A delicate balance: How Voodoo achieves ad monetisation without compromising ad quality

With 8 billion downloads, and more than 150 million monthly active users, Voodoo is a powerhouse amongst mobile publishers. Headquartered in France, the company specialises in mobile games and app development. As a key part of their expansion into the US and Japan, in 2024 they acquired social network BeReal.

As one of iion’s valued client partners, we caught up with Baptiste Durif, Head of Ad Monetisation & User Acquisition Innovation, to find out how Voodoo maintains and measures strong ad quality and brand safety standards, alongside their highly successful ad monetisation strategies. 

Q: Baptiste, how do you maintain consistent ad quality standards across your partner studio network and across different game genres?

All our ad ops are centralised. We publish strict ad quality guidelines covering creative integrity, placement design, brand safety, frequency, policy compliance and technical performance, and we require every partner to accept them - in writing.

For new partners, we conduct a small-scale test with real-time monitoring, and we review complaint rate, retention impact, and stability before any scale-up can occur. We monitor continuously throughout the partnership with automated alerts. Partners breaching standards are paused immediately, and removed if issues persist.

For us, ad quality is not genre dependent and doesn't deteriorate when scaling monetisation across different game genres, because we apply the same clearly defined standards across all titles. 

Q. What adtech infrastructure/engineering priorities have been most critical for maintaining ad quality?

We rely on a simple, reliable stack built on trusted and resilient mediation and network dashboards, stable SDK integrations, and clear placement guidelines. 

Our key investments are strong quality assurance, strict privacy and policy compliance, and feedback loops. We also focus on lightweight analytics that track ANR, crash rates and ad call latency, retention and session health, and complaint signals. We design for safe rollouts and quick reversions with feature flags and holdouts. That way, we can spot problems quickly and act accordingly.

Q: How do you integrate new monetisation solutions while maintaining quality standards?

As I mentioned, we do this through a gated pilot with a small cohort, strict quality guardrails, and side-by-side tests against a control. The Voodoo approach is to scale progressively and only when monetisation metrics (such as ARPDAU, eCPM, fill rate, and revenue per session), retention, and stability meet our thresholds, game by game. We also halt or remove any solution that fails, or if any quality metric deteriorates (even when revenue goes up) with instant rollback.

Q. How does ad monetisation strategy differ between gaming and social apps like BeReal, and what learnings from gaming are you applying to your expansion into social app environments?

In gaming, value exchange is explicit. Rewarded video and playables are the primary drivers of conversion on the UA side, and we optimise around session health, progression, and payer protection. Meanwhile, in a social app, the bar for interruption is higher. We favour native and creator-aligned formats, tighter adjacency controls, and greater reliance on brand outcomes such as attention and brand lift.

We also bring a strict experiment mindset from gaming to social apps: every new format or placement starts as an AB test with a clear hypothesis, fixed guardrails, and success metrics. Again, we scale only when results replicate across cohorts and time (and when monetisation improves and quality stays the same or better).

Q. What are the biggest threats to ad quality in gaming monetisation today, and how has the industry responded? 

I would say there are five things: 1. misleading or clickbait creatives that erode trust; 2. performance instability from heavy formats or SDK conflicts that trigger ANR, crashes, or stutter; 3. content drift in programmatic supply that places unsafe or low-quality ads in sensitive contexts; 4. privacy-driven signal loss that hinders optimisation; and 5. fragmentation across devices and OS versions that creates inconsistent quality across cohorts.

In response, platforms and partners have tightened policy and brand safety. Creative integrity has improved, and privacy changes have pushed us to rely more on product signals such as retention after exposure, to decide when to scale or roll back. Expectations have risen, but publishers and adtech partners have risen to the challenge of maintaining - and improving - ad quality.

Q. Given Voodoo's focus on user experience and game quality, why is partnering with a monetisation provider that prioritises both brand advertising and brand safety important for your long-term strategy?

It is critical that our partners understand and adhere to brand safety standards across our diverse game portfolio. They must respect category blocks, creative standards, and context rules - with transparent enforcement and fast takedown. As for brand demand - it diversifies revenue, raises floor prices, and brings high-quality inventory. It aligns with user experience and protects long-term trust, so for us it is a no-brainer.

Q. What emerging trends in gaming monetisation are you most excited about for mobile and social?

There are a few on our radar. AI tools that predict quality impact before the ad is shown to the user are so important, so we can stop harmful ads at the gate.

Also, smarter price floors to improve yield while keeping firm quality controls are an emerging trend that I see. New ad formats, such as in-game ads and offerwalls, are also a potential lever to add incremental revenues for us. Dynamic ad contextualisation is also a significant trend right now, using contextual signals (such as genre, session depth, player behaviour), to adapt ad frequency and formats. So there is a lot to be excited about as we plan for 2026. 

To discover how Voodoo empowers bold creators and reaches millions of players worldwide, visit voodoo.io/company. Meanwhile, to unlock new revenue streams and elevate your ad monetisation strategy, get in touch with the iion team at iion.io/contact

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