This question related to Unity Ads in Unity and using it in a mediation waterfall. I have gone through the Unity Ads API here. There are a couple of things I didn’t find.
Control when the ad is cached: Control regarding when the ad can be cached is needed so that game play doesn’t suffer, and we don’t waste user’s bandwidth when caching an ad from a network other than Unity Ads.
Ad Loading Callbacks: There are no callback from Unity Ads regarding whether an Ad failed to load or was successfully loaded. Checking if an ad has been loaded using a timer every now and then is inefficient and impractical solution to get around an important missing feature.
These basic functions are quite essential for implementing an effective mediation waterfall. So my question is, how are developers implementing the mediation waterfall? I definitely do no want to be depended on only one ad network.
If I missed something, please point me to the right direction:
Note: I had asked the same question about 6-7 months ago to Unity Ads support but I didn’t get a reply. I ended up dropping Unit Ads because I couldn’t make it fit in the mediation waterfall with Charboost, AdMob, RevMob, etc. I have recently launched a new game on Google Play Store, and the planned update will make use of Rewarded Videos from different networks. Therefore, guidance related to making Unity Ads play nice in a mediation waterfall will be very helpful.
If you want to use UnityAds in mediation, it might be a better idea to use the native SDK. Pretty much all mediation partners that we work with use our native SDK and wrap their code around it.
As a rule of thumb though, until you have over 1 Million downloads, worrying about mediation between networks is not really time well spent. Just pick one adnetwork that is good and go with them.
Thank you Heikki.
I was hoping to not reinvent the wheel by diving into native libraries but if thats the only way, I will take a look at the native libraries when time permits.
As for mediation being useful for small developers, I suppose its a matter of opinion. In my experience, I have seen CPM fluctuate wildly across networks (AdMob and InMobi - the two I have experience with) for a couple of my finance apps that use banners. The thumb rule I follow is to not put all my eggs in one basket :).
I use my own setup that allows me to change the frequency of ads and order of ad networks dynamically without updating the app, and doesn’t take much time to setup either if the API includes the caching control and callbacks I inquired about in my question above.