliably ads are available to show. The single blended eCPM here smooths all of that into one average.
• Whales and revenue concentration. IAP revenue is famously top-heavy — a tiny number of high spenders can dominate. An average purchase value hides that distribution; two games with the same ARPDAU can have very different risk profiles.
• Taxes, fees, and platform nuances. Net here means after the store cut, not after income tax, mediation fees, currency conversion, or refunds. Treat the output as top-line developer revenue, not take-home profit.