Soomla analyzed churn in mobile games.
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Soomla: Some game ads can cause a mobile app to lose 3 times more users

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 2 min

Churn is a dirty word in mobile apps and games. It refers to users who don’t come back. And mobile gaming analytics firm Soomla has found that some game advertisements can cause up to three times as much churn, or loss of users, as others.  It also found that advertising the games of direct competitors isn’t as damaging as you might expect.

Soomla did a study of advertising effects on 4 Pics 1 Word, a casual mobile puzzle game made by Germany’s Lotum. The game is available in eight languages and it is one of the top word games in the charts. Soomla analyzed advertisements for different games within the Lotum game, and then evaluated the effect the ads had on the users.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.