How much revenue per active and per paying user?
№ 134 · ARPDAU and ARPPU trend
Definition
MetricBlended average revenue per daily active user and per paying user
UnitUSD per daily active user; USD per paying user
Two lines: average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU) and per paying user (ARPPU). Build from revenue divided by DAU and revenue divided by paying users. Both rising means monetization and conversion improving. Example: ARPDAU $0.32 Jan to $0.41 Dec; ARPPU $9.40 to $11.20.
- ARPDAU
- Average revenue per daily active user. Daily revenue divided by daily active users.
- ARPPU
- Average revenue per paying user. Revenue in a period divided by paying users only, excluding free users.
- DAU
- Daily active users. Unique users performing a qualifying action in a day.
Benchmarks
| Bottom 30% | Median | Top 30% |
|---|---|---|
| ARPDAU below $0.02, typically advertising-only hypercasual; D90 IAP ARPPU under $5 | ARPDAU $0.03 to $0.08 blended across pooled genres; D90 IAP ARPPU $7 to $10 | ARPDAU $0.15 to $0.50 blended for hybrid and midcore titles, and above $0.50 for deep strategy and hardcore; D90 IAP ARPPU above $11 |
Mobile free-to-play, App Store and Google Play, all genres pooled, 2024 to Q1 2026. ARPDAU is total daily revenue including in-app purchase and in-app advertising divided by daily active users. ARPPU is measured on a fixed D90 window from install, not on a calendar month. · No Tier 1 provider publishes ARPDAU percentiles. The bands above are assembled from genre averages (AppsFlyer, Appodeal) and vendor reference ranges (Tenjin), so treat them as calibration and not as a measured distribution. Two definitional traps dominate. Including or excluding advertising revenue changes ARPDAU by two to five times in casual titles. ARPPU measured D90 from install is not comparable to ARPPU measured per calendar month, and most published figures do not say which they are. Pooled datasets such as GameAnalytics run far lower than marketed-title datasets because they include a long tail of unmarketed games. The Appodeal lifetime ARPU figures are 2025 and the GameAnalytics genre commentary carrying the 5x to 7x conversion gap is from 2019, flagged in the source list.
| Category | Bottom 30% | Median | Top 30% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Casino | not published as a percentile | D90 IAP ARPPU $11.40; D90 IAP ARPU $2.43; advertising ARPU $0.47 | not published as a percentile |
| Midcore (strategy, RPG) | not published as a percentile | D90 IAP ARPPU $9.80; D90 IAP ARPU $2.13; ARPDAU $0.10 to $0.50, rising above $0.50 in deep strategy | not published as a percentile |
| Casual | not published as a percentile | D90 IAP ARPPU $7.26; D90 IAP ARPU $1.34 plus $0.55 advertising; ARPDAU $0.02 to $0.10 | not published as a percentile |
| Hypercasual | not published as a percentile | advertising-led, D90 advertising ARPU $0.22, lifetime ARPU near $0.86; ARPDAU $0.01 to $0.05 | not published as a percentile |
| Hybridcasual | not published as a percentile | blended ARPDAU $0.15 to $0.50 | not published as a percentile |
When it looks bad
ARPPU climbs while ARPDAU is flat or falling, so the two lines separate instead of moving together, which means the paying base is shrinking and the survivors are carrying more of the revenue.
ARPPU up from $8.20 to $11.60 over two quarters while ARPDAU slips from $0.061 to $0.048 and payer share falls from 2.4% to 1.6% of monthly actives.
What to do about it
- Split the ARPDAU line into advertising ARPDAU and IAP ARPDAU and report them separately every day. Blended ARPDAU hides the substitution effect where an added interstitial lifts advertising revenue and suppresses purchase intent, and both Tenjin and Game Growth Advisor treat unsplit ARPDAU as unusable for optimisation.
- Model advertising ARPDAU explicitly as rewarded impressions per DAU multiplied by eCPM divided by 1,000, then move the impressions-per-DAU term rather than chasing eCPM. Regional eCPM spread is wide, with casual rewarded eCPM near $8.90 on Android in Europe and North America against low single digits in Southeast Asia and Latin America (TopOn H1 2025 via Game Growth Advisor), so a geo shift will move the number regardless of product work.
- Add a mid-tier price point between the entry offer and the top pack. The D90 IAP ARPPU spread from $7.26 in casual to $11.40 in casino (AppsFlyer) is a pack-ladder difference more than an audience difference, and payer depth is where the gap gets created.
- Recompute ARPDAU on a D7-active denominator alongside the raw DAU denominator. With pooled median D7 retention at 3.42% to 3.94% across 11,600 games (GameAnalytics), the raw base carries a large non-returning population that flattens the metric and masks real monetisation movement.
Sources
- AppsFlyer D90 IAP ARPPU of $11.40 for casino, $9.80 midcore, $7.26 casual. D90 IAP ARPU of $2.43 casino, $2.13 midcore, $1.34 casual. D90 advertising ARPU of $0.55 casual, $0.47 casino, $0.40 midcore, $0.22 hypercasual. appsflyer.com ↗
- GameAnalytics Pooled median D7 retention of 3.42% to 3.94% and 75% of titles below 3% at D28, which means ARPDAU computed on a raw DAU base is diluted by a large one-and-done population. gameanalytics.com ↗
- Tenjin Typical ARPDAU of $0.01 to $0.05 hypercasual, $0.02 to $0.10 casual ad-heavy, $0.10 to $0.50 midcore, and $0.50 to $2.00 or above for hardcore and strategy. tenjin.com ↗
- Moloco D7 ARPPU fell 3% year on year in 2024 while D30 ARPPU rose 3% and D90 rose 6%, so the ARPPU curve is lengthening rather than lifting early. moloco.com ↗
- Game Growth Advisor Blended ARPDAU runs roughly $0.15 to $0.50 for hybridcasual against $0.03 to $0.08 for hypercasual, with no overlap between the two bands. gamegrowthadvisor.com ↗
- Juego Studio, citing Appodeal Mobile Casual Benchmarks 2025 Lifetime ARPU of $0.86 for hypercasual, the lowest of any genre tracked, against $4.90 for party games and $2.99 for match games. juegostudio.com ↗
- Sensor Tower Gaming IAP revenue approached $82 billion in 2025, up 1.3% year on year, against essentially flat downloads, so revenue per active user is where growth now comes from. sensortower.com ↗
- AppMagic Hybridcasual IAP revenue rose 88% year on year to $733 million, and the share of App Store payers who had spent more than $100 by day 90 rose from 22% in 2024 to 32% in 2025. gamedevreports.substack.com ↗
- Adjust IAP revenue across casual, midcore and hypercasual reached $81.8 billion in 2025 while global session count grew only 1%, so per-user monetisation carried the growth. adjust.com ↗
- Game Growth Advisor No primary source publishes a usable ARPDAU benchmark for IAP-dominant midcore or subscription-led games. Advertising ARPDAU should be modelled as rewarded impressions per DAU multiplied by eCPM divided by 1,000. Casual rewarded eCPM runs $8.90 on Android in Europe and North America against low single digits in Southeast Asia and Latin America. gamegrowthadvisor.com ↗