June was the month where many of us stretched our legs, glad to be out of quarantine — and then immediately went back inside due to fears of a second wave. “One step forward, one step back,” offers an adequate summary of life in a pandemic. It’s also a sentiment that applies to the ongoing challenge in mitigating glitches and outages.
Similar to other companies in the entertainment industry, gaming companies typically drive revenue from three sources: in-app purchases, ads, and subscription. A couple of examples of these sources include creating different in-app purchase options for each game and various ad units from multiple ad networks. While this diversity in revenue streams may be advantageous from a business perspective, from a technical standpoint, it creates numerous challenges.
Hello, and welcome back (to some of you, at least) from quarantine. Although things may look as though they’ve reached a new normal, our present equilibrium still includes a number of glitches. In May, in addition to the usual outages due to overloaded servers, we also have outages due to failures of partner monitoring, plus – an Anodot first – a pizza arbitrage issue. Is it true that you can make money by selling pizzas to yourself?
Revenue monitoring not only involves monitoring huge amounts of data in real-time but also finding correlations between thousands, if not millions, of customer experience and other metrics. Are traditional monitoring methods capable of detecting a correlation between a drop in user log-ins and a drop in revenue as it’s happening? For many reasons, the answer is no.
There’s no question that subscription-based businesses are an incredibly popular revenue model in today’s economy. While single transaction revenue models tend to fluctuate due to the seasonality of markets, subscription plans offer much more consistent and predictable revenues. Although the subscription revenue model can certainly be advantageous over one-off transactions, these businesses are also notoriously challenging to keep subscribers active on their plan.
